232 WESTERN HEMISPHERE IMMIGRATION

labor which can, without serious physical consequences, work in these fields
and accomplish anything. We have never yet seen any effective answer to the
almost universal statements of those who have lived in these regions and
worked in them that American labor not only will not but can not perform
many of the tasks required of such laborers.

SHALL THE UNITED STATES BE REASONABLY SELF-SUSTAINING?

Which is better from an economic standpoint, to maintain on a profitable
plane the investments made on American soil by American who contribute regularly
 to the support of our own American Government, by giving them such
transient help as they may need from Mexico, or to sacrifice these investments
and send our money to Mexico to purchase the commodities that might have
been and should have been produced in our own country, thus depriving ourselves
of the American prosperity which should go hand in hand with the production
of American wealth and foregoing the income for the support of the Government
which American industrv would provide?

PEST AND DISEASE MENANCE OF ILLEGAL ENTRIES

Another problem presented by the limitation of Mexican immigration is the
great influx of Mexicans though illegal channels into this country. True, this
influx varies materially, depending on the shortage of food in Mexico and the
drawing power of the vacuum created in this country by the absence of adequate
American common labor to fill the needs for agricultural and other purposes.
The Secretary of Agriculture has indicated the risk of entry with such labor of
several very dangerous crop pests, as well as diseases of man and domestic
animals. Chief of these are the Mexican fruit worm and the pink bollworm of
cotton.
Quoting again from the House hearings above referred to, the Secretary of
Agriculture says:
The Federal Horticultural Board of the United States Department of Agriculture
 maintains its Mexican border inspection service to prevent the entry of
these and other pests. Their findings indicate that practically all the risk comes
from those who enter the border illegally and they feel that to close the horder
more tightly would result, under present conditions, at least, in the movement of
a larger amount of so-called bottleg immigration over the line at other than entry
points.
“Doctor Marlatt, chairman of the Federal Horticultural Board, points out that
road inspection during 1927 which caught the illegal immigrant, resulted in over
3,000 interceptions of cottonseed, cotton, cotton-picking sacks, pillows, quilts,
etc., stuffed with seed cotton. How many more came across that were not
intercepted is a matter of ‘conjecture. The board has already spent upward: of
$2,700,000 in an effort to clean up a few spots of pink bollworm in this country,
a pest, which if permitted to spread over the Cotton Belt, would probably do
greater damage than the Mexican boll weevil, the latter having already done
damage approximately of $300.000,000 annually in vears of excessive weevil
abundance.
“The Mexican fruit worm last year gained limited entry in the Brownsville,
Tex., district and is requiring a $100,000 appropriation in an attempt to contro)
and, if possible, eradicate it.” .
In the opinion of the Secretary of Agriculture, the most effective way to prevent
 this illegal entrance with its attendant dangers is to keep the border reasonably
 open to legal entries, where the diseased and the unfit may be kept back and
the proper ones admitted, thus relieving the pressure on the labor vacuum and
doing away with the urge for illegal entrance at points where inspection and
songeguent protection is impossible.

MEXICANS VERSUS JAPANESE, ETC.
Now, as to the political espects:
The Congressional hearings contain many. references to the economic arguments
 presented by those desiring the entrance of the Mexican, in answer to
which the proponents of exclusion try to point out that the same arguments were
used with reference to the exclusion of the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Hindoo;
viz, that the exclusion of any of them would mean economic ruin to tne farmers
of California. They then claim that the same reasons why the people of the