Chapter XXII: The Nemesis of Immigration

Our American civilization has received during these three hundred years two crushing blows. So staggering have been these onslaughts that it is still doubtful whether or not we can recover and go on as a democratic people. On both occasions the blows have come primarily from a relatively small group of profiteers. During the first two hundred years of our history the African slave traders of old England and New England traded their vile cargoes of rum for the black man, and sold him throughout the Americas. So they accursed half our country with slavery. To-day their deeds remain in the form of a large population of black people, which, like a millstone about its neck, still drags upon every natural aspiration of the Southland.

The desire for cheap labor was not fully satiated through the importation of the African slave. The coming of modern industrialism gave it a new turn. Our American system of industrialism has been based, from the first, largely upon a European system of labor. Without the slightest question as to their unfitness to take part in our social life, or our political democracy, without thought of anything in the world but securing much labor for little money, our employing classes have, until very recently, persuaded the nation to give them a free hand in their immigration policy. What the importation of the black man did to the South in accursing our history for centuries, immigration has done and is still doing to the industrial districts of the North and West. Having advanced far beyond Europe in the development of a democratic civilization, we have now again, deliberately, turned back upon our past and prevented the social, intellectual and political progress of our country by instituting the conditions of a degrading poverty, illiteracy, overcrowding, slums, and mediaeval religious worship. The gang rule and the boss rule of our cities are simply a return to monarchical forms without the decencies of government and the refinements of society which an hereditary monarch provides. All this we have gotten together with the riches we so much craved. We have amassed our wealth only to realize, perhaps too late, that our very food and drink are ashes and vinegar.

There have come into America during the last fifty years great hordes of immigrants. The tide reached its height in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1914, when it totalled 1,320,000. From Europe there came during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1921, 805,000. With our cities swarming with millions of unemployed, congress was impelled at the end of the last fiscal year to pass the three per cent law. This law permits, annually, immigrants to come from each European nation to the extent of three per cent of their peoples already here in 1910. That is, if 100,000 Rumanians were settled among us in 1910, 3,000 a year are now permitted to come. This law is difficult to enforce. Within an hour I have read in the day's news that 1,100 immigrants, mostly from Hungary and Armenia, brought over by the greedy shipping companies in excess of the three per cent quota of those nations, are to be admitted. This is done as a Christmas gift to these unfortunate people. Once arrived at our ports, who can have the heart to return these unfortunates to Europe. No doubt this act of charity will be repeated again and again.

If we permit this three per cent law to be continued during a time of economic stress and unemployment, we may expect the profiteers, and cheap labor advocates generally, to come upon us with their demand of unrestricted immigration as soon as times are better and workers are more in demand. Of course, as might be expected, these foreign born already here are most zealous in their advocacy of unrestricted immigration. In the first place they wish to bring over their relatives and friends. Then, too, the foreign born wrongly interprets all opposition to unlimited immigration as being a base imputation against his particular people. The thoughtless and unpatriotic appeal of all these groups is usually made upon the basis of a sentimentalism. "Is America not the haven of refuge for the oppressed?" they ask. In the same manner was the trade in African Negroes defended three hundred years ago. The blacks were being brought over, it was said, "in order to Christianize them." If half of them died on the way and were thrown overboard to feed the sharks, as often happened, still our intentions were said to be Christian. This sickly, and ofttimes affected, sentimentalism is one of the most disgusting features of both the criminal profiteering of the few, and of the criminal carelessness of the many among our people.

Reflect for a moment upon the fact that there are at least one hundred millions of poor in Europe, who would come to America now if they could. They await only ship space and money to pay for their passage. To bring over one million this year is always to prepare the way for two millions next year. Each incoming crowd soon invites and pays the way for a greater host of relatives and friends.

This importation of the poor and destitute does not much benefit European countries, if indeed it helps them at all. A country, which, like Italy or Belgium, is primarily industrial in character, has long since reached its limit of population. Remove a million Belgians or a million Italians to America, and their places are at once refilled by a million more births at home. Hence the creation of Italian or Belgian slums in Boston, Pittsburgh and Chicago does not ultimately decrease the size of the slums in Brussels or Naples. Nor does the overflowing tide help the home country where, as from Poland or Hungary, the emigrants are largely peasants. The land of Poland and Hungary is held in large estates. Every peasant who deserts the soil of Europe to fester in our cities merely postpones the change in the land system which denies him opportunity in his own country. Furthermore, in Poland, Hungary, Rumania, etc., this peasant is now needed more than ever before to raise food crops. He leaves his country because conditions are bad. These evil conditions are due, in part, to the aftermath of war. But this is only secondary. The primary cause of poverty among the peasants of Southern and Eastern Europe has been large holdings of land and conditions of practical serfdom, but, above all, primitive and backward means of production. Instead of plowing his land with a plow, this backward peasant turns it up with a hoe three times the weight and with only half the cutting edge of an American garden hoe. Instead of reaping his grain with a reaper, the Polish or Russian peasant reaps with a scythe of about the size, weight and shape of an American fence rail. So, to compensate for his own ignorance, backwardness, and the crude mediaevalism of his whole environment, this peasant escapes responsibility by rushing to the United States. His case is exactly the same as that of the city wastrel from Belgium or Italy. In leaving his own country he does not help it in the least. In coming to America he drags us down to the pit of Hell.

As regards the immigration from Japan, the West Indies, and Mexico, the conditions are only exaggerated. They are exaggerated by greater differences in race and by the wider gulf which separates our economic conditions from theirs. There are tens of millions of people in India who never know from one year's end to another what it means to have enough to eat. One good American dollar will outfit their wardrobe for twelve months. Throw these millions into the industrial life of America, and in twenty years' time their place in India will be taken by as many millions more, just as wretched, just as absolutely hopeless as the millions who are begging, starving and dying to-day. Here is a place where sentimentalisms are only trash. A sentimental attitude by an American toward this problem is a criminal attitude. It is a sort of criminal insanity which makes for suicide. If the suicidal intent concerned only the individual, we should not worry nearly so much. But it is our country which is committing suicide.

The problem may be simplified by a comparison. Let us picture our sentimentalist as possessed of an American family of wife and three children living in an eight room house. Will this average citizen welcome the arriving immigrants into his own house to the extent of five per room? If he lives in Texas, will he fill his home with Mexican peons; if in California, with Japanese and Hindoos; if in New York, with Sicilians or Turks? All that I ask is that he be fully consistent. If the sentimentalist is willing to prevent his own children from having homes in America in order to provide homes for the Japanese; if he is willing to prevent his American neighbors from having children in order to make way for the children of the Japanese of to-morrow--then he ought to be willing to open wide the door of his own house in order to provide for the destitute immigrant.

There is something quite terrible in the stern fact that this country will belong to the people who multiply most rapidly. The imbeciles and the other feeble-minded, if permitted to do so, multiply much more rapidly than normal persons. Suppose that we permit this class to multiply at will and carefully preserve its progeny from disease and other causes of a high mortality. In that case we can easily calculate the time when the feeble-minded and insane will number a majority of our population. Among the competing races in America the birth-rate is the ultimate victor. The German and the Irish among us outbreed the original Americans. The French-Canadians and the Poles outbreed the Germans and the Irish. The Negroes and the Japanese outbreed all the whites. Return to the liberal immigration policy of five years ago and we shall become a conglomeration out of which it will be impossible to build a nation. Under such conditions almost no sound reform policies, no national progressive movement of any sort, can be successfully advocated and executed. Stop immigration and a homogeneous English-speaking nation will again be developed. Such a nation will solve every economic and social problem as it arrives. Such a nation will develop according to our Anglo-Saxon methods of free speech, free press, democratic methods and popular respect for the law. We are dealing here with the most crucial and fundamental issue of our generation.

The time has come to brand every advocate of continued immigration as the outright enemy of this country and of our American civilization. We are already two generations late in waking up to this matter. We are on the very brink of the pit, and if we are to act at all, we must act in unity and at once. Eventually, after our present foreign element has been Americanized and absorbed as best it may be we might permit again a small amount of carefully selected immigration annually. But even that would be a mistake. Future Americans should be born and reared in America. Again and again let me urge that I am not claiming that Americans are inherently superior to other peoples. We have a peculiar civilization to guard and to guide. The tendency in our industrial regime is always for the weaker, the more humble, the more serf-like peoples to undermine the sturdier native whose standard of living spells his destruction. The lower standard of living which the immigrant willingly accepts, at least at first, is his essential curse. Admitting swarms of low standard Europeans in order to "bring American working people to reason" as regards their wages and conditions is a piece of ignorant folly. In the end this always increases, instead of decreases, our labor difficulties.

As I have already stated, our American labor problem can not be solved by breaking down the American standard of living and the American spirit among American born working men. Our labor problem can be solved only by winning the employers and workers alike to accept a common policy of justice and Americanism. The view that there is ever "more work in America than we can do ourselves" is the falsest of false economic theories. Why should we try to exploit our resources or develop new projects of any sort at the crazy and destructive rate of speed which has marked our industrialism during the past generation? Just the contrary is the correct policy. The unskilled labor of America must be done by Americans. A dozen of our presidents have wielded the axe and guided the plow. The very foundation of our country is a sturdy, intelligent, characterful and self-respecting working class, who do not at all crave to be parsons and college professors. Better build fewer miles of highway or dig less coal than destroy our civilization by the admixture of unsuitable and unworthy elements. There is an old story of a farmer who burned down his barn in order to get rid of the rats. Here we have a case of burning down one's house in order to settle an argument as to who is going to wash the dishes. Right here appears what may be our supreme test in the building of a great nation, in the conservation of our democratic civilization. Are we Americans ready and willing to eat our bread by the sweat of our brow? If we are, we shall live and prosper as a people. If we are not, if we crave the importation of an ever larger servile class, then we shall perish, and we shall deserve to perish. Democracy is impossible in the presence of a class which holds common labor in disesteem. On the other hand, no idle aristocratic class exists in all the world, that the mills of the gods will not grind to dust and oblivion in the end.

Another aspect of European emigration deserves especial comment. Let us take for granted that it is desirable for a certain number of Europeans to emigrate from their various home lands. Why do they not go to South America, where millions of square miles are as yet untilled and unbroken, and where raw materials in countless amounts await the tools and the initiative of the worker? Or, why does not the European emigrant go to East Africa, where a fair and fruitful land, resembling California, is open to settlement by white men? Australia, with three millions of square miles, has a population of only six millions. She can take millions of immigrants, and provide lands and plenty.

The answer is simplicity itself, the mass of European wage workers and peasants to-day do not wish to become pioneers. Those who are physically, mentally and morally capable of becoming independent and successful farmers no longer emigrate. They stay at home and improve their conditions by instituting modern methods, as in Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia. They know that we have no longer free lands for them. The present European emigrant is one who wishes to become a city wage-worker or petty trader. Here in America considerable numbers have attained great wealth. It is this story of the poor emigrant boy who acquires millions of money and perhaps political distinction which troubles the mind and disturbs the sleep of the unemployed European wage worker, the peddler and the landless peasant. Stop European emigration to the United States and within ten years South America, Africa and Australia will begin to receive such emigrants as they need for their natural and rightful development. But those who emigrate from Europe to the great open spaces of the world will be forced to become farmers, foresters and miners, producing the solid wealth which all the world needs.

One further word. We shall presently come again upon a period of prosperity. It will be limited by world conditions, probably, to a few months, at the most to a year or two. During this period an enormous propaganda for unlimited immigration will be again financed by the profiteers and supported by the feeble minded and weeping sentimentalists. At that time the intelligent and patriotic portion of our citizenship must be especially alert and active. We must so organize our working forces that great numbers can readily be shifted from city factories to the harvest fields and back again. Certain seasonable trades and outdoor construction work can be made to supplement one another, so that the workers will not be forced out of employment at any season of the year. To a man of the breadth and experience of, for instance, Mr. Ford, the execution of such a plan would be simplicity itself. We Americans can and must solve these peculiar industrial problems on the basis of a slowly increasing native population.

I realize fully that to consummate so great a reform as the permanent stopping of immigration requires the setting in motion of larger forces than the Klan can command. To this end every American must function through his political party, his fraternal order, his business associates or labor union, and his church. All the argument is on one side. What we require is action, and we Klansmen propose to have it without further dilly-dallying and compromise.