Page:Immigration and the Commissioners of Emigration of the state of New York.djvu/172

144 The money, however, is not the only property which immigrants bring with them. In addition to it, they have a certain amount of wearing apparel, tools, watches, books, and jewelry. Assuming that their cash amounts to only $100 a head, I do not think I exaggerate in estimating their other property at $50, thus making $150 the total of the personal property of each immigrant. The total arrivals at New York for the year 1869 were 258,989 immigrants, and the amount added to the national wealth, through this port alone, in one year, did consequently not fall short of $38,848,350. Large as this sum appears, it is insignificant in comparison with the hundreds of millions which have been, and will be, produced yearly by the labor of immigrants. And here the question suggests itself: What is the economic value of each immigrant to the country of his adoption?

We are perfectly familiar with the estimates which, during the existence of slavery, were made of the value of negroes. A good field hand was considered to be worth $1,200 and over; a good cook was valued higher; and a seamstress or housekeeper was, in some cases, held at even $1,500 or $2,000. In order to obtain a proper idea of the importance of immigration to the United States, we must endeavor to capitalize, so to speak, the addition to the natural and intellectual resources of the country represented by each immigrant.

A prominent German statistician, Dr. Engel, of Berlin, Director of the Prussian Statistical Bureau, in an able treatise on the price of labor, distinguishes three periods in the economic life of each man: two unproductive and one productive period. The first comprises the raising and education of the individual, and continues until he reaches his fifteenth year. It is, of course, not only unproductive, but causes considerable outlay. The second, extending from the fifteenth to the sixty-fifth year, is the productive time of life. The third comprises the unproductive years of old age after sixty. Dr. Engel calls the first the juvenile, the second the labor, and the third the aged period.

It is only during this productive period that man is able to subsist on the results of his own labor. In the juvenile period he is dependent on the assistance of others, and in the aged period he has to live upon the accumulated fruits of the productive years.