Mr. Chairman. when the Porto Rico bill was before the House. one of the strongest of the reasons for passing that was to make a test case as to the rights of Congress to legislate law in regard to those possessions that have fallen to us as a part of the fruit of the Spanish war. If by annexing the Philippine Islands we simply remove the barrier we had drawn against Chinese immigration 9.000 miles farther west so as to include the Philippine Islands and make them the ports from which the Chinese emigration could start to the United States of America. the damage to this country would be incalculable. It becomes necessary to draw a line in the verystart. and the result of the enactment of the Porto Rican law was that we obtained at least in part an authoritative construction by the Supreme Court of the United States as to our power in this possession. I believe the legitimate and logical result of the Porto Rican decision is that the Congress has the power that it is now proposed to exercise in section 2. We should not permit those islands to become merely the means of peopling this country with the Mongolian race.
Keywords matched
immigration Mongolian emigration