WESTERN HEMISPHERE IMMIGRATION 301

own affairs as to Canadian immigration, it must be Canadian interests,
Canadian policy, and Canadian legislation, and not American intersts,
 American policy, and American legislation that will control the
quantity of immigration coming into the United States and into the
American labor market, except so far as that immigration is affected
by similar mistakes made by us in other directions.
If there are two tanks, one ours and one our neighbors, and if we
connect the bottoms of these tanks by a large pipe and then strenuously
 forbid the pouring of water into our own tank, but allow it to
be poured freely into the other, we can not hope to be very successful
in regulating the level in our own tank.
There is another similar problem to the south, but one less obvious.
Haiti contains some two million or so of inhabitants. It is ve
mountainous in parts. Only part of its surface can be bo % i |
but the portions capable of cultivation has to support some four
hundred persons to the square mile. The per capita income is only
a very small fraction of our own, I am told; some $33 a year as against
several hundred here. The people are about as desperately poor as
it is possible to be. They are looking for a chance to live. They
might come directly here in great numbers, and probably will before
long, but that is not the main thing at present. Cuba is right across
the channel. Cuban planters are hard put to it with a world overproduction
 of sugar. Real democracy in Cuba is rather new and
experienced, -and possibly less powerful that it might he. There
has alsb been a considerable Spanish immigration into Cuba. What
happens will depend upon the ruling Cuban interests moulding Cuban
policy, and upon Cuban legislation, and not upon the corresponding
American interests, policy, and legislation. These will decide how
many native born Cubans are to be crowded over into the American
labor market in Florida, and elsewhere, by the importation of
Haitian and other labor into Cuba, unless we undertake to control
the matter in the interests of our own people.
There are similar situations elsewhere in the West Indies, the effects
of which are beginning to be felt in parts of the United States, but we
hope that enough has been said to show that these factors should be
taken into consideration if we are to control our own immigration.
Mexico is somewhat different. She needs no foreign immigration
to crowd her people into the United States. Her own misfortunes
have reduced her standard of living sufficiently. In that quarter the
handwriting is on the wall. No Americans in our time have had a
plainer or more important duty to perform for our country than have
you in this respect. You have the evidence before you of the employment
 of Mexican labor in all lines of industry, not only in the fields
buf in the shops and mills. Merely to shift the sweatshop from Ellis
Island to the Rio Grande would make a farce of the great work that
you have begun. } .
The whole problem has become economic rather than racial. and
you will greatly simplify it if you recognize that fact.
New England has had many new foreign job takers since Congress
enacted the bill of 1924, which plugged some of the holes. Yet
since then mills have moved away and whole towns have been decimated
 by unemployment; yet, in spite of this, during that time, in
Massachusetts alone, some 80,000 foreigners have been let in to take
the jobs of our own people, for whom 1t is our first duty to provide.
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