Speech #710026518

Very many of the children of foreignborn parents could not specify the exact point of birth of their parents. so that group. the socalled children class. had to be treated in exactly the same way that the 1890 census had to be treated. with a measure of estimate in dividing the whole countries up into postwar geographical terms. It required a lot of research to do that. and let me explain an instance that will illustrate better than a general statement could. In Germany. as you see there. there was a considerable emigration to America back before 1850. The fact was. I am told. that most of that emigration went from southwestern Germany. from Saxony. At one time there was scarcely a house there that did not have a representative in America. Then about the middle of the century that flow of emigration seemed to dry up. and in its turn came a great outpouring of persons from a district that had not been represented before at all. and that was up in East Prussia. around the neighborhood of Posen and Konigsberg. and from that source this desire to migrate seemed to spread like an epidemic. The extreme northeastern corner of Germany began to send its throngs over here. Since the World War the extreme northeastern corner of Germany has suffered territorial disasters in the making of the Polish corridor and in ways like that. The extreme east of Germany. what used to be called Polish Germany. has all been lopped off. The changes on the western frontier of Germany are familiar to all of us. and there had to be calculations made of all that. and it was necessary to understand those varying trends and sources of immigration in order to apportion it intelligently. and the degree to which that controlled the figures is shown in the wild aberration of these census estimates in 1924 under the 1890 basis. To that extent that factor of uncertainty which pervades all of the 1890 basis applies to this second group. the children class of the 1920 population that we are considering. Then there was the third class. That was what was called the postcolonial. They have been hard put to it to invent labels for these groups. but they have united in calling this third group either the grandchildren class or the posteolonial immigrants. There we were dealing with much smaller figures. Fortunately. that is so. because as we go back toward the early years of the nineteenth century the records are less definite. and an error in them is of less importance. because the numbers are small.