been 19.4. The number of immigrants requisite to leave 5,000,000 survivors at the end of five years would be 5,516,000, or 552,000 a year. Thus one method of estimating the net annual increase from immigration, 1900-1910, yields 536,000 and the other method 552,000. It seems safe to say that it has not been over 600,000 and consequently that the estimate of "a million a year" exceeds the probable number by about two thirds.

But a country's power of assimilation might be held to vary, other things equal, with its population. If we compare the net immigration during the last decade as just estimated with the population of the country in 1900, the resulting ratio of 72 immigrants to each 1000 total population, although greater than the ratio of gross immigration to population in the preceding decade, was less than that ratio in any decade of the half century between 1840 and 1890. During the decades 1841-1850 and 1851-1860 there were probably very few birds of passage, and gross and net immigration must have been nearly identical. Relative to the population of this country the net immigration into the United States, 1900-1910, was less than the gross immigration in the decades 1841-1850, 1851-1860, or 1881-1890 and about the same as the gross immigration in 1861-1870 and 1871-1880.

2. Another of these eight objections is that "the immigrants are poorly assimilated or not assimilated at all." Here I would ask for the evidence. But not content with that, may I offer one or two opposing considerations? In 1890 among the foreign-born whites at least ten years of age 15.6 per cent were reported as unable to speak English; in 1900 the proportion had fallen to 12.2 per cent. Perhaps the quality of our English is being debased, but in that decade at least we were not becoming a more polyglot people as the result of immigration.1

1 The Census of 1910 shows that 2,953,011 foreign-born whites in this country could not speak English. This is 22.8 per cent of the total foreign-born white population, as against the 12.2 per cent in 1900. The percentages in some individual states are as follows: West Virginia, 55.2; New Mexico, 54.4; Arizona, 54.1; Texas, 51.5; Florida, 42.8; Pennsylvania, 36.6; Delaware, 32.8; Ohio, 30.6; Indiana, 29.6; New Jersey, 25.0; Illinois, 22.7; New York, 22.1; Wisconsin, 20.9. At the present time we certainly are becoming 'a more polyglot people as the result of immigration." These data apply to persons ten years of age and over.-Ed.

There were nearly six and one-half million persons of foreign birth in the United States in 1900 who had come from countries where English was not spoken. Of these more than four fifths (81.2 per cent) were reported as able to speak English. The number unable to speak English was about equal, apparently, to the number who had come from a country where English was not spoken and had been in the United States less than eight years. In other words, it takes an immigrant who cannot speak English when he arrives apparently about eight years on the average to learn enough of the language to claim that he speaks it. In the second generation the process is practically completed, for, if my estimates are correct, nearly 99 per cent of the children born in this country of immigrants from countries where English is not spoken and at least ten years old in 1900 claimed to speak English.

These inferences, be it remembered, are drawn from a census now eleven years old. Since 1900 the pendulum may have been moving in the opposite direction, but about that we cannot speak with confidence.1

Much fear has been expressed lest our immigrants should lower the level of general education. The illiteracy of most illiterate immigrants is a characteristic of the country from which they come and not primarily of the persons. So far as census figures tell, the class with the smallest proportion of illiterates is the children of our immigrants. Thus among the children ten to fourteen years of age born of our native white stock 44 in 1000 [22 in 1000, in 1910] cannot write; among the children of our immigrants of the same age only 9 in 1000 cannot write [6 in 1000, in 1910]. No doubt this is due largely to the fact that both immigrants and schools are more abundant in the North than in the South and in the cities than in the country. But who shall say that the immigrants do not avoid the South and the country districts largely because they desire for themselves and above all for their children the educational advantages and other opportunities which are still found mainly in our cities and our northern states? I do not believe that our immigrants as a class need the

1 The Census of 1910 does not tabulate the number of native-born of foreign parentage who cannot speak English.— ED,

help or the interference of government. Many of them have come to this country to escape a well-meant but fretting and harmful control on the part of those in power.

3. I come now to consider the statement that "immigration seriously increases the amount of pauperism and crime in the United States." I grant that the 13,000,000 foreign-born add to the amount of pauperism and crime. To make an effective argument the word amount should be changed to proportion and I assume that this is meant. Do the foreign-born population contribute disproportionately to the crime and pauperism of the country?

There is little time to go into the evidence on this point. I may say, however, that I have found nothing to prove that the foreignborn contribute more largely to the almshouse population or the prison population than do the native whites of the same sex and age residing in the same part of the country. What indirect evidence there is points in the other way. Certainly a proper allowance for the lower average income of the foreign-born would sufficiently explain a slight tendency, and if there is any tendency of the sort I believe it to be a slight one, towards a larger proportion of foreign-born in the almshouse population than in the population outside. As to crime, when attention is confined to major or serious offenses, the proportion of foreign-born whites committed to prison is almost exactly the same as the proportion of native whites of the same age.

The objections that immigration is created or fostered from motives of private gain, that many immigrants enter the country as conscious lawbreakers, and that immigration is of no benefit to foreign nations must be passed for lack of time.

Lastly, a word regarding the objection that the immigrants are poorly distributed. The results of the preceding census I examined in an article on "The Distribution of Immigrants," the main conclusions of which still seem to me sound. But doubtless they will not apply without considerable modification to the widely different conditions of the following decade. The distribution of the foreign-born, like that of the native population, is determined by the interplay of motives, largely economic, inviting to a change of residence, and other motives, among which human

inertia is important, leading to a retention of the present abode. The foreign-born population is probably more migratory within the country than the native population, and responds more quickly to the suggestions of economic or other advantage. On the other hand, this class probably has fewer and less trustworthy sources of information than the native population. I see little objection to the government's gathering reports and disseminating news for the purpose of aiding in the wise distribution of our population whether native or of foreign birth, but I do not anticipate much effect from such governmental activities. On the other hand, to abandon our traditional policy of allowing free migration within the country, to substitute for it a policy of forced migration and apparently of compulsory residence at the spot assigned, to apply this new policy to our foreign-born residents and not to the natives, seems to me a most dangerous solution of a difficulty that is largely imaginary. What is the evidence that it is not to the advantage of our recent immigrants to stay as long as they do in the northeastern states and the large cities where people of their own kind are congregated and can help far more effectively than the government their first steps towards American citizenship? 1

1 The following table, compiled from the Census of 1910 (Vol. I, p. 163), is of interest because it shows not only the broad changes in the distribution of foreignborn white and children of foreign-born white, but also the heavy percentage these two classes, taken together, constitute of the total white population: PERCENTAGE OF THE TOTAL WHITE POPULATION CONSTITUTED BY THE FOREIGN-BORN WHITE AND THE NATIVE-BORN WHITE OF FOREIGN OR MIXED PARENTAGE, 1890, 1900, AND 1910

The concentration in the northeastern states is apparent.

ED.

The one serious objection to present immigration is its menace to American standards of wages and of living. The cost of rearing children in the United States is rapidly rising. In many, perhaps in most, cases it is simpler, speedier, and cheaper to import labor than to breed it. The arguments in favor of restriction for this reason are strengthening with the increasing cost of living and of rearing children. The time may have come for more radical methods of restriction. In that case a heavy increase of the head tax so as to make the cost of producing laborers in other countries and importing them into the United States more nearly equal to what it now costs to rear children for the labor market in the United States itself seems to me the simplest and best method of protecting our wage-earning class from debasing competition.

35. AN ARGUMENT AGAINST RESTRICTION OF

IMMIGRATION 1

The claim is often made that we have an oversupply of unskilled labor in this country to-day, and the report of the Immigration Commission is often invoked as establishing this fact, but its investigations, as distinguished from a few unjustified conclusions, make quite uniformly in favor of immigration. The Commission did not find that wages have decreased, but the contrary, though it claimed that employment is not uniform, and that American standards of living are supposed to be in danger. Neither assumption seems warranted. Substantially all the field work of the Commission, on which these inferences were based, was conducted in 1907-1908 in the midst of the panic, when employment was slack, proving nothing. Nor is the bituminous coal-mine industry of western Pennsylvania, where confirmation for this theory was sought, at all typical, although even there, despite the abnormal conditions, wages did not decrease. Affirmative action by States is doubtless called for, to improve housing and other conditions, particularly at such interior points, for the Commission reported

1 By Max J. Kohler. Adapted from the American Economic Review Supplement, March, 1912, pp. 74-78.