Speech #670230171

At their homes? At a thousand places in Mexico and Canada? Immigrants come to America on irregular and tramp ships from all the ports of the world. This. and their coming through Canada and Mexico. would force us to maintain our seaport and land frontier stations and to turn back many from them. Establishing foreign stations would merely add a great system of distant stations without eliminating home stations or avoiding the necessity of rejecting great numbers of immigrants at them. If foreign countries would permit It. which we have found they will not do. the plan is impossible. Of course. the only place for our stations and guards is at our own ports and on our own frontiers. It is urged that if prospective immigrants were inspected and selected abroad. they would be protected from the hardship resulting from their selling their effects and breaking themselves loose from their homes and sources of livelihood. expecting to be admitted to the United States only to find themselves denied admission and be thrown adrift penniless. friendless. and far from home. Unless the stations were located. at prohibitive cost. in hundreds of places. the prospective immigrants could not be selected near their present homes. The establishment of immigration stations in a few great cities on the coasts in Europe. Asia. and Africa would not meet this difficulty. These seaports are hundreds of miles from the present homes of most of the immigrants and in countries foreign and strange to them. They would have to go in families hundreds of miles. often across national boundaries. necessitating passports. and a great part of the travel. expense. and difficulty which they now meet. The average immigrant can not. without selling all. carry his family from thd center of Europe to the seacoast for examination. If he could. ie would not know 1ow long it would require him to return to his home with his filmily to sell out and return to the immigration station on the coast. The uncertainty. delay. .1922. expense. and other difficulties of such a course would forbid Its adoption by the immigrant. who usually has little or nothing. He sells all. and even under the proposed plan would sell all and break up completely. before leaving his old home to go to the place of inspection and embarkation. The risk and loss of this breaking up would have to be incurred under any system except one that sent the inspector to the prospective immigrant at or near his present home. which is manifestly impossible. The steamship companies. relatives. and other opponents of restriction are all talking much of regulating immigration by treaty agreements. I have shown that this plan of foreign inspection depends upon treaty agreements. I suspect that their agitation for foreign inspection is prompted by the desire to have the control of immigration away from Congress and give it to the treatymaking power. It is certain that the adoption of the system of foreign inspection would have that very effect. Treaties establishing such a system. if made at all. could be made only upon such conditions as were satisfactory to foreign Governments. so that the whole system of immigration control would pass to the treatymaking power. Treaties made on the subject would become the supreme law of the land. Immigration regulation would pass to the President as the treatymaking power. subject to the ratification or the rejection of the Senate. The House would lose all voice in this question of the greatest importance to the people. who are most directly and truly represented in the House. and whose desires on this subject they have so much more frequently and truly voiced. I have stated other vital reasons why we must never let the control of immigration become a matter of treaty making. For that involves the surrender by us of our present sole right and power to regulate it. Confessedly. we now have this right and power regardless of the wishes of foreign countries. When immigration control is passed to the treatymaking power we will have surrendered this right and consented that we must consult foreign countries in fixing our immigration regulations. Foreign countries such as Germany. Japan.