The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-01-05
PLANS FOR REGULATING MIMI
 GRAFTON.

lTftAl1OlN.
 During the administration of Presi-
 dent Harrison we secured the passage
 of the first law to regulate immigration.
 It went no further than to make provi-
 sion for the exclusion of the diseased,
 the criminal and the pauper classes;
 but it was a first and most important step, which we owe largely to the effort
 and management of Senator Chandler
 of New Hampshire. At about the same
 period we also passed what was known
 as the great abuse which then existed
 of bringing to this country large bodies
 of cheap laborers to perform work un- der contract made abroad and then to be returned to their native country.
 Nothing, of course, could have been
 worse for the United States econorni-
 cally than such methods of importing
 labor. The contract labor law put 8
 stop to this practice of introducing large
 bodies of cheap temporary labor in it's
 most exaggerated form; but it has nev-0
 CT been thoroughly carried out, and has
 often been enforced in an absurd man.
 ner and so as to bring ridieule and op-
 position without attaining any good re- suit Nevertheless, on the whole it has
 been very valuable for it has stopped the bringing in of a great mass of the most undesirable kind of immigrants by the most vicious and wholesome meth ods. The contract labor law has prob ably not had much restrictive effect on the actual number of persons of this class, but they at least have not come to us in the thoroughly objectionable way which was in practice before this law was placed upon the statute books. Those, however, who are interested in the subject have seen clearly from tn beginning that neither the Chandler law lnor the law affecting contract labor really reached the objectionable immi- grafton in any genuinely restrictive sense, and the effort to obtain suitably restrictive immigration laws theH be- gun has been continued ever since Various schemes have been proposed The most obvious was heavy head tax of some such sum as fifty dollars That this would have been restrictive was unquesfioned, but it was indiscriminate, lit would have excluded the desirable as well as the objectionable immigrant, and it aroused natrally a great deal of opposition. It was never seriously at tempted.
 Another plan was to require from the immigrant a. consular certificate from our consuls in the country of origin, such certificates to be issued only to suitable persons This method ap- pealed to people generally as very de- riaabe one, and the committee of the house and the senate gave it much at tention. I think that it was embodied in at least one bill. Inquiry, however, developed the fact that it was not only impracticable, but that some foreign countries would not permit such an as- sumption of authority by our consuls land it was found also that the effect of it would be to prevent the coming of |young men of military age, and thus discriinate in favor of older and less desirable immigrants.
 The third plan, that which was ulti- ma tely adopted, and which has been pressed year after year in many bills,
 was the one known as the educational
 test. finally reduced to requiring all immigrants of a certain age to read the Cinstitutiin in some language. The eff fleets of the educational test were care fully examined by congress and were thoroughly discussed in many speeches in the senate. It was shown that thinn test would exclude virtually ma immi- grafton firm Scandinavia, Finland or Germany. nor more than three per cent. from France and Great Britain, and less than ten per. cent. from Ireland; but that it would shut out firm forty to | fifty per cent. of the Italian and Rus sian immigrants, and as large or even
 a larger percentage of the immigrants from eastern Europe. It was also shown that the illiterate immigrants congregated chiefly in the slums of our great cities, proof positive that the test on the wrole reached the worst class The objection always made that some l objectionable immigrants could both
 read and write, and that some desirable
 immigrants could do neither, is, of can shut out only the objectionable and
 admit only the desirable, but the edu- cational test makes as few mistakes in
 that way as any Wv which could be de- vised.-Henry Cabot Lodge in the Gen. tury.