16 UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE UNITED STATES
here. The whole problem of immigration ought to be better system-
atized and my own judgment is that we have reached the point,
where some authority ought to be conferred upon some one to stop
all immigration for certain periods of time when these unemployment
situations are threatening and when they come upon us. That, I
think, is necessary.
Mr. Sparks. It is a fact, is it not, that during the year 1928 there
were more immigrants from Mexico than from any other country to
the United States?
A Mr. Green. Well, I hesitate to quote figures unless I have them
ere.
Mr. Sparks. I think that is the fact.
Mr. Green. Of course the immigration figures will show. Now I
must hasten along. I should like to deal with this problem of tech-
nological unemployment, just briefly, supplementing what I have
already submitted. Technological unemployment is no new thing, but
the rate at which it has been developing in the past 10 years makes
it a special problem. A wage earner must have a job in order to meet.
his living expenses. As his reserve margins are small, loss of his job
is the shadow of the great fear that is the background of labor think-
ing. It is bad to lose a job but it is a catastrophe to lose one’s trade
skill. Imagine if by some wave of the magic wand the law profession
was wiped out and the lawyer's skill was destroyed: Would not that
be serious to him? Well suppose the glass blower and the machinist,
the window glass blower and the electrician, and all of that class—.
his skill is wiped out: He occupies about the same position as a lawyer.
The lawyer would not be very well fitted to go dig in the ditch; nor is
the musician fitted to go dig in the ditch when he is supplanted by
the sound picture. His hands, his muscles, and his whole outlook
are totally unfitted, temperamentally and otherwise. Yet that is his
choice and there is nobody to help him now; nobody to help him, to
advise him—to find a place for a man of that type.
When craft skill is “transferred to a machine’ the craftsman is
industrially bankrupt. Craft skill that was an investment of a life-
time of work goes to the industrial scrap heap when scientists find
new processes or inventors produce new machines. Their trades are
gone and, because workers must live, they seek jobs in other callings—
often at lower incomes and with consequent lower standards of living.
On the other hand, technical progress means more things at lower
prices and consequently more physical comforts and greater ease of
living for greater numbers of people. Technical progress is the
means to higher material civilization. Progress comes from change.
Change means dislocation. It is a sad commentary that individual
wage earners have paid the social costs of technological progress in
industry.
What thought has been given to musicians displaced by musi-
reporductions; to the art of the actor forgotten in the latest movie-
tone; to the Morse operator displaced by the teletype; to the steel
worker displaced by a new process; to the carpenter watching a house
assembled by units; to the printer turned out by the teletypesetter?
Such workers in thousands have been turned out without jobs and
without the possibility of future emplovment in the craft in which
they have invested their all.
Here are a few of the changes which have made jobs scarce: Take
for instance the manufacture of electric licht bulbs. In 1918 it took
