Speech #680193373

The one is as guilty as the other. Punishment should be equal. otherwise you undermine the aliens faith in our institutions and destroy every honest plan of socalled Americanization. Deportation of the seller and not the buyer means justice with scales unbalanced. Is it not time to leave off harassing the alien? Should we not let them work out their own salvation with a little less drastic interference? It is claimed they do not Americanize fast enough. as though that process were all overnight affair. Americanization is an imperceptible change like the blending of dawn Into day. It is not accomplished by straitjacket methods. by dragooning and deportation. By such methods you make the alien timid and afraid and suspicious of you. Every time you pass this sort of law. in equal degree you rob the alien of his confidence in you. Some one has stated that the difficulty of Americanizatioii is due to a lack of model. After whom should the alien pattern himself? Shall le fashion his life after Members of the House. the Senate. or the Immigration CommitteeI wonder? Mark Twain said that "there is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it ill behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us." Thomas Huxley (Evolution and Ethics. p. 309) says: I sometimes wonder whether people who talk so freely about extirpating the " unfit " ever dispassionately considered their own history. Surely one must be very " fit." indeed. not to know of an occasion. or prehaps two. in ones life when it would have been only too easy to qualify for a place among the " unfit." Let us therefore. pause and think well before we attempt to extirpate by deportation the socalled " unfit" . that is. violators of the Volstead Act. I am sure that many of us applying that test would find ourselves in the category of unfit." We were told that when the immigration law of 1924 was passed that that law would totally solve the immigration problem. Tile print of the statute is not yet dry and now we are told that further restrictions are necessary. and the alien is to be dported for violation of a law. which at best is unenforceable because it lacks the respect of the majority of people. citizens and noncitizens alike. throughout the land.