ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION
More and more immigration is an economic matter, a flow of men
rather than of families, seeking gain rather than religious and
political liberty. Those who bring anything but their hands are
a very small and diminishing contingent. Most of the money the
immigrant shows on landing has been supplied him for that purpose.
In 1882, when the old immigration reached its height, the public
domain was being carved up at a tremendous rate, and the home-seeker
predominated. When the crest of the new immigration arrived, in
1907, a quarter of a century later, free land was gone forever, and
the job-seeker predominated. Formerly the idea of wandering oversea
sprang up naturally among the intelligent and restless; now the
idea is sown broadcast by thousands of steamship agents and their
runners. In the tavern, knee to knee with the yokels, sits the
runner, and paints an El Dorado. The poor fellows will believe him
if he tells them the trees of America bear golden leaves. When the
"American fever" seizes upon the peasant, it is the obliging runner
who suggests mortgaging his home for the passage-money or who finds
a buyer for his cows.
Common laborers who have been in America are hired to go about
among the peasants, flash money, clink glasses, and tell of the
wonderful wages awaiting them. The decoy thus gets together a group
who elect him leader and pay him so much per head to guide them to
America. Little do the poor sheep suspect that their bell-wether
is paid by the steamship agent for forming the group and by the
employer to whom he delivers them. A forwarding business exists for
sending penniless laborers to America as if they were commercial
ware. Each leaves at home some relative under bonds that the
laborer will within a year pay a certain sum as cost and profit
of bringing him here, Parties, through-billed from their native
village by a professional money-lender, are met at the right points
by his confederates, coached in three lessons on what answers to
make at Ellis Island, and delivered finally to the Pittsburgh
"boarding-boss," or the Chicago saloon-keeper, who is recruiting
labor on commission for a steel mill or a construction gang.
The emigration of 5,000 Rumanian Jews between January and August,
1900, was brought about by steamship agents, who created great
excitement in Rumania by distributing glowing circulars about
America. One authority stated to the Immigration Commission that
two of the leading steamship lines had five or six thousand
ticket-agents in Galicia alone, and that there was "a great hunt for
emigrants" there. Selling steerage tickets to America is the chief
occupation of large numbers of persons in Austria-Hungary, Greece
and Russia, the main sources of undesirable aliens. In 1908 and 1909
the inflow and outflow of steerage-passengers through our ports
amounted to about a million and a half a year. Allowing an average
outlay of $50 a head, we have a movement furnishing $75,000,000 of
annual business to the foreign railway and steamship companies.
That a monster of this size grows dragon claws with which to defend
itself goes without saying.
CHEAP LABOR A RAIN OF MANNA
Still, it is not as cargo that the immigrant yields his biggest
dividends. But for him we could not have laid low so many forests,
dug up so much mineral, set going so many factories, or built up
such an export trade as we have. In most of the basic industries the
new immigrants constitute at least half the labor force. Although
millions have come in, there is no sign of supersaturation, no
progressive growth of lack of employment. Somehow new mines have
been opened and new mills started fast enough to swallow them up.
Virtually all of them are at work and, what is more, at work in an
efficient system under intelligent direction. Ivan produces much
more than he did at home, consumes more, and, above all, makes more
profit for his employer than the American he displaces. Thanks to
him, we have bigger outputs, tonnages, trade-balances, fortunes,
tips, and alimonies; also bigger slums, red-light districts,
breweries, hospitals, and death-rates.
To the employer of unskilled labor this flow of aliens, many of
them used to dirt floors, a vegetable diet, and child labor, and
ignorant of underclothing, newspapers, and trade unions, is like a
rain of manna. For, as regards foreign competitors, his own position
is a Gibraltar. When the European sends his capital hither, he puts
it into railroad securities yielding from four to seven per cent.,
thereby releasing American capital for investment in the enterprises
that pay from ten to thirty per cent. The foreign capitalist dares
not put up mill or refinery here, because he cannot well run such
concerns at long range. He may not invade the American market with
the products of his mill over there, because our tariff has been
designed to prevent just that thing.
ENDLESS INFLOW OF THE NEEDIEST
Thus, so long as he stays in his home market, the American
mill-owner is shielded from foreign competition, while the common
labor he requires is cheapened for him by the endless inflow of
the neediest meekest laborers to be found within the white race.
If in time they become ambitious and demanding, there are plenty
of "greenies" he can use to teach them a lesson. The "Hunkies" pay
their "bit" to the foreman for the job, are driven through the
twelve-hour day, and in time are scrapped with as little concern as
one throws away a thread-worn bolt. One steel-mill superintendent
received official notice to hire no man over thirty-five and keep no
man over forty-five. A plate-mill which had experienced no technical
improvement in ten years doubled its production per man by driving
the workers. No wonder, then, that in the forty years the American
capitalist has had Aladdin's lamp to rub, his profits from mill and
steel works, from packing-house and glass factory, have created a
sensational "prosperity," of which a constantly diminishing part
leaks down to the wage-earners. Nevertheless, the system which
allows the manufacturer to buy at a semi-European wage much of the
labor that he converts into goods to sell at an American price has
been maintained as "the protection of American labor"!
[Illustration: Sunday Group of Roumanian Steel Workers, Youngstown,
O.]
[Illustration: Sunday Roumanians, Youngstown, O.]
THE NEW IMMIGRATION AND THE HIGH COST OF LIVING
Between 1900 and 1910, although population grew twenty-one per
cent., the output of the ten principal crops of the country
increased only nine per cent. Between 1899 and 1911 the value of the
average acre's output of such crops increased seventy per cent.,
while its power to purchase the things the farmer buys was greater
by forty-two per cent. There has been a general upheaval of prices,
to be sure, but the price of farm produce has risen much faster and
farther than the price of other commodities. This is "the high cost
of living," and it is immigration that has made this imp shoot up
faster in the United States than anywhere else.
As long as good land lasted, our Government stimulated agriculture
by presenting a quarter-section to whoever would undertake to farm
wild land. This bounty overdid farming, until, in the middle of the
nineties, the cost of living had reached a minimum. With the ending
of free land, the upward turn was bound to come, but the change was
made more dramatic by the inpouring of ten millions of immigrants
without the knowledge, the means, or the inclination to engage in
farming. Among us there is one American white farmer for fourteen
American whites, one Scandinavian farmer for eight Scandinavians,
one German farmer for eleven Germans, one Irish farmer for forty
Irish; but it takes 130 Poles, Hungarians, or Italians in this
country to furnish one farmer. Failing to contribute their due quota
to the production of food, these late-comers have ruptured the
equilibrium between field and mill, and made the high cost of living
a burning question. Just as the homestead policy overstimulated the
growth of farms, the new immigration has overstimulated the growth
of factories.
IMMIGRANTS AND AGRICULTURE
Nevertheless, certain of the South Europeans who are upon the soil
have something to show American farmers facing the problems of
intensive agriculture. Italians are teaching their neighbors how to
extract three crops a year from a soil already nourishing orchard or
vineyard. The Portuguese raise vegetables in their walnut groves,
grow currants between the rows of trees in the orchard, and beans
between the currant rows. They know how to prevent the splitting of
their laden fruit-trees by inducing a living brace to grow between
opposite branches. The blackbeetle problem they solve by planting
tomato slips inclosed in paper. From the slopes looking out on the
Adriatic the Dalmatian brings a horticultural cunning which the
American fruit-grower should be eager to acquire.
The conversion of New Jersey barrens into berry farms, vineyards,
and pepper fields, the reclamation of muck soil in western New York,
which Americans were not willing to touch, the transmutation of wild
Ozark lands into apples and peaches, are Italian exploits which
constitute clear gain for the country. But there are other immigrant
farmers whose labors count on the wrong side of the national ledger.
Not a few Slav colonies are clearing and tilling land so poor or
so steep that it ought never to have been brought under the plow.
The soil they have deforested will presently wash into the rivers,
leaving stripped rocky slopes to grin, like a Death's-head, in the
landscape. The nation will have to pay for it, just as France paid
for the reckless ax work that went on under the First Republic.
HELPING THE IMMIGRANT TO GET UPON THE SOIL
When confronted with the undeniable evils resulting from the
crowding of old-world peasants into American slums and factories,
the opponents of restriction urge that the trouble is with the
distribution of the immigrants, there are not really too many of
them, but they are congested in certain centers and industries.
Then let the state or the nation take the immigrant in hand and
settle him upon the soil, where there is room for him and where he
yearns to be. Supply him with the best of information, guidance and
supervision and lend him a little money until he has gotten upon
his feet. Successful state colonization would, no doubt, restore
the balance between agriculture and manufactures and prevent
the heartbreaking waste and misery resulting from the present
hap-hazard, catch-as-catch-can distribution of immigrants among
American opportunities.
Two other consequences ought, however, to be evident; First, the
policy would tend to use up the agricultural opportunities Americans
may prefer to hold open for their children and grandchildren.
Second, State help to the immigrant would furnish splendid
advertising matter to the steamship companies endeavoring to fill
more steerages and might soon swell the number of arrivals to a
million and a half or two millions a year. If we wish to have more
immigrants and to fill up this country in the briefest possible
time, state colonization is just the way to go about it. On the
other hand, once the volume of immigration has been brought under
effective control, the policy of aiding the immigrant to get upon
the land is heartily to be commended.
[Illustration: Photograph by Hine. Courtesy of The Survey
The Unemployed--Middle of the Morning, Chicago]
INDUSTRIAL DISPLACEMENT
The facts assembled by the Immigration Commission shatter the rosy
theory that foreign labor is drawn into an industry only when native
labor is not to be had. The Slavs and Magyars were introduced into
Pennsylvania forty-odd years ago by mine-operators looking for
more tractable miners. Agents were sent abroad to gather up labor,
and frequently foreigners were brought in when a strike was on.
The first instance seems to have occurred in Drifton in 1870, and
resulted in the importation of two ship-loads of Hungarians. The
process of replacing the too-demanding American, Welsh, and Irish
miners with labor from Austria-Hungary went on so rapidly that by
the middle of the nineties, the change was accomplished. In 1904,
during a strike in the coal-fields near Birmingham, Alabama, many
South Europeans were brought in. In 1908 "the larger companies
imported a number of immigrants," so that the strike was broken and
unionism destroyed in that region. In 1880, in the first strike in
the coal-mines of Kansas, "the first immigrants from Italy were
brought into the fields as strike-breakers."
Poles were introduced into South Cleveland in 1882 to replace
strikers in the wire-mills. The meat-packing strike of 1904 in
Chicago was broken with trainloads of negroes, Italians and Greeks.
In 1883 the largest oil-refining company at Bayonne, New Jersey, "in
order to break the strike among the Irish and American coopers, ...
introduced great numbers of Slovaks, Ruthenians, and Poles." In 1887
a coal-dockers' strike was broken with Magyars, and in 1904 striking
boiler-makers were replaced by Poles. The striking glass-workers in
1904 were beaten by the introduction of Slovaks, Italians, Poles
and Magyars. During the 1907 strike in the iron-mines of northern
Minnesota, "one of the larger companies imported large numbers of
Montenegrins and other Southeastern races as strike-breakers, while
a few of the smaller companies brought into the region a number of
German-Austrians." "One mining company imported as many as 1300 of
these strike-breakers."
The hejira of the English-speaking soft-coal miners shows what must
happen when low-standard men undercut high-standard men. The miners
of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, finding their unions wrecked
and their lot growing worse under the floods of men from southern
and eastern Europe, migrated in great numbers to the Middle West
and the Southwest. But of late the coal-fields of the Middle West
have been invaded by multitudes of Italians, Croatians, Poles, and
Lithuanians, so that even here American and Americanized miners
have their backs to the wall. As for the displaced trade-unionists
who sought asylum in the mines of Oklahoma and Kansas, the pouring
in of raw immigrants has weakened their bargaining power, and many
have gone on to make a last stand in the mines of New Mexico and
Colorado.
Each exodus left behind an inert element which accepted the harder
conditions that came in with the immigrants, and a strong element
that rose to better posts in the mines or in other occupations. As
for the displaced, the Iliad of their woes has never been sung--the
loss of homes, the shattering of hopes, the untimely setting to
work of children, the struggle for a new foothold, and the turning
of thousands of self-respecting men into day laborers, odd-job men,
down-and-out-ers, and "hoboes."
IMMIGRANTS AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS
The dramatic unionization of the garment industries in our large
cities has misled the public as to the actual effect of recent
immigration upon trade-unions. The fact is that the immigrants from
the backward parts of Europe tend to weaken, if not to shatter,
labor organizations in the fields they enter. They arrive needy and
eager to get any work at almost any pay. Having had no industrial
experience in the old country, they lack the trade-union idea.
Without our speech, and often illiterate, they are very hard to
reach and to bring into line. So far as they are transients, who
are not staking their future on the industry, they are loath to pay
union dues and to run the risk of having to strike. It is true that
the labor organizer evangelizes the alien workers with his union
gospel; but by the time one batch has been welded into a fighting
force, another batch is on his hands. His work, like Penelope's
web, is raveled out about as fast as it is woven. No wonder that
in the cotton industry unionism has been wrecked, while, of the
iron miners, less than two per cent. belong to unions. In 1901 the
United States Steel Corporation's constituent companies signed
agreements with two-thirds of their 125,000 workmen, among whom the
English-speaking held a dominant place. Ten years later the company
signed not a single agreement with its beaten mass of Slav-Latins.
There was no union with which to sign. The organizing, organizable
Americans had been deleted from the works. No wonder that organized
labor demands restriction of immigration. While the inrush
continues, the lines of labor will be weak, forming, breaking, and
reforming in the face of the intrenchments of capital.
IMMIGRANTS AND WAGES
During the last fifteen years the flood of gold has brought in a
spring-tide of prices. Since 1896 the retail cost to Americans of
their fifteen principal articles of food has risen seventy per
cent. Wages should have risen in like degree if the workman is to
retain his old standard, to say nothing of keeping his place in a
social procession which is continually mounting to higher economic
levels. We know that by 1907 wages had risen twenty-eight per cent.,
while retail prices were rising twenty-six per cent. Evidently
the working man was falling behind in the social procession. In
the soft-coal field of Pennsylvania, where the Slav dominates, the
coal-worker receives forty-two cents a day less than the coal-worker
in the mines of the Middle West and Southwest, where he does not
dominate. In meat-packing, iron and steel, cotton manufacture, and
other foreignized industries the inertia of wages has been very
marked. The presence of the immigrant has prevented a wage advance
which otherwise must have occurred.
[Illustration: "Shack" of a Polish Iron Miner, Hibbing, Minn.]
[Illustration: Cabin of an Austrian Iron Miner, Virginia, Minn.]
What a college man saw in a copper-mine in the Southwest gives in a
nutshell the logic of low wages.
The American miners, getting $2.75 a day, are abruptly displaced
without a strike by a trainload of five hundred raw Italians brought
in by the company and put to work at from $1.50 to $2 a day. For
the Americans there is nothing to do but to "go down the road." At
first the Italians live on bread and beer, never wash, wear the
same filthy clothes night and day, and are despised. After two or
three years they want to live better, wear decent clothes, and be
respected. They ask for more wages, the bosses bring in another
trainload from the steerage, and the partly Americanized Italians
follow the American miners "down the road." No wonder that the
estimate of government experts as to the number of our floating
casual laborers ranges up to five millions!
IMMIGRANTS AND CONDITIONS OF WORK
"The best we get in the mill now is greenhorns," said the
superintendent of a tube mill. "When they first come, they put their
heart into it and give a full day's work. But after a while they
begin to shirk and do as little as they dare." It is during this
early innocence that the immigrant accepts conditions he ought to
spurn. This same mill had to break up the practice of selling jobs
by foremen. In one concern the boss who sold a job would dismiss the
man after a fortnight and sell the job again, while another boss
in the same works would take on the dismissed man for a fee. On
the Great Northern Railroad the bosses mulcted each Greek laborer
a dollar a month for "interpreter." The "bird of passage," who
comes here to get ahead rather than to live, not only accepts, the
seven-day week and the twelve-hour day, but often demands them. Big
earnings blind him to the physiological cost of overwork. It is the
American or the half-Americanized foreigner who rebels against the
eighty-four-hour schedule.
When capital plays lord of the manor, the Old World furnishes the
serfs. In some coal districts of West Virginia the land, streets,
paths, roads, the miners' cabins, the store, the school, and the
church are all owned and controlled by the coal company. The company
pays the teacher, and no priest or clergyman objectionable to it may
remain on its domain. One may not step off the railroad's right
of way, pass through the streets, visit mine or cabin, without
permission. There is no place where miners meeting to discuss
their grievances may not be dispersed as trespassers. Any miner
who talks against his boss or complains of conditions is promptly
dismissed, and ejected from the 35,000 acres of company land. Hired
sluggers, known as the "wrecking-gang," beat up or even murder the
organizer who tries to reach the miners. No saloon, gambling-hall,
or bawdy-house is tolerated on company land. Even the beer wagon may
not deliver beer at houses to which the superintendent objects.
It is needless to add that the miners are all negroes or foreigners.
IS THE FOREIGNER INDISPENSABLE?
After an industry has been foreignized, the notion becomes fixed in
the minds of the bosses that without the immigrants the industry
would come to a standstill.
"If is wasn't for the Slavs," say the superintendents of the Mesaba
Mines, "we couldn't get out this ore at all, and Pittsburgh would
be smokeless. You can't get an American to work here unless he runs
a locomotive or a steam-shovel. We've tried it; brought 'em in,
carloads at a time, and they left."
"Wouldn't they stay for three dollars a day?" I suggested, "even if
two dollars and ten cents isn't enough?"
"No, it's not a matter of pay. Somehow Americans nowadays aren't
any good for hard or dirty work."
Hard work! And I think of Americans I have seen in that last
asylum of the native born, the Far West, slaving with ax and
hook, hewing logs for a cabin, ripping out boulders for a road,
digging irrigation-ditches, drilling the granite, or timbering the
drift--Americans shying at open-pit, steam-shovel mining!
The secret is that with the insweep of the unintelligible bunk-house
foreigner there grows up a driving and cursing of labor which no
self-respecting American will endure. Nor can he bear to be despised
as the foreigner is. It is not the work or the pay that he minds,
but the stigma. This is why, when a labor force has come to be
mostly Slav, it will soon be all Slav. But if the supply of raw
Slavs were cut off, the standards and status of the laborers would
rise, and the Americans would come into the industry.
Some bosses argue for a continuous supply of green foreigners
because the sons of the immigrants are "above their fathers' jobs."
A strange industry this! Britain's iron industry is manned by
Britons, Germany's by Germans, but we are to believe that America's
iron industry is an exotic which can attract neither native
Americans nor the sons of immigrants. The truth is that the school
and other civilizing agencies have turned Michael's boy not against
hard work, but against the contempt with which his father's kind
of work is tainted. But for the endless stream of transients with
their pigsty mode of life, their brawls and their animal pleasures,
the stigma on the work would vanish, and the son of the immigrant
would be willing to inherit his father's job.
[Illustration: Photograph by Burke & Atwell. Courtesy of The Survey
Immigrant Girls Coming to Work in the Early Morning at the Union
Stockyards]
[Illustration: Photograph by Townsend. Courtesy of The Survey
Polish Girls Washing Dishes under the Sidewalk in a Chicago
Restaurant. The only Light is Artificial]
IMMIGRANT WOMEN DOING MEN'S WORK
While millions of women are being drawn from the home into industry,
the popular ideal of womanhood serves as a precious safeguard,
turning them away from coarsening occupations which might rob
them of health or youth or refinement. But this ideal, which is
higher among the American working-men than among the workers of
any other people, is menaced by the new immigrants, with their
peasant notions of womanhood. The Slavs and the Italians are not
in the least queasy about putting their women into heavy and dirty
work, such as core-making, glass-grinding, and hide-scraping, which
self-respecting American girls will not touch. The employer realizes
this, and continually tries these women in male occupations, with
the object of substituting them for men, beating down men's wages
or breaking a men's strike. Engaging in such masculine work not
only prevents immigrant women from rising to the American woman's
sense of self-respect, but it hinders their men from developing the
American man's spirit of chivalry. What is more, the extension of
woman's sphere on the wrong side underlines the native standard of
womanliness, so that native girls are perhaps being drawn into work
that denies them refinement and romance.
WHAT BECOMES OF DISPLACED AMERICANS
Does the man the immigrant displaces rise or sink? The theory
that the immigrant pushes him up is not without some color of
truth. In Cleveland the American, German, and Bohemian iron-mill
workers displaced within the last fifteen years seem to have been
reabsorbed into other growing industries. They are engineers
and firemen, bricklayers, carpenters, slaters, structural
iron-workers, steam-fitters, plumbers and printers. Leaving pick and
wheelbarrow to Italian and Slav, the Irish are now meter-readers,
wire-stringers, conductors, motormen, porters, janitors, caretakers,
night-watchmen, and elevator-men. I find no sign that either the
displaced workman or his sons have suffered from the advent of
Pole and Magyar. Some may have migrated, but certainly those left
have easier work and better pay. It is as though the alien tide
had passed beneath them and lifted them up. On the other hand, in
Pittsburgh and vicinity the new immigration has been like a flood
sweeping away the jobs, homes, and standards of great numbers, and
obliging them to save themselves by accepting poorer occupations or
fleeing to the West. The cause of the difference is that Pittsburgh
held to the basic industries, while in Cleveland numerous high-grade
manufactures started up which absorbed the displaced workmen into
the upper part of their labor force.
OUR STANDARD OF LIVING CRUMBLES
Unless there is some such collateral growth of skill-demanding
industries, the new immigrants bring disaster to many of the
working-men they undercut. The expansion of the industry will create
some good jobs, but not enough to reabsorb the Americans displaced.
Thus in the iron-ore-mines of Minnesota, out of seventy-five men
kept busy by one steam-shovel, only thirteen get $2.50 a day or
more, and $2.50 is the least that will maintain a family on the
American standard. It is plain that the advent of sixty-two cheap
immigrants might displace sixty-two Americans or Irish, while
the setting up of an additional steam shovel would create only
thirteen decent-wage jobs for them. Scarcely any industry can grow
fast enough to reabsorb into skilled or semi-skilled positions the
displaced workmen.
Employers observe a tendency for employment to become more
fluctuating and seasonal because of access to an elastic supply of
aliens, without family or local attachments, ready to go anywhere
or do anything. In certain centers, immigrant laborers form, as it
were, visible living pools from which the employer can dip as he
needs. Why should he smooth out his work evenly through the year in
order to keep a labor force composed of family men with local roots
when he can always take on "ginnies" without trouble and drop them
without compunction? Railroad shops are coming to hire and to "fire"
men as they need them instead of relying on the experienced regular
employees. In a concern with 30,000 employees, the rate of change is
a hundred per cent. a year, and is increasing! Labor leaders notice
that employment is becoming more fluctuating, there are fewer steady
jobs, and the proportion of men who are justified in founding a home
constantly diminishes.
IMMIGRATION AND CRISES
The fact that during an acute industrial depression in this
country the immigrant stream not only runs low, but the departures
may exceed the arrivals (as in the eight months following the
1907 panic, when there was a decrease of 124,124 in our alien
population), has been made the foundation for the argument that
surplus immigrant labor, by promptly taking itself off when times
are bad here, relieves the labor market and hastens the return to
normal conditions. It is overlooked that only the prosperous go,
leaving upon us the burden of the weak unemployed aliens. Moreover,
at the first sign of returning prosperity, a freshet of immigrants
starts up, thereby checking sharply the good-times tendency toward
higher wages and better working conditions.
THE RISE OF SOCIAL PRESSURE
Free land, coupled with high individual efficiency, has made this
country a low-pressure area. It ought to remain such, because
individualistic democracy forbids a blind animal-like increase
of numbers. By causing the population to accommodate itself to
opportunities, our democracy solves the Sphinx's riddle and opens
a bright prospect of continuous social progress. But of late that
prospect has been clouded. The streaming in from the backward lands
is sensibly converting this country from a low-pressure area into
a high-pressure area. It is nearly a generation since the stress,
registered in the labor-market, caused the British working-man to
fight shy of America. It is twenty years since it reached the point
at which the German working-man, already on the up-grade at home,
ceased to be drawn to America. As the saturation of our labor-market
by cheaper and ever cheaper human beings raises the pressure-gage,
we fail to attract as of yore such peoples as the North Italians and
the Magyars.
[Illustration: Roumanian Shepherds in Native Costume, Ellis Island]
In 1898 few came to us from east of Hungary. Now we are receiving
them from Asiatic Turkey, Circassia, Syria, and Arabia. An
immigration has started up from Persia, and conditions are ripe
for a heavy influx from western Asia. These remote regions, which
have had only twilight from Europe's forenoon, are high-pressure
areas. Their peoples are too many in relation to the opportunities
they know how to use. Until education, democratic ideas, and the
elevation of women restrict their increase, or machine industry
widens their opportunities, these regions will continue to produce
a surplus of people, which the enterprising avarice of steamship
companies will make ever more mobile and more threatening to
the wage-earners of an advanced country. Only lately comes the
announcement that one of the trans-Atlantic lines is about to run
its steamships through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus into Black
Sea ports in order to bring immigrants direct to America from
southeastern Europe without the expense of the long haul overland to
Hamburg.
If an air-chamber be successively connected by pipes with a large
number of tanks of compressed air, the pressure within the chamber
must rise. Similarly, if a low-pressure society be connected by
cheap steam-transportation with several high-pressure societies, and
allows them freely to discharge into it their surplus population,
the pressure in that society must rise. But for Chinese exclusion we
should by this time have six or eight million Celestials in the far
West, and mud villages and bamboo huts would fill the noble valleys
of California. Something like this must occur as we go on draining
away surplus people from larger and larger areas of high-pressure.
Immigration raises the pressure-gage at once for laborers, but only
gradually for other classes. It is the children of the immigrants
who communicate the pressure to all social levels. The investor,
landowner, or contractor profits by the coming in of bare-handed
men, and can well afford to preach world-wide brotherhood. The
professional man, sitting secure above the arena of struggle, can
nobly rebuke narrowness and race hatred. Throughout our comfortable
classes one finds high-sounding humanitarianism and facile
lip-sympathy for immigrants coexisting with heartless indifference
to what depressive immigration is doing and will do to American
wage-earners and their children. If the stream of immigration
included capitalists with funds, merchants ready to invade all lines
of business, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and professors qualified
to compete immediately with our professional men, even judges and
officials able to lure votes away from our own candidates for
office, the pressure would be felt all along the line, and there
might be something heroic in these groups standing for the equal
right of all races to American opportunities. But since actually the
brunt is borne by labor, it is easy for the shielded to indulge in
generous views on the subject of immigration.