WESTERN HEMISPHERE IMMIGRATION 235

One witness from Wyoming, an extensive employer of Mexican labor, in the
sugar-beet fields, told how he had guaranteed store accounts for Mexicans, and
how when through an oversight he had failed to take the necessary precautions
to see that the Mexicans could not collect their pay checks until the merchandise
was paid for, all of the men so employed went voluntarily to the merchant to
pay their grocery bills when they had every opportunity of getting away without
doing so. His experience was that he had found the Mexicans “more honest
than any other kind of labor they had had.”
NO POLITICAL PROBLEM

Ask anyone who has lived in a community where Mexicans live, and who has
also Jived in a community where there were large numbers of any other nationals,
and the evidence shows that the Mexican is not politically conscious, has no
political ambitions and does not, no matter in what numbers he may live there,
aspire to dominate the political affairs of the community in whieh he lives. In
this respect he is the least objectionable of all nationalities. As one man has
said: ‘‘Imagine as many Irishmen living in a community without making themselves
 felt politically?’ The charge that the Mexicans may be voted in bloc is
only true in limited instances, and then when whites themselves were responsible
for it. ‘This same charge may be brought against almost every other race, and
in many respects against our own Americans living under similar conditions.
Witness the ““carpet-baggers.”’

DIPLOMATIC PROBLEM

Diplomstically there is another aspect of this case that is of tremendous importance.
 During the hearings last year in Washington, the Secretary of State
himself appeared before the Senate committee in opposition to the application
of a quota to the countries of the Western Hemisphere. An examination of his
testimony before the committee shows that he considers it very unwise from an
international-relations standpoint to apply a quota to these countries, or to single
out Mexico and apply a quota to that country alone, and he presents ample
statistical evidence to show that the immigration problem from a numerical
standpoint is not nearly so serious as many bave made it out to be.
It is interesting at this point to note that at the Senate committee hearings
last year the Secretary of State appeared personally in opposition to the application
 of the qucta. The Secretary of Agriculture sent some very specific communications
 to the committee with regard to the seriousness of the quarantine
situstion, which I have already outlined; and the Secretary of the Interior sent
his personal representative to present his objections on the ground that the
Government itself had undertaken to sponsor and develop this great western
area and that its own interests in the completion of this big project would be
seriously interfered with if a quota were made applicable.
SOCIAL PROBLEM GREATLY OVERDRAWN

Now, as to the social aspects:
It is claimed by some that ‘the Mexican people are under a cloud of ignorance,
poverty, and superstition; backward in the extreme; that they serve the country
in no way, but crowd our county hospitals, deplete the funds of the cheritable
institutions, contaminate the communities into which they go; are constantly
committing petty thievery and other crimes; are diseased of body, subnormal
intellectually, and are moral morons of the most hopeless type.”
The statistics which have been quoted heretofore in support of this position
have to a large extent been sclected statistics, for we find in the testimony much
to discredit them, and the comparisons have not been limited to comparable
classes of people.
SOCIAL ASPECTS SUMMARIZED

Mr. A. H. Hughey, superintendent of public schools of El Paso, where the
population is 60 per cent Mexican, and which city is close to the international
line, ought to be in a strategic position to express an authoritative opinion as to
the real nature of the Mexican. His opinion, typical of many others, as expressed
in a letter read at the hearings, is that the Mexican is not a social menace or a
social problem, unless the poor are everywhere so regarded; that the Mexicans
are a health menance or a health problem only to the extent that any povertystricken
 class of the population having a low level of living is a health problem;