Omaha daily bee., 1910-04-10
The Excluded Immigrant.

Have you ever given a thought to
the piteous fate of the excluded i'm
migrant? Have you ever wondered
what must become of the oor for
eigner who has been keyed up to hopes
of liberty and better days, only to
have the door shut in his face as he
reaches the threshold and to b. sent
back to the depths of despair and
misery?
According to the best available fig
ures the number of exclusions by i'm
migration authorities during the last
fiscal year ending June 80, 1909, was
about 10000. The number during the
preceding year was also about 10000
and during the year before that 1t
was about 1900, so that within three
years more than $4,000 immigrants
have been turned back after reaching
our shores and told that they could
not enter what to them was to be the
promised land. In addition to his
tremendous number of exclusions after
arrival, for the year 1907 $4,000 per-
sons were excluded on the other side
Of the ocean by refusal for medical
reasons by the steamship companies to
deliver to them tickets for which
they had made arrangements. II this
ratio holds good throughout, five times
as many being intercepted at the point
of departure as are turned back at
the point of destination, the total
number of exclusions for the three
years would be nearly 2OO,0 OO.
Some of these exclusions it is i'm
possible to prevent or to avoid, but
many Of them, If not most ( them,
could be forestalled. They are due,
first, to ignorance of our immigration
requirements on the part Of those who
would come to this country, and sec
ond, to the indefinite and elastic terms
used in defining the reasons for ex-
clusion, and the harsh and often un-
feeling construction put on them in
their application to individual cases.
Where our immigration laws debar
"paupers" and persons likely to be-
come public charges" or persons as
sisted with prepaid tickets" much is
left to the judgment and discretion OF
the immigration inspectors. While
only from l to 2 per cent of the i'm
migrants are excluded, and of these
perhaps only a small proportion with
out justification, still no one can tell
what particular immigrant will be-
come the victim of official blunder-
ing, and the order of exclusion when
it falls on the hapless and helpless
leaves him practically without rem
edy even if disposed to assert his
rights.
What becomes of the excluded i'm
migrant, is a question for whose an
swer we cannot. wholly shake off re-
sponsibility. Imagine the case Of the
foreigner who has uprooted himself
from friends, family and forefathers,
disposed of his earthly belongings to
get the means to come to what he has
been led to believe is the land Of milk
and honey, and is then sent back as
a person likely to become a public
charge" If he might by any posi-.
bility have become self-supporting and
make himself a useful citizen, the
prospect is absolutely destroyed by the
act of deportation, and driven from
n{lIor n most he mYat hAnOuna Dnfhiu0
but a human direlict.
Two hundred thousand excluded i'm.
migrants in three years! Surely II
devolves upon us to devise some more
humane and more just machinery for
sitting out the d%esirables from the I'm
desirables and preventing this awful
misery instead Of aggravating It.