Speech #720026121

I doubt whether anyone knows. Mr. President. had we had no immigration restriction. the number of persons walking the streets and looking for work would have been at least 2.000.000 more today than the actual figures. I can not think of any single thing that has so far benefited the workingman of the United States as has the immigration law now in effect. Before that law was passed we had a pretty sound system for the exclusion of those who were diseased and defective. The immigration law of 1917 provided that we should keep out those who were likely to become public charges. that we should keep out those who were contract laborers. who came under a previous contract for employment in the United States. That was the second class excluded. The third class was composed of those hopeless illiterates who could neither read nor write in any language. and a fourth class were those afflicted by serious and contagious and transmissible diseases. America did a wise thing in 1917 when it excluded those four classes of undesirables. and it did a wise thing in 1924 when it limited the numbers to come. For a good many years the administration of the act of 1917 has been a sloppy administration. Many people came in who. in all common sense. were likely to be public charges. and the consuls who gave the visas were not nearly strict enough in requiring evidence that those people. once they came. would be able to maintain themselves. There was not any adequate physical examination. At the ship a doctor stood and watched a line go by. and he caught a good many cases of trachoma. but many a case of contagious or transmissible disease came by that perfunctory scrutiny. and many a criminal came. simply because there was not time or was not effort to look up the records of applicants for visas. In the past 18 months we have begun to apply for the first time the requirements of the act of 1917. We have begun to exclude those who would be public charges if they came. We have begun to exclude those who are physically imperfect. We have begun to exclude the illiterates. and we have increased our application of the contract labor laws. The result has been that last month. for the first time in 100 years. more emigrants left the United States than the number of immigrants who came in. I give full allowance to the fact that the depression in business has reduced the temptation to migrate to the United States. but we must remember that the depression is worldwide. that its effects are more severely felt in many European countries at this moment than in the United States. and that to most European peasants the United States remains today a land of promise just as it has been a land of promise for the past century. If it were not for the numerical restriction imposed by the act of 1924. and the qualitative restriction imposed by the old act of 1917. now being firmly enforced. we would have hundreds of thousands of peasants from European countries. and mostly from southeastern Europe. swarming to this country today. intensifying our unemployment problems. and making it more difficult for the American to find a job with which to support himself. That is why the American Federation of Labor and both of the great political parties have supported these efforts toward immigration restriction. I am speaking not at all as a Republican. because I know that the sentiments I am trying to express are shared as much on the other side of the aisle by my Democratic friends as they are by us Republicans. It is a very happy thing for the United States that this matter of immigration control has never been the property of either political party. It has never been a partisan victory when an immigration law was adopted. It has never been more Republican than Democratic. never more Democratic than Republican. and it is a happy thing for our land that that has been so. and I trust that it always will be. With that preliminary observation.