IRE RESTRICTION OF EMIGRATION. T HE Bill just submitted to Congress
by the Immi- gration Committee of the House of Representatives is, we believe, the first of a series of enactments which will ultimately prohibit or seriously restrict emigration from Europe to the United States. The Bill is the product of two separate currents of opinion which have been in- creasing in volume for the last fifteen years, which will yet grow deeper, and which can hardly cease to act until their objects have been secured. The respectable classes throughout the Union, and especially all capitalists, are becoming seriously alarmed at the increase in the un- manageable foreign vote, and at its influence in their cities, at the transformation of a city like Boston, once the centre of orderliness and culture, into an Irish town ; at the riotous waste kept up by the miscellaneous voters of New York ; at the outbreak of anarchist opinions among the foreign workmen of Chicago ; and at the evil influence which Irishmen are exercising over the foreign relations of the general Government. Aspirants to office are compelled every year to risk a war which the body of the people do not want, in order not to lose the votes of an unassimilated cclan which has encamped itself among them. These respect- able classes could, if they would, cure the evil in a year, by adding to the Constitution a clause that none but born citizens of the Union should have either votes or office ; but they have not the civil courage for that proposal, and prefer to prevent the increase of the danger by restricting immi- gration. Behind them march an immense multitude of workmen who are as yet indifferent about the vote, but think that " the foreigners " diminish wages, who detest their " low " style of living, and who look upon the " labour " of the Union as a great property which may be whittled away by division among too many claimants. They are especially annoyed just now by the arrival of swarms of Italians and Hungarian Slays, whom they set down as uncivilised beings, and who are willing, like the Polish Jews of East London, to do hard work for wages which secure them only the means of bare subsistence. The workmen are seriously excited ; they have already compelled the exclusion of the only Asiatics who arrived in any number, and they are now seeking to keep away all but picked Europeans. Their representatives, of course, obey them, and this Bill is the first instalment of concession to their demand. It is a much more serious one than it looks at first sight, for besides prohibiting the introduction of disqualified immigrants, it introduces three entirely new principles, which may, as time goes on, be made precedents for much more drastic legislation. In the first place, no immigrant can land without a certificate from the American Consul at the port from which he sails—that is, in fact, without a passport—which hereafter it may be made impossible to obtain. In the second place, every immigrant is required to prove to the satisfaction of inspecting officers that he is not an anarchist or socialist, or polygamist or convict ; that he is not liable to become " a possible charge to the community ;" and that he does not intend to return to Europe with his savings,— provisions which may be easily extended as the demand arises, until no foreigners not capitalists can claim a right of residence within the United States. And, in the third. place, every immigrant is taxed a sovereign on arrival, an impost which is doubtless intended to pay the cost of all these inquiries, but which may be raised, should public opinion so demand, until it becomes an absolutely prohibi- tory tax. The State is, in fact, furnished with weapons which have only to be a little sharpened to keep out immigrants altogether, and this without recourse to the difficult and complicated device of formally amending the national Constitution.
The Bill is not, it is said, to be passed this Session, perhaps because the Representatives would like to consult their constituents beforehand ; but when it passes, its pro- visions will, we fancy, be made more and not less stringent than at present. The Knights of Labour, the largest organised Society in the States, are inclined, it is alleged, to advocate total exclusion, a story which receives support from the fact that one Union, the Goldbeaters', which is specially intelligent, and has a monopoly of its own trade, has imposed a fine of twenty pounds sterling upon any foreigner who seeks to enter its ranks, a fine which is absolutely prohibitory, and marks the temper of the skilled workmen better than any law. Moreover, the idea of exclusion has not yet reached its full development in the West, and will gather strength yearly as the proportion of foreigners grows larger, and as flight from the conscription, now so marked a phenomenon in all European countries, becomes year by year, with the spread of knowledge and the cheapness of transport, an easier and a more attractive plan of life. A great army flies from Germany every year. Southern Europe is only just beginning to disgorge itself on North America, and Southern Europeans, with their low standard of comfort, their separateness of appearance, and their indifference to cleanliness, irritate the Americans as the English, Germans, and Scandinavians have never done. We fancy, too, that they retain their languages longer, and that, like the Irish, they herd together ; while they avoid even more than the Irish the field labour in which, as yet, the natives of the American continent are careless of competition. We expect the idea of exclusion to grow, and this the more because the popula- tion has already become vast enough for safety—the census will, it is said, show it next year as double that of the United Kingdom—and because the disposition to regard labour as a property which cannot be advantageously shared is betraying itself in so many countries at once. The Canadian Dominion intends to abolish all grants in aid of immigration. The Australian Colonies hardly aid anybody but picked labourers, and would, it is believed, tax immigrants, were not the main body subjects of the Queen ; in France, where population never presses, native workmen are already attacking the Italian im- migrants ; while in England, a whole party already recommend taxation of the foreign labourer, and are held in check mainly by statistics showing how imperceptible amidst our crowds the foreign immigration really is. The great counter-truth, that every immigrant who works is a source of national wealth and diminishes taxation, makes no way among masses who are inflamed at once with that instinctive dislike of "outsiders," 61 f3apgapor, which has lasted all through history, and with that new and sovereign passion of our day, the longing for a high average standard both of comfort and of leisure. The movement will have different intensity in different countries, and it possibly may not extend to some regions, like South America, vast enough and fertile enough to hold the human race ; but the large probability is that before little children are fit to emigrate, the opportunity of emigration will have disappeared, and that the most wonderful movement of our century, the march of the surplus European population across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, a march incomparably greater in volume than that of the barbarians upon Rome, will have almost suddenly died away. The nations which were all to be fused in a " federation of the world," will insist on the most effective of all forms of separation, and every tribe will be left, as of old, to work out its problem for itself.
It is utterly vain to speculate on the results of such a change, for we do not know even the general laws which will regulate the new direction given to human energy. None of us really know whether the increase of the European peoples will continue as it has done during this century, or whether it will stop, as it must have done for ages ; whether the great races will burst out in arms, seizing new lands for themselves— as, for instance, the Russians might do in Persia, or the Germans in Hungary and the Balkan Peninsula— or whether Europe, like China, will rely upon feverish industry and thrift pushed beyond all precedent, to feed her teeming multitudes. None of us can be sure that a plague analogous to the phylloxera may not attack wheat, or whether science may not find for us a substance as universal as clay and as reinvigorating to the soil as nitrate of soda. The assertion that poverty checks the production of a race has proved absolutely false in China and Ireland ; while the counter-hypothesis, that prosperity checks the birth- rate by inducing prudence in marriage, is absolutely con- tradicted by the statistics of the American West. We know nothing about it for certain, except a few facts so confused and so contradictory that they will not yield under any analysis a basis for clear thought. One is. that in most European countries the increase of popula- tion has been unattended with any decrease in the standard of comfort. That is hopeful, but there is another which is not,—that Europe is becoming over- cropped, and needs, decade by decade, more and better restoratives for the declining vigour of her soil. We know that if the emigrants stay, we shall have more labour, and very good labour, they being, in the main, energetic men ; but we also know that if they stay, the very pick of the discontented will remain among us in hunger. Prediction is as impossible as guidance, and all we can hold to be established is, that if emigration stops, the problems of the future will be at once more complex and more urgent even than those of the past.
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