Speech #620269141

I ana just as anxious as any other Member of this House to keep from our shores the criminals. the vicious. and the physically and mentally defective. I would exclude these classes as much as any gentleman who favors this bill. But I do not believe that the illiteracy test will have the effect of keeping out undesirable immigrants. The member of the mafia. the member of the camorra society. the black hander. the anarchist. and the dynamiter can invariably read and write. This matter of the restriction of immigration is not a new subject. and the present agitation is but a recrudescence of antiforeign agitation that has occurred periodically from the very beginning of our Government. On Saturday the gentleman from New York called the attention of the committee to the fact that Benjamin Franklin. in 1753. had deprecated the great influx of Germans into Pennsylvania. A few years later. in 1770. the same Benjamin Franklin was a member of that committee of five that reported the Declaration of Independence to the Continental Congress. and one of the leading causes of complaint against the King of England named in that Declaration of Independence was thatHe has endeavored to prevent the population of these States. for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners. refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither. and raising the condition of new appropriations of land. It is a strange thing. Mr. Chairman. to see gentlemen upon this floor who are descendants of some of those Pennsylvania Germansand their ancestors made mighty good citizensinveighing against the immigration that is coming to these United States today and insisting upon the passage of this law for a literacy test.