'EMIGRATING THE IMMIGRANT

With the passing of the Dillingham restrictive immigration bill, otherwise known as the Quota Law, everyone concerned with the flood of European immigrants sottled back with relief, hoping that matters had been finally adjusted. But now, it seems, the snarl is worse than before, and from the smoke around Ellis Island comes more than one tongue of fire. The law itself is to blame, for it states that three per cent of every foreign group now resident in the country shall form the quota of each nationality admitted--nationality to be determined by birth. It is clear, concise--but it allows no leeway or opportunity for judgement on individual cases.

A recent article in the New York Tribune discusses the matter very clearly. Take, for instance, the news item of the arrival of two Russian couples, each with a baby less than a year old. The babies had both been born in Constantinople, while the families were en route to America. The Russian quota was not complete, the Turkish was; hence the parents were eligible to enter, but the babies would have to be deported. As the case of the seventy-one year old peasant who was sent back to Europe, although his son and daughter, amply able to care for him, were waiting just outside the steel gates. Then there was the twelve year old boy of German parentage, who, by the postbellum changes of boundary-lines, was adjudged to have been born in Jugo-Slavia, and so of that nationality. His mother and father had lived in this country throughout the war, and had sent for their son at the first opportunity. But the Jugo-Slav quota was full, and the boy was shipped back, homeless and penniless. "A rotten deal" was what the official in charge of the case termed it; but he was helpless. Two young Roumanian girls were deported although their father, in this country, offered a thirty-thousand dollar bond for their release.

But the climax is reached in the account of an officer in the British Royal Flying Corps, who was figured as an Egyptian because he was born in Egypt while his English parents were staying there. He had left Egypt at the age of five, never to see it again. His protest sums up the whole situation: "If I had been born in a stable," he asked, "would I be a horse?"

Patently something is wrong when a law misfunctions so flagrantly. The newness of the regulations and the changing boundaries of Central Europe, add immensely, of course, to the confusion. But there can be no excuse for so large a number of tragedies. Part of the fault lies in the lack of co-operation between the immigration authorities and the American consuls who sign passports long after the quotas for their countries have been reached. Apparently no effort is made to investigate conditions beforehand, and so prevent the immigrant from starting on a useless, or worse than useless, pilgrimage. Consuls have even been reported as encouraging the journey when the slightest effort to obtain definite knowledge would have shown admission to this country to be impossible. Surely the foreign representatives of the United States should feel enough sense of responsibility toward these immigrants to take a few pains in their behalf.

Nor are the steamship companies at fault; their days of peasant exploitation are proved, by official facts, to be past and gone. The mistakes and seriocomic muddles are official mistakes and muddles alone. That they spring from a law whose application has been made too rigid and impersonal there can be no doubt. After all, the immigrant is not a chattel nor an automaton; he is a human being, and as such must have his own special problems and conditions.

Were this fact to be admitted by the gentlemen who make such laws, the great majority of our immigration difficulties could be averted. You cannot handle immigration as you do the tariff. The only fair way to settle the perplexity is to allow the officials at each port of entry more personal discretion in the judgment of the various cases--to make the Quota Law itself more flexible, more capable of expansion as necessity arises. Unless this is done the comic opera ending in tragedy, will continue to be enacted. And all this is quite apart from the consideration of the light in which America will be regarded by those nations whose peoples we are treating in such a manner.