DISCUSSION AXD CORRESPONDENCE 



375 



DISCUSSIOX AXD CORKESPOXDEXCE 



TEE EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION 

 OX HOMICIDE 

 Under this heading, Mr. Maynard 

 Shipley has presented extensive sta- 

 tistical material, in the August num- 

 ber of The Popular Science Monthly, 

 to prove the undesirable character of 

 immigrants from eastern and southern 

 Europe, as compared with those from 

 its northern and western countries and, 

 by inference, with native-born Ameri- 

 cans. While 1 do not wish to impugn 

 the good faith of his investigations, he 

 manipulates the figures which he 

 quotes in so remarkable a manner as 

 to justify the belief that he has ap- 

 proached his subject with preconceived 

 notions, which have blinded him to 

 some of the pitfalls in so serious an 

 inquiry. I do not wish to whitewash 

 the immigrants, but merely to point 

 out Mr. Shipley's errors, hoping earn- 

 estly that more careful methods may 

 prevail in the study of large masses of 

 our present population, if it is to 

 guide our legislators in the adoption 

 of a policy toward immigration. If 

 the foreigner is to be kept out, let it 

 be done frankly on the score of racial 

 prejudice, but do not seek to blacken 

 his character by the use of ill-digested 

 statistics. 



The gravest defect in Mr. Shipley's 

 presentation is the continuous shift- 

 ing of basis, without attempting to 

 make corresponding corrections. Some- 

 times figures are given for homicide as 

 a total; at others we have the division 

 into murder and manslaughter. Pres- 

 ently, I shall show why manslaughter 

 must necessarily be on the increase in 

 American court records; hence sta- 

 tistics which do not distinguish it from 

 intentional homicide are valueless as 

 showing a criminal tendency of the 



population. All Mr. Shipley's com- 

 parisons that tell most severely against 

 the recent immigrant fail to make the 

 distinction. Manslaughter is prac- 

 tically the unintentional killing of a 

 human being by another, and it is the 

 charge upon which a man would be 

 held, whose careless handling of ma- 

 chinery caused death; the introduction 

 of cable-cars and trolleys enormously 

 increased the number of fatal street 

 accidents; as have the erection of 

 steel-framed buildings, with the coin- 

 cident abandonment of fixed scaffold- 

 ing, the use of power-hoists, the em- 

 ployment of dynamite in excavating, 

 enhanced the dangers of building opera- 

 tions. Did he take these develop- 

 ments into account? Did he realize 

 that the man arrested for such an ' ac- 

 cident ' was, nine times out of ten, an 

 ' ignorant foreigner,' whom the greed 

 of a native-born American entrusted 

 with dangerous implements, without 

 providing him with adequate safe- 

 guards in their use? 



Again, in Table II., homicide is 

 studied according to the nationality 

 of the people killed in San Francisco, 

 with the intention of proving the 

 criminality of the Chinese by their 

 relatively large mortality by violence. 

 1 admit the truth of the argument 

 that the murderer and his victim are 

 apt to belong to the same race; in fact 

 a sardonic member of the Immigration 

 Restriction League might classify such 

 homicidal tendency among the ' unde- 

 sirables ' as a redeeming virtue. But, 

 for rigid statistical purposes, Mr. 

 Shipley has overshot the mark. His 

 own figures show that 65 out of 100,000 

 Chinamen in the United States were 

 accused of murder in the year when 

 75 per 100,000 were being killed; are 



