1 91 2] Immigration. 15 



that the effect of immigration is to decrease the native birth-rate by an 

 amount about equal to the number of the immigrants. That this is by 

 no means an absurd overstatement is further shown by R. R. Kucgynski,* 

 who was able so long ago as in 1902 to demonstrate that in Massachu- 

 setts the native population is slowly dying out. In other words, restric- 

 tion of births within the family has already gone so far that the present 

 generation is less numerous than the last. Where the tariff has altered 

 the racial composition of the people, it has therefore, by causing a fall 

 m the native birth-rate, altered the relative proportions of native-born 

 and foreigners by approximately twice what it would at first appear to 

 have done. 



It may be that the replacement of native American by Neapolitan, 

 Semitic, Slavonic and Ruthenian stock is altogether for the good of the 

 race as a whole. Perhaps ultimately the introduction of these new 

 peoples, with their artistic taste possibly more developed, their religious 

 and emotional faculties more mature than those of the old race, may 

 produce after fusion, a race still finer and more capable. On the other 

 hand, the fusion may give to each element the worse, without the better 

 qualities of other elements. We do not know. All that we can say is 

 this; that for the next fifty years a hard task lies before our neighbours, 

 the assimilation of some twenty million immigrants. The process does 

 involve, and will involve much suffering. Social corruption and political 

 corruption and a revolutionary labour movement are the three signs of 

 distress, which the blindest of us must observe. Some of these immi- 

 grants are more capable of assimilation than others. The only perfect 

 test of these capabilities would be an exhaustive enquiry into the inter- 

 marriage of the foreign-born with the native population. This the writer 

 has not at present been able even to begin. A rougher test is the simi- 

 larity or dissimilarity of various races, compared with the native Ameri- 

 can. Such a test, making allowance for differences of language, would 

 divide the races, as above they are divided in Groups i., ii. and iii. The 

 Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking peoples would come first; next to them, 

 the Norse and Teutonic peoples of northwest Europe; after them the 

 Latins, Slavs, Magyars, Jews and others, who fall broadly into the third 

 of these three groups. f 



Thus, the net effect of the stimulation of American urban industries 

 by the tariff has been to bring in the less assimilable instead of the more 

 assimilable races of Europe, and to restrict the birth-rate among the 

 native population. If the native population had to compete with the 



■"Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. XVI., pp. 1-36, 141 186. 

 fit is, however, maintained by Mr. J. H. Senner, North American Review, Vol. 

 162, 1896, that the Italian is easily capable of assimilation. 



