Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/240

236 United States. Officers of the service receive special training for their work as medical inspectors of immigrants. Ellis Island, New York, is used by the service as a great school of instruction where young officers, before being detailed for immigration duty at one of the other ports of entry, are trained in the detection of the particular diseases and defects likely to be found in immigrants. Canada has always been a favorite route for undesirable immigrants wishing to evade the law, and officers of the Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service are stationed for immigration duty at Quebec and other Canadian ports, and at various points upon the Canadian frontier. Certain steamship lines make a regular business of carrying to Canada, for subsequent entry to the United States, aliens who have been rejected and sent back from an American port, or who manifestly belong to the excluded classes, or who have been rejected by other steamship lines who have some regard for our laws.

The officers of the Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service stationed at Quebec, Halifax, N. S., and St. Johns, N. B., have authority to examine only those aliens manifested as destined for the United States through Canada. Immigrants so manifested do not differ materially from immigrants ordinarily received at United States ports, and are given certificates of physical fitness which admit them to the United States through any of the border points. Thousands of immigrants evade this inspection at Quebec, Halifax or St. Johns, by being falsely manifested as destined finally to Canada. They have no certificates of inspection by United States officers at Quebec, Halifax or St. Johns, and upon attempting to cross the border are sent back to Montreal for examination.

In order to show the quality of the immigration brought by the Beaver Line and other lines engaged in this nefarious business, it is only necessary to state that 50 per cent, of the immigrants attempting to cross the border in 1903 were rejected, whereas the usual percentage of rejection at United States ports is only one per cent.

A regularly organized system of smuggling diseased immigrants across the border has been exposed by the United States immigration authorities at Montreal, and although the border inspection maintained by the United States Immigration Service is doing splendid work, it is impossible to guard effectively every point of over 3,000 miles of frontier. A more perfect system of exclusion is now possible, and consists of a rigid inspection of all aliens landing at Canadian ports under an effective Canadian law similar in character to our own, which has recently been enacted.

The real danger to the public health from immigration lies in that class of immigrants whose physique is much below American standards, whose employment is in the sweat-shop, and whose residence is the East