Notes
Papers and Proceedings from the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society (1917) Vol XII: Social Control. pp. 174-184
Accessed via HathiTrust: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951p008656026
Control of Immigration Based Upon the True Demand for Labor
Arthur James Todd
The maintenance and perpetuation of population types through selective immigration is a principle of social control as old as group-awareness itself. The annals of primitive Israel, of Japan, of other "hermit nations" or "peculiar peoples," and the history of Colonial New England teem with illustrations. Wherever you find well-developed ethnocentrism, there you are altogether likely to find more or less conscious attempts at immigration restriction designed to assert power over the alien, to compel him into conformity with established norms of language, religion, wage-levels, standards of living, etc. Both public opinion and formal law reflect the principle still in modern national life. The methods of securing this form of control vary according to the social group's sense of what is most worth while in life, that is to say, its own attitude toward itself as a focal point in civilization. The more highly egotistic or fearful a group is the more its policy approaches the extreme negative pole of absolute exclusion. The modern world, however, has seen a pretty general acceptance of the principle of peaceful access and the right of a man to elect his own national adherence. Thus modern immigration policy has to do rather with special methods of restriction, special tests bearing largely upon questions of assimilability, capacity for citizenship, and the like. The cruder issues of race affinity and religious orthodoxy crop out only sporadically, as in the Know-Nothing Party, the A.P.A., and the Japanese-Korean Exclusion League.
All of these control methods were based upon quasi-instinctive emotions and untested opinions, and were therefore weak and not calculated to work efficiently. Our American immigration legislation has scarcely a better basis. It was dictated (as in the case of the Geary Chinese Exclusion Act) largely by political exigencies. Our present laws as revised this year (1917) are still a makeshift, an evasion, a crazy quilt. I mean in particular the latest attempt at selective restriction through the so-called illiteracy test. So far as I am able to make out, there are only three arguments that carry any weight in its favor. First, the argument of the man in the street that some form of restriction is desirable and that the illiteracy test would keep down the numbers somewhat anyway. But anybody who has read the act and the administrative rules based upon it would hesitate to prophesy that the inability to read forty words in their own language is going to debar many intending immigrants. The second argument comes from certain labor leaders who wish to prevent corporations from forming "alien pools" and keeping them away from labor publications. In other words, the illiteracy test prevents employers from agitation-proofing the immigrant. There is some shadow of validity in this plea; the report of the Immigration Commission seemed to show that immigrant labor was more or less resistant to unionization, and thus, indirectly at least, tended to retard the upward movement of wages. The third argument is that of the present-day Know-Nothings, who frankly advocate the illiteracy test as a means of barring Catholics, whom they conceive as illiterate and ignorant and dangerous.
Whatever cogency these arguments have almost if not altogether disappears in face of the fact that the whole principle of the illiteracy test fails to meet the issue squarely. It is a process of side-stepping, with a great deal of buncombe and claptrap about it. Both consciously and unconsciously interested groups insist on thus shifting the real issue from the plane of cold business to the planes of religious and political freedom, aesthetics, or natural rights. I do not know whether all race prejudice is at bottom a mode of economic self-defense; there may be certain subtle and inherent biological antipathies; but it is very certain that economic suspicion plays a very prominent and definite role in it. And it is even more certain that, on the other hand, economic motives prompt to an overwhelming degree the modern immigrant in his change of residence. Ninety-nine per cent of recent immigrants to the United States were seeking superior economic opportunity. And a very considerable percentage of this migration had been artificially stimulated by vitally interested industries—large employers of unskilled labor, employment agencies, transportation companies—and their political agents.
The modern immigration problem is primarily and predominantly economic and will probably continue to be so after the war. The labor organizations have recognized this fact, and their legislative policy (as worked out, for example, in fifty years of California history) has been dictated by it. The recent hysterical demands for easing up the immigration law on the grounds of labor shortage indicate an awareness that the issue is fundamentally industrial. New York, Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, and the Pacific Coast (somewhat less urgently) have pleaded their shortage. But invariably their pleas have reduced to a demand for very cheap labor. For example, Texas wanted to admit Mexican cotton pickers for a wage of eighty-five cents per hundred pounds, although they were paid a dollar per hundred last year with cotton at a lower selling price. Oklahoma offered two dollars a day for farm labor that formerly received two and a half to three dollars. Parenthetically we may observe that there are at present three potential sources of the belief in a real scarcity of labor: (1) the shift of workers to the munitions factories, attracted by high wages; (2) the draft army (heretofore felt by employers largely, however, merely as an emotional forecast of what might happen); (3) low wages. Temporary scarcity there may be, due to dislocations like the present war, or refusal to recognize the principle of adequate wage; but there is nowhere in America a chronic state of real labor shortage.
After the war the industrial situation will press upon us more intensely than ever, what with the transformation of war plants back into peace industries, the dilution of labor by the entrance of women and youths into industry, the re-education of soldiers and sailors to the vocations of peace, to say nothing of the possible dumping of war-sick alien labor upon our shores. Nobody can forecast with exactitude the outworking of these situations. But it at least ought to be clear enough that whatever of the immigration problem remains after hostilities cease and the period of reconstruction begins, must be faced, if it is to be faced scientifically and effectively, upon an economic basis, with a long range and not a mere hand-to-mouth policy.
All things considered, I am renewing in this paper a demand for the control of immigration upon a basis of the true demand for labor—a frank program for meeting the economic issue, which I have already urged repeatedly.1 The essential outlines of this program are (1) to ascertain the true demand for labor; (2) to organize the labor market; (3) to abolish the contract labor provision and the illiteracy test in our existing immigration law, and to introduce the principle of the sliding scale as a guide to admitting immigrant labor.
By the true demand for labor I do not mean of course the cry of labor shortage. I do not mean merely the registering of calls for labor. For, as Mr. Gompers pointed out in a recent interview, much demand for labor is either the result of using up productive labor as flunkies, valets, and other "unnecessary servitors," or is merely a call for odd-job men. And we might add that perhaps the biggest item to be deducted from an inflated demand for labor is the enormous labor turnover due to the common—I was going to say "system," but a sense of truth forbids—practice of hiring and firing. Moreover, it is a matter of common knowledge, through frank confession of the interested parties, that large industrial employers have made it a definite part of their practice to maintain a reserve labor force of the unemployed, a regiment ready to jump to the rescue when labor unrest began to brew, when wages threatened to go up or hours to go down. In other words, just as some corporations "watered" their stock others "watered" their labor force and thus padded the general demand. Again, the true demand for labor relates also to the habitually unemployed, the casual, the vagrant, and perhaps more than all else to the sweated. Hence this true demand considers the factors of wages offered, living conditions tolerated, facilities for organization, vocational guidance, etc. It matches the figures of calls for labor with statistics of unemployment, wage schedules, cost-of-living tables, and industrial education. Hence it necessitates some governmental machinery for securing and constantly renewing the vital facts in our labor market. But since the same machinery would naturally in consequence undertake the organization of the labor market I shall consider it under that heading.
By organization of the labor market I do not contemplate such a reconstruction as would work social revolution. I mean simply the utilization and extension of existing agencies or principles. An unemployment research commission or a permanent industrial commission or a co-ordination of investigative and administrative functions in the federal Department of Labor could accomplish all I have in mind, which is to establish a chain of labor intelligence offices so linked up and so manned that we could get the necessary facts. It is significant that the Department of Labor has actually under consideration such a scheme for employment exchanges and a national clearing-house. Assistant Secretary Post showed me recently an outline of this plan, which has been held back for want of money. It proposes to utilize the existing employment service of the Department of Labor consisting of 88 offices in 27 states, the post-offices, the Bureau of Farm Management in the Department of Agriculture, the state labor exchanges in 22 states, the municipal labor exchanges, the state councils of defense (with their employment departments and plans for conscripting the idle and vagrant), labor organizations, technical societies, and other private agencies operating employment departments. It further aims to reduce this complex and almost bewildering variety of services to some show of order. It is evident upon the face of things that some sort of clearing-house is necessary. This the plan proposes to secure through co-ordinating the diverse agencies into district exchanges (congressional areas), leading up to state employment exchanges, which in turn lead up to zone exchanges, which finally clear through the National Labor Department at Washington. This plan, I may say, has not only the approval but the enthusiastic approval of Secretary Wilson, Assistant Secretary Post, and others. If it can be put through it will give us at least the beginnings of a technique for ascertaining the true demand for labor and organizing the market, without which I believe we can never reach a successful solution of the immigration problem.
Now we are in a position to tackle the third element in our plan for immigration control, namely, repealing the contract-labor provision of the present law and utilizing the sliding scale as a principle for admissions.
Certain sections of American industry, both employers and workmen, have long fought the contract-labor exclusion feature in current immigration law. Suppose we frankly admit that it is much better for the immigrant to come over here to a definite job than to wander about for weeks after he arrives, a prey to immigrant banks, fake employment agents, and other sharks. Suppose, accordingly, we repeal the law against contract labor—it is constantly violated in letter and spirit anyway. Let the employer contract for as many foreign laborers as he likes or says he needs. But make the contractor liable for support and deportation costs if the laborers become public charges. Also require him to assume the cost of unemployment insurance. Exact a bond for the faithful performance of these terms, guaranteed in somewhat the same way that national banks are safeguarded. Immigration authorities now commonly require a bond from the relatives of admitted aliens who seem likely to become public charges, but who are allowed to enter with the benefit of the doubt. Customs and revenue rules admit dutiable goods in bond. Hence the principle of the bond is perfectly familiar, and its application to contract immigrants would be in no sense an untried or dangerous experiment. It would establish no new precedent; for precedents, and successful ones, are already established, accepted, and approved. It would be understood that all admissions of aliens can be only provisional. It would be understood further—and the plan would work automatically. If the contractor were made such a deeply interested party—that intending immigrants must be rigidly inspected, that they be required to produce consular certificates of clean police record, freedom from chronic disease, insanity, imbecility, etc. The result of such a scheme would probably be to cut away entirely contract labor, for it would no longer pay; and it would put an end to peonage.
This is no revolutionary proposal. Indeed the present immigration law provides an entering wedge with a working principle which apparently is accepted on all sides, since it was also a part of the law of 1907. Section 3 of the law includes this proviso: "That skilled labor, if otherwise admissible, may be imported if labor of like kind unemployed cannot be found in this country, and the question of the necessity of importing such skilled labor in any particular instance may be determined by the Secretary of Labor. . . . ." This proviso, slightly amended to make it applicable to unskilled as well as skilled labor, would offer not only a really workable test for immigration, but in my judgment a satisfactory adjustment of the immigration problem. The case becomes all the clearer if we are allowed to read into it another proviso of the same act and the administrative rules based upon it. The Secretary of Labor issued in May, 1917, a bulletin of instructions to his immigration staff of which the following is the substance:
The ninth proviso to Section 3 of the Immigration Act of February 5, 1917, reads: "Provided further, That the Commissioner-General of Immigration with the approval of the Secretary of Labor shall issue rules and prescribe conditions, including exaction of such bonds as may be necessary, to control and regulate the admission and return of otherwise inadmissible aliens applying for temporary admission." While, obviously, this special exception to general provisions of law should be construed strictly and should not be resorted to except with the object of meeting extraordinary situations or conditions, it can be and should be availed of whenever an emergent condition arises. With agricultural pursuits such a condition now exists in certain sections of the country and is likely to arise in other sections during the continuance of the war. The department therefore issues the following instructions for the information and guidance of all concerned: Aliens admitted under the provisions hereof are allowed to enter temporarily upon the understanding that they will engage in no other than agricultural labor; and any who fail to accept or after acceptance abandon employment of that kind and engage in the performance of labor in connection with other industries shall be promptly arrested and deported to the country whence they came.
In cases arising under this circular, the aliens involved shall be admitted without payment of head tax.
These rules were ordered to apply only to agricultural laborers from Mexico and Canada. But that they can be stretched on occasion is evident enough from a department order in July permitting several hundred illiterate Bravas from Cape de Verde Islands to land at New Bedford temporarily for farm work.2
Immigration policy, then, reduces itself to two simple problems, namely, the determination of real economic demand at home and the technique of selecting candidates for admission. As I have said elsewhere:
The latter problem need give us no special concern, for it would involve no new untried machinery. Our consular service is or could be organized for that purpose, as was long ago proposed by American consuls themselves. In addition to visiting certificates from police, poor-relief, and health authorities for the purpose of weeding out positive undesirables, consular offices might be authorized to receive from prospective immigrants their formal declarations of intention to migrate. Such declarations might or might not be accompanied by validations from the local administrative authorities. In all probability, with the huge tasks of reconstruction now facing European governments, they would co-operate heartily in the work of scrutinizing the papers of emigrants. The central point to the plan would be the filing of these declarations at American consulates. Suppose this done. When notice comes from the United States Department of Labor that an authentic demand exists for a certain number of laborers and that so many may be admitted from this or that locality, the consular authority to whom the notice is directed merely takes up the declarations in the order of their filing and certifies the proper number for admission. The immigration authorities at this end would be relieved of an enormous responsibility, which at best they can fulfil in only superficial fashion.
That is the gist of what I consider a rational plan for social control of immigration. Now for objections to it. They come from business men, doctrinaire radicals, farmers, and I.W.W.'s. I give them just as they have been fired at me. The first group of objections are based upon abstract notions. (1) I am told that no body or state or officer has a right to limit my right to go where I please. The answer to this, of course, is simple enough. Under an international or world state all bars would be down; neither my proposed restriction laws nor those that now exist would be necessary; we should have the fullest mobility of labor and goods. We are still, however, in a nationalistic era: I am dealing with things as they are, and as they may be expected to be for some time to come. (2) It is objected that it is not the immigrant but the machine which is the enemy of workingmen, through padding the labor force. The answer to this, of course, is that the machine should be the worker's best friend; as matters now stand it is a case of alienation of affections. Partnership must be restored through co-operative industry; this in turn should come about through a better organization of the labor market, which can be effectuated more easily if it is made impossible to hold a reserve labor source as a club over the heads of the workers. (3) I am told that the world needs more, not fewer, people; that if civilization is a good thing, and if American civilization in particular is a good thing, then more people should be allowed to enjoy it. The answer may be made in either eugenic or economic terms. The economist says make men precious by conferring a scarcity value upon them. The eugenist is asking not for a bigger but for a better population. The question is not How many people can you pack into the state of Massachusetts or Minnesota? but the practical question, What are they able to do now toward insuring themselves a rational standard of living? (4) My single-tax friends object that America is big enough to house the world; that the trouble is not too many immigrants, but a faulty system of land ownership; therefore that single tax, not immigration restriction, is the remedy. But unrestricted immigration will not necessarily hasten the single tax, nor will restriction prevent its adoption as a social panacea if it has the real merit its apostles claim.
The second set of objections is based upon questions of economic fact. (5) It is objected that American industrial troubles probably result, not from immigration, but from lack of labor organization. There is no denying the lack of labor organization. We have dwelt upon that fact almost ad nauseam. Moreover, we have claimed that a heterogeneous, ignorant, illiterate mass of foreign workmen tends to hinder the effective development of labor organization. (6) I am told that the problem is not immigrant labor, but baby labor, that is to say, child labor. But child labor is growing less all the time, and the tendency is strongly toward its elimination. The objectors on this score should remember, moreover, that immigrants add babies to our population faster than the natives do. (7) I am told that what we want really to know is how to find men jobs, not how to keep men out of the country. I answer that public employment agencies under federal control can do this work more readily if not pressed upon by increasing masses of the unemployed to whose ranks the immigrant adds. (8) The objection is raised that if there is no reserve labor there will be nobody left to do our farm work. But here again it is less a question of the immigrant than of effective labor organization. The problem of farm labor is admittedly difficult, but I cannot see that a policy of unrestricted immigration is going to aid in the solution, for careful investigators assure us that "it is clear that the tendency of the new immigration is toward industrial and city pursuits rather than toward agriculture."
The third group of objections lean to questions of administration. (9) We are told that if we do away with the contract-labor provision we let down the bars for exploiting the American laborer. But this is not at all the case if we safeguard it by the bonding and insurance plan which we have outlined. (10) Some critics are afraid that such a plan would create a condition of slavery or indentured servitude if every immigrant had to sign a bond to remain with his employer for a certain period at a certain wage. But I have nowhere contemplated that he would do any such thing. On the contrary, the contractor would have to assume and carry all the risks, including strikes, inefficiency, etc. (11) The question is asked, Who would fix wages under this plan? Undoubtedly they would be fixed by the United States Bureau of Labor upon the basis of the reports coming to the clearing-house. (12) Suppose, for example, that after five years an employer discharged his imported immigrants who had begun to demand higher wages, and had turned them loose, stranded, and out of work. Could he not then send and bring over an equal number of strike breakers? No, by hypothesis, not so long as any capable unemployed men were available. (13) How can you tell the true supply of or demand for labor when there are so many floaters and vagrants? The Bureau of Labor's plan for unemployment bureaus would take care of the real workers; the others would be sifted out and handled on penal farms for the vagrant. Just now several of our state councils for defense are trying such methods for conscripting the idle and the vagrant.
A far more serious objection (14) which goes to the root of the whole scheme crops out of the present war, to this effect: Now that we are in the war we cannot work such a scheme without offending our Allies. But it is altogether possible to extend to our Allies preferential treatment in the matter of immigration as with other forms of reciprocity. Moreover, it is altogether possible that our Allies will prefer to encourage their people to remain at home or to go to their own colonies. At any rate there can be no charge of race discrimination under such a sliding scale.
Finally, the objection comes that the whole scheme is gratuitous and unnecessary, because at the end of the war the tide will be toward Europe and not from Europe. Here facts end and opinion begins; but in such an event we have done no harm, and we should enjoy the immense strategic advantage of having met the issue frankly, thought it through without subterfuge, and prepared ourselves for any emergency.