290 WESTERN HEMISPHERE IMMIGRATION

takes a good deal of time to make even the study that we have made
here. Now, this committee went, in one season, between sessions,
to California, Washington, and Oregon, on the immigration problem.
We were so pressed for time, on account of the witnesses pro and con,
that we held sessions three times a day, including Sunday, for nearly
four weeks; and as the result of it, we had a mass of details of personal
experiences. You see, you can not refuse witnesses when you go
among them to try to get the facts. The aim, of course, of most
people, Government officials and others, is to consider the alien end
of it, the transient labor coming in. That is what makes it so hard
to get up those commissions. Congressmen are not so organized as
to be able to absent themselves except on matters of grave importance.
I know that both Senator Robinson and Senator Reed hesitated
particularly about going away to the Naval Conference in London,
on account of the time they would lose from the Senate.
Mr. Gray. Surely.
The CrairMaN. So it also involved that problem.
Mr. Gray. Yes; it involves that problem. And I would remark,
about your former investigation of this matter on the ground which
you covered, at least partially, in that trip a year or two ago, that after
all of it was done, however, it is very evident that you did not get
enough information, or you got such conflicting information that when
you came back you were not prepared to recommend definitely, as a
vody of investigators, what the solution of this thing was; and that
gives strength to what our organization asks, that rather than do it
by snap judgment, if you are to settle this thing once for all, to go
nto it, even if it takes a year or two. I do not know how long it will
take, but even if it takes a year or two, let us get the information, for
the well-being of everybody that is concerned in this, before any
definite, final, or arbitrary law of the Federal Government is enacted.
The Crarrman. Now, I will tell you, to refresh your recollection,
that trip authorized by Congress was just ahead of the 1924 immigration
 act. The committee members who had not sensed the racial
problem on the Pacific coast concluded immediately that we could
not afford to develop another racial problem based on the experience
of one that has been with us for a long time. Now, when it came to
the question of amending the 1924 act, regulating immigration in
this hemisphere, we had about all that could stand up in the 1924
act, every paragraph of that law meant something, and we were
anable to devise a plan that would be equitable to the countries both
north and south of us, and we had to let that bill go. Now, all the
members of this committee knew that the minute we had reduced
immigration from the European countries, that the immigration,
particularly from the south of us, would stick out like a sore thumb,
and it has from that day to this.
Mr. Gray. The question is, then, to use a colloquial expression,
what are we going to do about it? In the farm bureau we are just
as much interested in getting it finally settled as any member of
Congress can be, or any other citizen of the United States; but what
the eventual, perpetual solution is, we are not going to say, we are
not prepared to say, and I would not want to say at this time. But
we do want the solution to be made, if and when finally made, on the
most firm foundation and on the fairest justice to all. This is not a
position on our part of qualifying that support which we gave back
In 1924 and vears prior to the enactment of an immieration law.