WESTERN HEMISPHERE IMMIGRATION 423

“Lack of profitable lettuce markets in the East and other parts of the United
tates, due to financial depression, may make it necessary for the growers to
curtail their shipments further, and if lettuce must be-thrown away, the field is
the best and cheapest place to leave it. The present price of lettuce is below the
sost of production.”
The Los Angeles Times, from which this statement is taken, is one of the diminishing
 number of publications continuing to insist on the admission of more, and
yet more, Mexican peon laborers.
“Many others who have taken substantially the same position as taken by Mr.
Moore, have had their statements nob only contradicted, but overwhelmed by
the developments in their own communities, which have become known to the
committee and to the public. The report of the commission selected by the
United States Chamber of Commerce and the Industrial Conference Board,
quoted above, points to the enormous increase in the cotton acreage of western
Texas and Oklahoma. It could have as truly pointed out the large amount of
cotton being produced on irrigation projects in other southwestern localities,
during recent vears.

IRRIGATION PROJECTS AND MEXICAN LABOR ENLARGING COTTON CROP

The writer visited some of these cotton-producing irrigation projects during
recent months and saw a vast acreage now producing heavy crops of cotton,
which only a few years before he had seen in sheep and cattle ranches. Large
rrigated fields of fertile land are producing several times as much per acre as the
average cotton land throughout the Cotton Belt. Town have grown where only
~ailroad sidings or small stations with a few adjacent cottages formerly existed.
Large gin plants, with the yards surrounding them covered with cotton wagons
and bales of cotton already ginned and pressed, are located where sheep, goats,
and cattle grazed only a few years before. Further to the northeast in the semiarid
 regions formerly believed to be unsuited to anything but grazing purposes,
are now cultivated vast fields of cotton where an individual hired worker, usually
working for nonresident land owners, can cultivate three to four times as much
acreage in cotton as can be tilled by the owner or tenant of the small to moderate
sized farm, who has heretofore produced the bulk of the cotton crop. Many of
the pleas made before this committee for the admission of these Mexicans as farm
laborers, have specified they are wanted to grub new land and cultivate and gather
cotton and truck erops. That class of labor has done most of the work necessary
to this great expansion of the cotton-producing acreage. These are the laborers
which observers see doing the greater part of the work of preparing the land and
cultivating and gathering the crops in the regions mentioned. They are undoubtedly
 adding annually hundreds of thousands. if not millions, of bales to the cotton
crop of the Southwest.
It would be hard to imagine anything more absurd than the plight of our
Department of Agriculture and the National Farm Board in pointing out the
ruinous overproduction of these crops, particularly cotton, while at least some
of the very same officials are urging the public, and even this committee, to
sontinue, facilitate, and increase the overproduction of which they complain by
foe addition of alien Mexican laborers to do this work. mainly for speculative
ArIMers.
Every alien Mexican laborer who helps to do any of this work is in direct
zompetition with native white and colored farm laborers, farm tenants, and
farm owners of the nonspeculative type, looking to their own labor and the
farms rented or owned and worked by them for a livelihood. .
Under these conditions there is neither fairness nor promise of success in any
effort to induce average tenants and farm owners to lessen their acreage of such
crops, when they and others who have studied the problem know that their
self-restraint will be, to a large extent, nullified by the increase of production
by imported alien laborers working for nonresident or speculative employers.
This situation has been growing worse for some years. The survey made by
Congressman Jenkins and the writer, and the report of the studies made by
Doctor Garis, show that it still exists and that many men are seeking to make
it worse, some selfishly, some unwittingly, all unfortunately. The facts are
plain and overwhelmingly demand the enactment of this legislation.
Jorn C. Box.