Aliens or Americans? Part 2

A German nurse girl says: "I heard about how easy it was to make money in America and became very anxious to go there. I was restless in my home; mother seemed so stern and could not understand that I wanted amus.e.m.e.nt. I sailed from Antwerp, the fare costing $35. My second eldest sister met me with her husband at Ellis Island and they were glad to see me and I went to live with them in their flat in West Thirty-fourth Street, New York. A week later I was an apprentice in a Sixth Avenue millinery store earning four dollars a week. I only paid three for board, and was soon earning extra money by making dresses and hats at home." Friends in Germany would be sure to hear of this new condition.

[Sidenote: A Pole]

Why do the Poles come? A Polish sweat-shop girl, telling her life story, answers. The father died, then troubles began in the home in Poland.

Little was needed by the widow and her child, but even soup, black bread, and onions they could not always get. At thirteen the girl was handy at housekeeping, but the rent fell behind, and the mother decided to leave Poland for America, where, "we heard, it was much easier to make money. Mother wrote to Aunt f.a.n.n.y, who lived in New York, and told her how hard it was to live in Poland, and Aunt f.a.n.n.y advised her to come and bring me." Thousands could tell a similar story to that.

"Easier to make money" has allured mult.i.tudes to leave the old home and land.

[Sidenote: A Russian]

A Lithuanian (Russian) tells how it was the traveling shoemaker that made him want to come to America. This shoemaker learned all the news, and smuggled newspapers across the German line, and he told the boy's parents how wrong it was to shut him out of education and liberty by keeping him at home. "That boy must go to America," he said one night.

"My son is in the stockyards in Chicago." These were some of his reasons for going: "You can read free papers and prayer books; you can have free meetings, and talk out what you think." And more precious far, you can have "life, liberty, and the getting of happiness." When time for military service drew near, these arguments for America prevailed and the boy was smuggled out of his native land. "It is against the law to sell tickets to America, but my father saw the secret agent in the village and he got a ticket from Germany and found us a guide. I had bread and cheese and vodka (liquor) and clothes in my bag. My father gave me $50 besides my ticket." Bribery did the rest, and thus this immigrant obtained his liberty and chance in America. The American idea is leavening Russia surely enough.

[Sidenote: An Italian]

An Italian bootblack who already owns several bootblacking establishments in this country, was trained to a beggar's life in Italy, and ran away. "Now and then I had heard things about America--that it was a far-off country where everybody was rich and that Italians went there and made plenty of money, so that they could return to Italy and live in pleasure ever after." He worked his pa.s.sage as a coaler, and was pa.s.sed at Ellis Island through the perjury of one of the bosses who wring money out of the immigrants in the way of commissions, getting control of them by the criminal act at the very entrance into American life.

A Greek peddler, a graduate of the high school at Sparta--think of a modern high school in ancient Sparta!--after two years in the army, was ready for life. "All these later years I had been hearing from America.

An elder brother was there who had found it a fine country and was urging me to join him. Fortunes could easily be made, he said. I got a great desire to see it, and in one way and another I raised the money for fare--250 francs--($50) and set sail from the old port of Athens. I got ash.o.r.e without any trouble in New York, and got work immediately as a push-cart man. Six of us lived together in two rooms down on Washington Street. At the end of our day's work we all divided up our money even; we were all free."

[Sidenote: A Swede]

A Swedish farmer says: "A man who had been living in America once came to visit the little village near our cottage. He wore gold rings set with jewels and had a fine watch. He said that food was cheap in America and that a man could earn nearly ten times as much there as in Sweden.

There seemed to be no end to his money." Sickness came, with only black bread and a sort of potato soup or gruel for food, and at last it was decided that the older brother was to go to America. The first letter from him contained this: "I have work with a farmer who pays me sixty-four kroner[10] a month and my board. I send you twenty kroner, and will try to send that every month. This is a good country. All about me are Swedes, who have taken farms and are getting rich. They eat white bread and plenty of meat. One farmer, a Swede, made more than 25,000 kroner on his crop last year. The people here do not work such long hours as in Sweden, but they work much harder, and they have a great deal of machinery, so that the crop one farmer gathers will fill two big barns."

[Sidenote: An Irish Woman]

An Irish cook, one of "sivin childher," had a sister Tilly, who emigrated to Philadelphia, started as a greenhorn at $2 a week, learned to cook and bake and wash, all American fashion, and before a year was gone had money enough laid up to send for the teller of the story. The two gradually brought over the whole family, and Joseph owns a big flour store and Phil is a broker, while his son is in politics and the city council, and his daughter Ann (she calls herself Antoinette now) is engaged to a lawyer in New York. That is America's attractiveness and opportunity and transformation in a nutsh.e.l.l.

[Sidenote: Foreign Mission School, Cause of Immigration]

A Syrian, born on the Lebanon range, went to an American mission school at fifteen, learned much that his former teacher the friar had warned him against, had his horizon broadened, gave up his idea of becoming a Maronite monk when he learned that there were other great countries beside Syria, and had all his old ideas overthrown by an encyclopedia which said the United States was a larger and richer country than Syria or even Turkey. The friar was angry and said the book told lies, and so did the patriarch, who was scandalized to think such a book should come to Mount Lebanon; but the American teacher said the encyclopedia was written by men who knew, and the Syrian boy finally decided to go to the United States, where "we had heard that poor people were not oppressed."

His mother and uncle came, too, and as the boy was a good penman he secured work without difficulty in an Oriental goods store. As for his former religious teaching he says: "The American teacher never talked to me about religion; but I can see that those monks and priests are the curse of our country, keeping the people in ignorance and grinding the faces of the poor, while pretending to be their friends." In his case it was the foreign mission school that was the magnet to America.

[Sidenote: A j.a.panese]

A j.a.panese says: "The desire to see America was burning in my boyish heart. The land of freedom and civilization of which I had heard so much from missionaries and the wonderful story of America I had heard from those of my race who returned from there made my longing ungovernable."

A popular novel among j.a.panese boys, "The Adventurous Life of Tsurukichi Tanaka, j.a.panese Robinson Crusoe," made a strong impression upon him, and finally he decided to come to this country to receive an American education.

[Sidenote: A Chinese]

A representative Chinese business man of New York was taught in childhood that the English and Americans were foreign devils, the latter false, because having made a treaty by which they could freely come to China and Chinese as freely go to America, they had broken the treaty and shut the Chinese out. When he was sixteen, working on a farm, a man of his tribe came back from America "and took ground as large as four city blocks and made a paradise of it." He had gone away a poor boy, now he returned with unlimited wealth, "which he had obtained in the country of the American wizards. He had become a merchant in a city called Mott Street, so it was said. The wealth of this man filled my mind with the idea that I, too, would go to the country of the wizards and gain some of their wealth." Landing in San Francisco, before the exclusion act, he started in American life as a house servant, but finally became a Mott Street merchant, as he had intended from the first.

[Sidenote: Fortune and Freedom]

Thus we have gone the rounds of immigrants of various races. The two ideas--fortune and freedom--lie at the basis of immigration, although the money comes first in nearly all cases. These testimonies could be multiplied indefinitely. Ask the first immigrant you can talk with what brought him, and find out for yourself. Mr. Brandenburg says a Greek who was being deported told him that all Greece was stirred up over the matter of emigration, and that in five years the number of Greeks coming to the United States would have increased a thousand per cent.[11] The reasons are the too onerous military duties in Greece and prosperity of Greeks in America. The remittances fired the zeal of the home people to follow, and the candymakers' shops were full of apprentices, because the idea had gone abroad that candymakers could easily gain a fortune in America.

[Sidenote: Showing only the Bright Side]

From these ill.u.s.trations, it can readily be seen how widespread is the knowledge of America as a desirable place. The other side is rarely told and that is the pitiful side of it. The stories that go back are always of the fortunes, not of the misfortunes, of the money and not of the misery.

_V. Solicitation an Evil_

[Sidenote: Evils of Solicitation]

If immigration were left to the natural causes, there would be little reason for apprehension. It is in the solicited and a.s.sisted immigration that the worst element is found. Commercial greed lies at the root of this, as of most of the evils which afflict us as a nation. The great steamship lines have made it cheaper to emigrate than to stay at home, in many cases; and every kind of illegal inducement and deceit and allurement has been employed to secure a full steerage. The ramifications of this transportation system are wonderful. It has a direct bearing, too, upon the character of the immigrants. Easy and cheap transportation involves deterioration in quality. In the days when a journey across the Atlantic was a matter of weeks or months and of considerable outlay, only the most enterprising, thrifty, and venturesome were ready to try an uncertain future in an unknown land.

The immigrant of those days was likely, therefore, to be of the st.u.r.diest and best type, and his coming increased the general prosperity without lowering the moral tone. Now that the ocean has become little more than a ferry, and the rates of railway and steamship have been so reduced, it is the least thrifty and prosperous members of their communities that fall readiest prey to the emigration agent.

[Sidenote: a.s.sisted Immigration]

a.s.sisted immigration is the term used to cover cases where a foreign government has eased itself of part of the burden of its paupers, insane, dependents, and delinquents by shipping them to the United States. This was not uncommon in the nineteenth century, especially in the case of local and munic.i.p.al governments. Our laws were lax, and for a time nearly everybody, sane or insane, sound or diseased, was pa.s.sed.

The financial gain to the exporting government can be seen in the fact that it costs about $150 per head a year to support dependents and delinquents in this country, while it would not cost the foreign authorities more than $50 to transport them hither. This policy seems scarcely credible, but Switzerland, Great Britain, and Ireland followed it thriftily until our laws put a stop to it, in large part, by returning these undesirable persons whence they came, at the expense of the steamship companies bringing them. It was not until 1882, however, that our government pa.s.sed laws for self-protection, and in 1891 another law made "a.s.sisted" immigrants a special cla.s.s not to be admitted.

[Sidenote: Other Causes]

Other and incidental causes there are, such as the influence of new machinery, opening the way for more unskilled labor, such as the ordinary immigrant has to sell; the protective tariff, which shuts out foreign goods and brings in the foreign producers of the excluded goods; the thorough advertising abroad of American advantages by boards of agriculture and railway companies interested in building up communities; and a fear of restrictive legislation. But undoubtedly, ever back of all other reasons is the conviction that America is the land of plenty and of liberty--a word which each interprets according to his light or his liking.

[Sidenote: The Christian Att.i.tude]

[Sidenote: Colonists and Immigrants Distinguished]

Having thus considered the remarkable proportions of immigration, and the causes of it, it will be well at this point to say a cautionary word as to the att.i.tude of mind and heart in which this subject should be approached. Impartiality is necessary but difficult. There is a natural prejudice against the immigrant. A Christian woman, of ordinarily gentle and sweet temper, was heard to say recently, while this very subject of Christian duty to the immigrant was under discussion at a missionary conference: "I hate these disgusting foreigners; they are spoiling our country." Doubtless many would sympathize with her. This is not uncommon prejudice or feeling, and argument against it is of little avail.

Nevertheless, as Christians we must endeavor to divest ourselves of it.

We must recognize the brotherhood of man and the value of the individual soul as taught by Jesus. It may aid us, perhaps, if we remember that we are all--with the exception of the Indians, who may lay claim to aboriginal heritage--in a sense descendants of immigrants. At the same time, it is essential to draw a clear distinction between colonists and immigrants. Colonization, with its attendant hardships and heroisms, steadily advanced from its beginnings in New England, New Amsterdam, and Virginia, until there resulted the founding of a free and independent nation, with popular government and fixed religious principles, including the vital ones of religious liberty and the right of the individual conscience. In other words, colonization created a nation; and there had to be a nation before there could be immigration to it.

"In discussing the immigration question," says Mr. Hall, "this distinction is important," for it does not follow that, because, as against the native Indians, all comers might be considered as intruders and equally without claim of right, those who have built up a complicated framework of nationality have no rights as against others who seek to enjoy the benefits of national life without having contributed to its creation."[12]

[Sidenote: Colonist and National Rights]

It ought clearly to be recognized that the colonists and their descendants have sacred rights, civil and religious, with which aliens should not be permitted to interfere; and that these rights include all proper and necessary legislation for the preservation of the liberties, laws, inst.i.tutions, and principles established by the founders of the Republic and those rights of citizenship guaranteed under the const.i.tution. If restriction of immigration becomes necessary in order to safeguard America, the American people have a clear right to pa.s.s restrictive or even prohibitory laws. In other words, America does not belong equally to everybody. The American has rights which the alien must become American to acquire.

[Sidenote: Sympathetic and Open Mind]

At the same time, our att.i.tude toward the alien should be sympathetic, and our minds should be open and inquiring as we study the incoming mult.i.tudes. We do not wish to raise the Russian cry, "Russia for the Russians," or the Chinese shibboleth, "China for the Chinese." The Christian spirit has been compressed into the epigram, "Not America for Americans, but Americans for America." We must see to it that the immigrants do not remain aliens, but are transformed into Christian Americans. That is the true missionary end for which we are to work; and it is in order that we may work intelligently and effectively that we seek to familiarize ourselves with the facts.

[Sidenote: The Personal Responsibility]

The facts already brought out are surely sufficient to arrest attention.

Suppose this million-a-year rate should continue for a decade--and there is every reason to believe it will, unless unusual and unlikely restrictive measures are taken by our government. That would mean ten millions more added, and probably seventy per cent. of them from southeastern Europe. Add the natural increase, and estimate what the result of these millions would be upon the national digestion.

Politically, the foreign element would naturally and inevitably a.s.sume the place which a majority can claim in a democracy, and not only claim but maintain, by the use of votes--a use which the immigrant learns full soon from the manipulators of parties. Religiously, unless a great change should come over the spirit of American Protestantism, and the work of evangelization among foreigners be conducted along quite different lines from the present, is it not plain that our country would cease to be Christian America, as we understand the term? There is enough in these questions to set and keep the patriotic American thinking.

The personal inquiry for each one to make is, "As an American and a Christian, have these facts and queries any special message for me, and have I any direct responsibility in relation to them?"

SUGGESTIONS FOR USING THE QUESTIONS

These questions have been prepared to suggest to the leader and student the most important points in the chapter, and to stimulate further meditation and thought. Those marked * should encourage discussion. The leader is not expected to use all of these questions, and should use his judgment in eliminating or adding others that are in harmony with the aim of the lesson. For helps for conducting each cla.s.s session, the leader should not fail to write to the Secretary of his Home Missionary Board.

QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER I