Speech #710018800

Without objection. it is so ordered. The address is as follows: In recent months our newspapers have printed many dispatches from Washington telling of the controversy over the nationalorigins clause of the immigration law. But I have been surprised to discover how little the proposition is understood. To my mind the whole future of America depends upon the preservation of a sound immigration policy and that is my excuse for the brief talk that I am giving this evening. As you know. we have been limiting immigration throughout the past eight years and we must continue to limit it unless we are willing to see a great increase in unemployment. Our population is sufficiently large to develop our country and carry on its industry. and any considerable increase in population through immigration is bound to have an ill effect on American wages and American standards of living. America today is the magnet that attracts people from every land. and unless we maintain our Immigration policy the number of newcomers will be limited only by the number of ships that sail the ocean. I believe that the policy of restriction has been approved by the sober judgment of our people and that we must do all in our power to sustain it. If then we are going to hold immigration down to a limited number of persons. the question arises at once. How we are going to apportion that number among the millions of persons who desire to come. As a temporary expedient we have becn dividing the number up Into immigration quotas for the various countries first in proportion to the number of foreignborn persons who were tabulated in the census of 1910 and later according to the foreignborn persons tabulated in the census of 1890. As a temporary expedient this was perhaps well enough. but it seems obvious to me that it should not be used permanently. because It ignores all of us who were born in this country. and surely we have as much right to be considered in the makeup of the quotas as has the most recently arrived unnaturalized European. And so in 1924 Congress provided that the experts of the Census Bureau. of the State Department. and the Department of Commerce should make a study of the national origins of the whole white population of the United States and that when that study had been completed the immigration quotas should be divided in accordance with the findings of these experts. For five years their study has continued and has now been completed. Of course. they have not tried to trace back the ancestors of particular individuals. but they have used all the population figures of every census. they have taken our immigration records as far bac as we have any record of immigration. they have studied the makeup of our population in the Colonial period. have studied the foreign statistics of emigration from many European lands and their report is made with confidence In its accuracy. It is not simply based on the census of 1790 as some of its critics have mistakenly said. It takes all the facts there are and then apportions the new quotas in strict accordance with our racial makeup.