National origins provision of immigration law

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1796380105

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-196168

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: National origins provision of immigration law

Place of publication:: Washington

Publisher:: Gov. Pr. Off.

Year of publication:: 1929

Scope:: III, 171 S

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Statement of Frances H. Kinnicutt, immigration restriction league, and allied patriotic society, New York City

Collection:: Economics Books

156 NATIONAL ORIGINS PROVISION OF IMMIGRATION LAW Immigration, or more exactly, that cohering and aggressive mass alienage such as we have seen operating in other fields of the life of the Nation, is undoubt- edly playing a very important part in the malaise which to-day gravely troubles the body-soul of democracy. (Race or Nation, p. 133.) Without making any claim of superiority for the immigration chiefly discriminated against in the 1890 quotas, it presents as a whole no problem of assimilability. In the first place, these immi- grants speak the language of our country—a very important matter In connection with their fitting rapidly into our national life. They at once read our English language newspapers and know what is going on in all phases of American life and from the American point of view; whereas the immigrant who speaks a foreign language and sometimes does not master our language to the end of his life gets his ideas of our institutions and ideals only as interpreted by the foreign language press, which is often colored in its views, particu- larly on political subjects, by the point of view of the country in whose language it is written. For many reasons the newcomers from England or Scotland can hardly be said to require assimilation, as the word is used. They come from a country whose political institutions, particularly that of a truly representative government, are much like our own; and from a country from which we inherit our system of law, known as the common law, which prevails in every State of the Union, except Louisiana. Our Constitution, while it abolished the monarchical form of government, still prevailing in Great Britain, incorporated in its Bill of Rights many of the personal liberties won by the people of England in centuries of political struggle. They come from a country with which we have, to a large extent, a common literature and to whose great writers of the past we owe most of the master- pieces of our language. Further analogies might, of ‘course, be drawn between the institutions and civilization of the United States on the one hand and the Great Britain of to-day, such as similarity in forms of local government seen in the typical city, township, and county systems of the United States. Although we are to-day, par- ticularly since the Great War, greatly occupied with the American- ization of various alien groups, no one hears of any work of this kind being necessary ‘with respect to recent immigrants from Great Britain. In another respect, they assimilate readily. The census of 1920 shows that our British-born immigrants intermarry more with native-born Americans than with their own kind, there being more native-born children of mixed British and American marriages than native-born children both of whose parents are British. This is not true of any other foreign-stock group. I have offered (Exhibit 7) a table taken from the 1920 census, showing the figures on this particular matter with respect to several classes of immigration. Turning now to the question of the fairness of reliability of the national-origins quotas, as determined by the revised report of Feb- ruary 25, 1928, I wish briefly to refer to the action of the experts with respect to the only part of the statistical investigation which seems to have met with any substantial difficulty. At the time the preliminary report of the three secretaries was filed in January, 1927, the claim was made that the previous conclusions of the Cen- sus Bureau as to the national origins of our population at the time

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