102 WESTERN HEMISPHERE IMMIGRATION

say they need it. So do beet-sugar manufacturers in Utah and Colorado. Railroad
 interests in the southwest want Mexican immigration, because they find
it profitable and because some of their shippers can make profit from it.
All these interests have the same story, the same arguments. They say that
they can not get white labor for the work they want done. Therefore they must
be given a supply of low-grade humanity that will work for less than white
people, and will live as whites would not live. In short, what they want is serfs.
We are face to face with the last chapter, the tail end, of slavery. A hundred
and thirty years ago the southern planters said that chattel slavery was an economic
 necessity—that negroes living in cabins and working for their keep like
animals were needed, and that they must be allowed to keep importing such labor
from Africa. }
The slave trade from Africa was stopped, but for half a century more the same
interests continued to insist that the slaves already here must be kept in slavery
because the work they did could not be done profitably in any other way.
The war ended slavery, but it did not end the hunger of employers for cheap
labor. American labor lived decently and wanted good wages. If employers
could get certain work done by men who did not insist on living decently, and
who would accept wages that Americans would starve on, it meant profits.
Legal slaves were no longer to be had, but Asia and Europe could furnish economic
serfs.
In the seventies the Chinese began to come. Railroads and other employers
found Chinese labor an “economic necessity’ and Chinese poured into California.
California would by this time have been af least half Asiatic, perhaps much more:
than half, if the Chinese exclusion act of 1882 had not stopped the influx.
Turning eastward, large employers of unskilled workers brought in hordes of
Europeans under contracts, whereby the employer paid their passage and the
immigrants agreed to work for him. Again it was economic serfdom, the ‘‘pauper
labor” being content with wages and living conditions that Americans would not
accept. And again it was the old plea of ‘“‘economic necessity.” American
labor could not be had for the work, and so forth.
That was stopped by the contract labor law of 1885, and the exploiters turned
to the ordinary stream of European immigration for their supply. They could
not contract for foreign labor in advance, but they could hire it cheaply after it
arrived—provided the influx was large enough. “So for three decades we saw
the exploiting interests demanding unrestricted immigration. The more
foreigners the better, for it made common labor abundant, and they could hire
hungry men on their own terms. These interests didn’t want quality ; educated
Europeans and those well supplied with money are not content to grab the
first job they see, at any wages offered, and to live in shanties and bunk houses.
The best serfs are the ignorant and penniless, and that is what we got by millions.
That process was stopped by the immigration legislation beginning in 1920,
which applied rigid quotas to all European countries,
We are now getting close to the end of the long struggle against the interests
that have sought to hammer down American wages by exploiting low-grade
foreign labor. . Slavery was cut off ; the supply of Chinese coolies was cut off;
then the supply of contract European labor; then all European labor above
quotas. But there remained one unguarded gate—the one through which the
Indians from Mexico and the Malays from the Philippines could enter. )
The seekers after cheap labor welcome that stream, and stoutly resist all efforts
to close that gate. And once more we hear the same old arguments that such
labor is an “‘economic necessity,” that American labor can not be had, that this
industry and that industry will suffer.
The so-called necessity of having foreign economic serfs in this eountry is only
the old bogy-man trotted out again. Does anybody believe for a moment that
the pacific railways could not have been built but for the Chinese coolies? Does
anybody believe the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific can’t keep up their tracks
without Mexican labor? Does anybody believe that the farming industries in
California will be ruined unless they can get Filipinos or Japanese or that we must
Mexicanize the southwest to keep beet sugar mills running?
The “necessity” argument is threadbare from 50 years of hard use. There is
no necessity—nothing but hunger for profits, coupled with an utter disregard for
the welfare of the Nation as a whole.
We need no foreign serfs. Americans can and will do all the work to be done
in America, if they are paid what the work is worth. Cheap foreign labor is only
a way to get something for nothing, at the cost of the American people. That
cost is too high a price to pay for fattening the pocketbooks of a few. Close the
last gate and keep it closed.