Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/179

Rh is intelligently directed, and that the alien colonies which are being formed in our farming districts do not become a menace. As to a reduction in the numbers of our alien arrivals, that is a work in which all who have at heart the best interests of their country, of the immigrants who are now here, and of those who are still to come, should join hands to accomplish. As Mr. Robert Hunter has recently said: "If we let the steamship companies and the railroads, wanting cheap labor, alone, we shall not decide what immigrants will be better for coming, and what ones the country most needs. They will decide it for us." There are two feasible remedies for reducing immigration now before congress. One, the illiteracy test, which has the support of the great majority of those who have studied the immigration problem carefully, and which has been strongly endorsed by President Roosevelt, the commissioner-general of immigration, and the boards of organized charity throughout the country. The other suggested by Congressman Robert Adams, Jr., of Pennsylvania, which would restrict to 80,000 the number of new immigrants who could come to us from any one foreign country in any one year. In his last Annual Report the Commissioner of Immigration at New York said:

I believe that at least 200,000 (and probably more) aliens came here (last year), who, although they may be able to earn a living, yet are not wanted, will be of no benefit to the country, and will, on the contrary, be a detriment, because their presence will tend to lower our standards; and.if these 200,000 persons could have been induced to stay at home, nobody, not even those clamoring for more labor, would have missed them. Their coming has been of benefit chiefly, if not only, to the transportation companies which brought them here.

To exclude this surplus of undesirable aliens, and to distribute the others over our farming districts where they can find suitable work and where they are wanted, is one of the most important problems before the people of this country.