We have here a provision that every person who seeks to come to this country. whether he sail from an infected port or from a port free from infectious disease. must undergo seven days imprisonment at the hands of the steamship companies before he is eligible to prosecute his voyage. Now the practical operation of this section. if it go into force. will be that no decent man will submit to the regulation. and the man whose arrival in this country would be advantageous to the community will decline to embark under such conditions. while those who are forced from their homes under the operation of circumstances that reflect upon their own characters. whose condition will not permit them to decide for themselves whether they shall depart or stay. will submit to this or any other provision that you may choose to adopt. Instead of improving the character of immigration to this country by a device of this character. you will degrade it. because you will impose conditions to which honest and respectable men will not submit. That this amendment should apply to every port in the world is in itself. it appears to me. a statement of its own absurdity. If you intend to limit its application to infected po!ts. it does not go far enough. I am willing to vote here for an amendment that will prohibit all immigration from any infected port. but I am opposed to this amendment. because it applies alike to the infected and the uninfected. and because it will enable the steamship companies to add the cost of this quarantine to the cost of passage. thus forcing the honest. healthy. and vigorous men who seek to come here. the class of men whose immigration should be encouraged. to suffer an unnecessary. expensive. and degrading indignity. if it be adopted by this House. The quarantine described in this amendment does not enter in any way into the scheme of the bill presented by the Committee on Interstate Commerce. Here we have an act which provides for a quarantine system to be administered in some respects by the States and in other respects by the United States.
Identified stereotypes
Generalization about the type of person who would submit to the regulation.