LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
UPROOTED HUMANITY SIR,—In your issue of March 7th, both Mr. Frank Beswick and Sir Angus Watson, writing respectively of the million Allied Christian refugees and of the 100,000 Jewish refugees, suggest as a solution that an under-developed and under-populated South America, especially Brazil, needs immigrants. That is, of course, a matter for South Ameri- cans to decide. But in 1938-39, at a time when a then over-developed and over-populated Britain had taken pity on and admitted here over 90,000 Jewish Germans, I visited the A.B.C. countries of South America (Argentina, Brazil and Chile), with their approval, and reported on the condition of recent European immigrants and on Jewish settlements. One of the regrettable difficulties for Jewish European refugees now is that neither North nor South American nations, who are relatively recent as such, appear to want people who are not prepared wholly to assimilate themselves into the nation, and that, since the terrorism by Jewish Europeans in Arabic Asia, they wrongly or rightly fear the possibility that, if such immigrants' demands were not granted, it could also happen there.
In any case, Argentina and Brazil tend, not unnaturally, to prefer as immigrants Europeans who are nearest to their own stock, and therefore the most easily assimilable into a relatively new nation. They welcome people who are ethnologically Mediterraneans, linguistically, Latins and religiously Catholics. This element can best be found not among the million refugees but in the .Iberian peninsula and in Italy, whence about half the population wants to get out. Brazil may well be wise, since most of Brazil, such as the Amazonas and the Matto Grosso, is without safeguards unfit by European standards for hard physical labour by non-Mediterranean Europeans.
It is the United States and Canada, where the old Dutch and Anglo- Saxon stocks are now in a minority, which have proved themselves able to absorb and make productive, loyal citizens of hard-working Poles, Polish Ukrainians, Yugoslays and Baits, who are the main ethnic elements of the refugees now seeking to give their skills and to found new homes. More than a quarter of the pcpulaticn of, for instance, the United States are "foreign-born," with cne or both parents born abroad. If each of the Governments of the Americas, North and South, were to allow each family of their already assimilated citizens to adopt and take in one family of their ethnic kindred from among the refugees, they would become productively and rapidly assimilated, and the back of the refugee " problem " would be broken.
As regards Jewish Europeans (Russians, Poles, Austrians, etc.) in South America, the facts of settlement and the potentialities are briefly these. They can in fact, and have been, successfully settled on the land. This has been done in South America by, for instance, the Jewish Colonisation Association (I.C.A.) on the Baron Hirsch Foundation. Their settlements in the A.B.C. countries do not show more drift to the towns than non-Jewish communities. The best minimum unit is father, mother and adolescent son and daughter. The latter are first aided to get training and diplomas in agriculture, including dairying, poultry, stock-raising, cereals, etc. (The majority of non-Jewish refugees in British-American zones of Europe have been trained to agriculture from childhood.) In Argentina the association provides a farm, prefer- ably in the regular-rain Black-Earth area (such as Entre Rios). An average farm-unit is 176 acres. The immigrants find it fenced, equipped with the three main machines and standard house, furnished, set cen- trally on the plot and linked with a central all-weather road. Most farms are stocked with three draft-horses, fifty chickens, five milk-cows, etc.
The co-operative truck calls for the produce the day after their arrival, and regularly thereafter. They are producers from the first day. They are backed, in case of a series of bad seasons, by a land bank. Agricul- tural engineers circulate regularly to offer advice. After normal work for eight years, during which they agree to stay, they can become owners of the farm while still repaying. The association's work is a model of modern settlement. The total cost per family is about £800, plus ocean passage. In temperate Brazil the suburban settlement of market- gardeners costs about £600. The larger the scale, the less is the cost per family-.unit. Large-scale settlement en this modern and model plan costs a sum which only a loan backed by a Government or a consortium of Governments could achieve. When, however, such settlement is done on the cheap, Governments often have to spend more money on eventual doles for failures and bad seasons than they would have spent on initial expenditure on this plan, which makes the settlers into producers and an asset to the country from the day of their arrival.
An internationally guaranteed settlement-loan, on the model of that granted to Greece to settle Amtolians. would go a long way to dispose constructively of the million Allied pecple who have sought refuge with the Western Powers. They are unable to find normal work and homes in the British and American zones, so that they now remain, in any case, the Anglo-American taxpayers' responsibility. Meanwhile, France, by use of non-French labour, is producing more coal than in 1938. Belgium, increasingly employing non-Belgian workers (of which they foresaw, and agreed on, the need long ago), is nearest to normal of the Western belligerent nations. Britain, increasingly called on to produce more food for itself than ever before and industrially to produce to "export or die," probably needs 2,000,000 more skilled hands, and 500,000 per- manently now. Charity begins at home, and here at our doors is the main and productive solution of the alleged " problem " of Allied refugees. Here our moral responsibility and our own interests are at
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