WESTERN HEMISPHERE IMMIGRATION 419

CONCLUSIONS

All this substantiates the thousands of reports received by Judge Box and
myself in the survey made by us and a part of which we have heretofore made
to your honorable committee. }
By song and ballad the negro has been identified with the cotton fields and the
watermelon patches of the South and Southwest for generations. The story of
the heroic plainsmen of Texas has spurred our youth to high resolves to be
courageous and valorous ever since the day of Sam Houston and Davy Crockett,
but each of these admirable classes of our population has been driven from its
throne by the sinister, silent flood of Mexican immigration that has washed it
far back from its once secure moorings. In fact, the negro has been supplanted
almost altogether by the Mexican in the territory 200 miles north from the
Rio Grande. And the plainsman has receded before the onrush of Mexicans
that have supplanted his cattle ranches with cotton fields which yield a larger
return to the big plantation man of the Southwest, and has now lost himself
in the population of the large cities or has moved on to the highlands of the
Northwest. The Mexicans have so preempted the track work of the railroads
as that practically all of it in the Southwest is done by them, and even as far north
as Chicago nearly 50 per cent of all track workers are Mexicans—and practically
all this is the result of a desire to employe cheap labor. If we are to keep Amerisan
 business for Americans, we must keep American jobs for Americans.
There can be no question but that economic and hygienic conditions among the
Mexicans in our country are very bad in many cases. The average is far below
that maintained by Americans. Crime and vagrancy among Mexicans are
serious handicaps to their desirability as citizens and lowers their efficiency as
laborers. General undesirability of the Mexican because of his shiftlessness and
propensity to shirk is clearly established from the reports that we received.
This summary, together with other data procured by us, lead me to believe that
there are at present about 2,000,000 Mexican-born Mexicans in the United States.
The Mexican can not be blamed for his desire to come to the United States
and to enjoy the superior facilities of our country. A visitor to El Paso, Tex.,
or to Nogales, Ariz., or to any of the other border cities will see a contrast between
the standards of living in the United States and those of Mexico that will be most
astonishing. Nogales is a small city on the boundary between the United States
and Mexico. It is located in a valley probably one-quarter of a mile wide, which
runs north and south. From the top of the bordering mountains on the east side
of the valley runs an international wire fence to the top of the opposite mountains.
This fence runs directly through the city and divides it into two parts—American.
Nogales and Mexican Nogales. A railroad track runs up and down the valley.
Trains coming north stop at Nogales, Mexico. A watchman opens a large wire
gate and the train, after passing the inspection of American customs and immigration
 officials, pulls into Nogales, Ariz., and stops.
The contrast between the general conditions on either side of this wire fence is
unbelievable. The American city is a clean, healthy, and prosperous community.
The Mexican city is typically Mexican—poor buildings, poor streets, ragged
children, dirty foodstuffs sold by dirty men and women. Loafers on every curb
and corner, and listless lollers everywhere.
The Mexican has been most unfortunate. Of an ancestry which promises
little—sa mixture of native Indian with West Indian negro and Spaniard—with
an environment that can hardly be expected to conduce to progress, with a
political background of hundreds of years of banditry, murder, rapine, mobs,
and assassinations, what can be expected of him? The so-called higher classes
have utterly failed to appreciate the rights of the unfortunate. The unfortunate
has been oppressed and enslaved until the peon class far exceeds the upper class
in the population. Illiteracy is almost universal in many sections; poverty
stalks everywhere; immorality is so common that decency is a rare virtue, buf
over it all are the dishonest, debased, grafting officials who live off of the oppres~
sion of various kinds heaped on a poor benighted people. It has been said that
no nation can outlast the patience of its poor. May the time soon come when
this maxim will be again proved by another enslaved people losing their patience
and demanding their rights.
It is not my object in this article to discuss any special plan for effecting the
restriction of Mexican immigration. Any plan that will adequately restrict
should be approved by Congress. Since restriction is our natural policy, it is
aly to apply this doctrine to the front door and neglect to apply it to the back
00T.
Respectfully submitted.

TaoMAs A. JENKINS.