"
While the earlier immigration brought a liberal amount of intelligence
and ability, the later immigration (roughly, that of the last half
century) seems to have brought distinctly less. It is at present
principally an immigration of unskilled labor, of vigorous, ignorant
peasants. Some of this is "promoted" by agents of transportation
companies and others who stand to gain by stirring up the population of
a country village in Russia or Hungary, excite the illiterate peasants
by stories of great wealth and freedom to be gained in the New World,
provide the immigrant with a ticket to New York and start him for Ellis
Island. Naturally, such immigration is predominantly male. On the whole,
females make up one-third of the recent inflow, but among some
races--Greeks, Italians and Roumanians, for example--only one-fifth.
In amount of inherent ability these immigrants are not only less highly
endowed than is desirable, but they furnish, despite weeding out,
altogether too large a proportion of the "three D's"--defectives,
delinquents and dependents. In the single year 1914 more than 33,000
would-be immigrants were turned back, about half of them because likely
to become public charges. The immigration law of 1907, amended in 1910,
1913 and 1917, excludes the following classes of aliens from admission
into the United States:
Idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane
persons, persons who have been insane within 5 years previously;
persons who have had two or more attacks of insanity at any time
previously or who are affected by constitutional psychopathic
inferiority or chronic alcoholism; paupers, vagrants, persons
likely to become public charges; professional beggars, persons
afflicted with tuberculosis or with a loathsome or contagious
disease; persons who have been convicted of a crime involving moral
turpitude; polygamists, anarchists, contract laborers, prostitutes,
persons not comprehended within any one of the foregoing excluded
classes who are found to be and are certified by the examining
surgeon as being mentally or physically defective, such mental or
physical defect being of such a nature as to affect the ability of
the alien to earn a living.
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