Mr. Chairman. the gentleman from Texas . who has just preceded me. has referred to the need for these aliens on the farms in Texas and other places. Yet the report of the retiring Commissioner General of Immigration says: Notwithstanding the small percentage of rejections. there are those who constantly criticize the Immigration Service on every conceivable ground. even to the extent of asserting that the law is being so enforced as to reduce the labor supply at a time when there Is a great demand for labor. especially in connection with agricultural pursuits. Much of this criticism is not honest. Such as is honest is usually based upon ignorance of the law and conditions. Thus those who say the farmlabor supply is being interfered with seem to assume that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe go on the farms. whereas practically none of them do. although they may have been farm laborers in their native countries. As a matter of fact. over 80 per cent of the immigrants of today come from southern and western Europe or western Asia. and very few of these have any intention of performing or could be induced to perform farm work in the United States. and in the main dependence must be had upon the 18 or 20 per cent from northern or western Europe for the farmers labor supply. so far as it can be expected to come from overseas. So far as my section of the country is concerned we neither get nor do we desire that class of farm labor that comes from southern Italy or that this bill excludes. Gentlemen have made prophecies here in regard to the direful effects of this bill upon the Democratic Party. Yet I want to read to you some language that sounds like the words of a philosopher. a patriot. and a statesman: The census of 1890 showed the population of the country increased to 62.622.250. an addition of 12.466.467 within the decade. Immigrants poured steadily in as before. but with an alteration of stock. which students of affairs marked with uneasiness. Throughout the century men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe had made up the main force of the country or else men of the LatinGallic stocks of France and northern Italy. but now there came multitudes of men of the lowest class of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of where th(re was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence. and they came in numbers which increased from year to year as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population. the men whose standards of life and of work were such as American workmen had never dreamed of hitherto. The people of the Pacific coast had clamored these many years against the admission of immigrants out of China. and In May. 1892. got at last what they wanteda Federal statute which practically excluded from the United States all Chinese who had not already acquired the right of residence. and yet the Chinese were more to be desired as workmen. if not as citizens. than most of the coarse crew that came crowding in every year at the eastern ports. They had. no doubt. many an unsavory habit. bred unwholesome squalor In the crowded quarters where they most abounded in the western seaports. and seemed separated by their very nature from the people among whom they had come to live. but it was their skill. their intelligence. their hardy power of labor. their knack at succeeding and driving duller rivals out. rather than their alien habits that made them feared and hated and led to their exclusion at the prayer of the men they were likely to displace should they multiply. The unlikely fellows who came in at the eastern ports were tolerated because they usurped no place but the very lowest in the scale of labor.
Identified stereotypes
Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe are portrayed as undesirable and lacking skills, while Chinese immigrants are grudgingly acknowledged for their work ethic but still seen as culturally problematic.