W.
Jenks, who was a member of the Immigration Commission appointed by
President Roosevelt in 1907. He alludes to the belief that instead of
crowding the older workers _out_, the aliens merely crowd them up, and
says that he himself formerly held that view; "but the figures collected
by the Immigration commission, from a sufficient number of industries in
different sections of the country to give general conclusions, prove
beyond a doubt that in a good many cases these incoming immigrants
actually drive out into other localities and into other unskilled trades
large numbers of American workingmen and workingmen of the earlier
immigration who do not get better positions but, rather, worse ones....
Professor Lauck, our chief superintendent of investigators in the
field, and, so far as I am aware, every single investigator in the
field, before the work ended, reached the conclusion from personal
observation that the tendency of the large percentage of immigration of
unskilled workers is clearly to lower the standard of living in a number
of industries, and the statistics of the commission support this
impression. I therefore changed my earlier views."
If the immigration of large quantities of unskilled labor with low
standards of living tends in most cases to depress wages and lower the
standard of living of the corresponding class of the old American
population, the consequences would appear to be:
1.
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