THE TIDE OF IMMIGRATION 
Indirect Results on Eugenics are Quite as Important as Direct Results— 
Admission of Too Much Unskilled Labor Said to be Partly Respon- 
sible for Fall of Birth Rate in Old American Population 
A REVIEW 
r NHERE are now in the United 
States some 14,000,000 foreign- 
born persons, together with other 
millions of the sons and daughters 
of foreigners, who although born on 
American soil have as yet been little 
assimilated to Americanism. This great 
body of Uitlanders, representing perhaps 
a fifth of our population, is not a pool 
to be absorbed, but the emptying in of 
a continuous stream, which, until the 
war, was steadily increasing in volume, 
and of which the fountain-head is so 
inexhaustible as to appal the imagina- 
tion. 
The character of this stream will 
inevitably determine to a large extent 
the future of the. American nation. 
The direct biological results, in race 
mixture, are important enough, although 
not easy to define; the indirect results, 
which are probably of no less importance 
to eugenics, are so hard to follow that 
some students of the problem do not 
even realize their existence. 
A few thinkers have indeed been 
pointing out for many years that the 
consequences of this immigration are 
much more far-reaching than we suppose. 
The American Genetic Association’s 
committee on immigration has been 
persistently urging! that the problem of 
regulating immigration should be lifted 
above the plane of party politics and 
placed in the field of statesmanship. 
The present war, which has temporarily 
almost stopped immigration, gives the 
nation an excellent opportunity to take 
stock of its affairs and adopt a rational 
policy for future guidance. 
For this purpose we need all the facts 
available, and Frank Julian Warne, 
special expert on foreign-born popula- 
tion of the thirteenth United States 
census, has done a service in publishing 
an account of “The Tide of Immigra- 
tony” 
Dr. Warne’s book? is not a master- 
piece—it shows much use of the scissors 
and paste-pot, and an atmosphere of 
special pleading. It has neither the 
brilliancy nor the biological viewpoint 
of such a work as Prof. E. A. Ross’s 
“The Old World in the New.” But it 
will be very serviceable because it is 
timely, because it brings together a 
great amount of information, and be- 
cause it is rich in the little details of 
politics which will be uninteresting five 
years hence, but which just now one 
wants very much to know. 
OLDER AND NEWER IMMIGRATION 
Dr. Warne follows the usual course by 
describing the immigration of the first 
three-quarters of the nineteenth century, 
most of which was from races closely 
allied to the Anglo-Saxon, and which 
strengthened the United States im- 
mensely. Then he tells how this stream 
dried up and was succeeded by a flood 
of Southern Italians, Slavs, Greeks and 
Russian Jews, and last of all by an 
overflow from the Eastern Mediter- 
ranean. A large part of the later 
immigration is ‘promoted; agents of 
1See “First Report of the Committee on Immigration,’ American Breeders’ Magazine, 
Vol. iii, pp. 249-255, 1912; ‘Second Report of the Committee on Immigration,’ JOURNAL OF 
Herepity, Vol. v, pp. 297-300, 1914; ‘‘War, Immigration, Eugenics,’ Third Report of the 
Committee on Immigration, JOURNAL OF HEREDITY, Vol. vii, pp. 243-248, 1916. 
2 “The Tide of Immigration,” by Frank Julian Warne. 
D, Appleton & Co., 1916. 
Pp. 388, price $2.50 net. New York, 
541 
