542 
transportation companies and others 
who stand to gain stir up the population 
of a country village in Russia or 
Hungary, excite the illiterate peasants 
by stories of great wealth to be found 
in the New World, take a mortgage on 
the farm, provide the immigrant with a 
ticket and start him for Ellis Island. 
Or else the immigration represents a 
floating supply of casual laborers, who 
drift in during a period of prosperity 
in America, and drift out when business 
depression curtails the demand for their 
muscle. ‘The fact is, and a startling 
fact it 1s, too, immigration today and in 
the large has become a colossal business 
enterprise—a huge commercial under- 
taking—the wholesaling of human labor 
for gain.” “The religious and political 
motives have almost wholly disappeared 
in favor of the economic in modern 
immigration.’ Naturally, such immi- 
gration is predominantly male. On the 
whole, females make up one-third of 
the inflow, but among some races— 
Greeks, Italians and Roumanians, for 
example—only one in five is a woman. 
Most of the immigrants are merely 
ignorant, vigorous peasants, imbued 
with a natural desire to make money. 
There is, however, a considerable ele- 
ment of undesirables—i on this 
it is 
element that eugenicists have fixed their 
attention, perhaps too exclusively, in 
the past. Dr. Warne charges that 
many of these undesirables are informed 
that the immigrant rush is greatest in 
March and April, and that they there- 
fore make it a point to arrive at that 
time, knowing the medical inspection 
will be so overtaxed that they will have 
a better chance to get by. When 
three or four thousand immigrants 
arrive in a single day, the examiners 
must pass them almost as rapidly as 
the conductor on the street car punches 
transfers; and it is naturally difficult 
to arrive at any sound judgment, as to 
the alien’s physical, mental, moral, and 
economic status and the possibility of 
his becoming a public charge. 
The Journal of Heredity 
The American Genetic Association 
has long demanded an increase of the 
facilities for inspection. But no in- 
crease would shut out all undesirables. 
Insanity, for example, appears among 
the aliens to such an extent that a large 
part of the inmates of State hospitals 
in States on the Atlantic seaboard are 
foreign-born.* Probably few of them 
were actually insane when they passed 
through the port of entry. Insanity, 
it must be remembered, is predomi- 
nantly a disease of old age, whereas the 
average alien on arrival is not old. 
The mental weakness appears only after 
he has been here some years, perhaps 
inevitably or perhaps because he finds 
his environment in, say, lower Man- 
hattan Island much more taxing to 
the brain than the simple surroundings 
of his farm overlooking the bay of 
Naples. 
The difficulty or impossibility of 
shutting out individually all the unde- 
sirable immigrants is so marked that 
many students, including Dr. Warne, 
have decided that the easiest and most 
effective solution is to put a wholesale 
restriction on immigration, such as is 
contemplated by the literacy test, 
which is designed not so much as a 
sieve, but as a measure to cut down the 
volume of arrivals. Such a restriction 
would likewise, it is claimed, diminish 
the social problems which the huge 
volume of immigration creates. 
With the general character of these 
social problems we are all familiar. 
Though it is true that much of America’s 
social progress is due to the immigrants 
of the past century, it is not less true 
that the immigrants of the last genera- 
tion have created some very difficult 
problems with their low standards of 
living and their inability to understand 
American ideals and institutions. 
These social difficulties, important 
enough, are more obvious and _ less 
insidious, probably less serious, than 
the economic difficulties which are laid 
toimmigration. The immigrant arrives 
‘Of the total number of inmates of insane asylums of the entire U. S. of January 1, 1910, 
28.8% were whites of foreign birth, and of the persons admitted to such institutions during the 
year 1910, 25.5% were of this class. 
Of the total population of the United States in 1910 the 
foreign-born whites constituted 14.5%.—Special report on the insane, Census of 1910 (published 
in 1914). 
