Aliens or Americans? Part 1

Aliens or Americans?

by Howard B. Grose.

PREFACE

It is not a question as to whether the aliens will come. They have come, millions of them; they are now coming, at the rate of a million a year.

They come from every clime, country, and condition; and they are of every sort: good, bad, and indifferent, literate and illiterate, virtuous and vicious, ambitious and aimless, strong and weak, skilled and unskilled, married and single, old and young, Christian and infidel, Jew and pagan. They form to-day the raw material of the American citizens.h.i.+p of to-morrow. What they will be and do then depends largely upon what our American Protestant Christianity does for them now.

Immigration--the foreign peoples in America, who and where they are, whence they come, and what under our laws and liberties and influences they are likely to become--this is the subject of our study. The subject is as fascinating as it is vital. Its problems are by far the most pressing, serious, and perplexing with which the American people have to do. It is high time that our young people were familiarizing themselves with the facts, for this is preeminently the question of to-day.

Patriotism and religion--love of country and love of Christ--unite to urge thoughtful consideration of this great question: Aliens or Americans? One aim of this book is to show our individual responsibility for the answer, and how we can discharge it.

Immigration may be regarded as a peril or a providence, an ogre or an obligation--according to the point of view. The Christian ought to see in it the unmistakable hand of G.o.d opening wide the door of evangelistic opportunity. Through foreign missions we are sending the gospel to the ends of the earth. As a home mission G.o.d is sending the ends of the earth to our sh.o.r.es and very doors. The author is a Christian optimist who believes G.o.d has a unique mission for Christian America, and that it will ultimately be fulfilled. While the facts are in many ways appalling, the result of his study of the foreign peoples in our country has made him hopeful concerning their Americanization and evangelization, if only American Christians are awake and faithful to their duty. The Christian young people, brought to realize that immigration is another way of spelling obligation, must do their part to remove that tremendous IF.

These newcomers are in reality a challenge to American Christianity. The challenge is clear and imperative. Will we give the gospel to the heathen in America? Will we extend the hand of Christian brotherhood and helpfulness to the stranger within our gates? Will we Christianize, which is the only real way to Americanize, the Aliens? May this book help to inspire the truly Christian answer that shall mean much for the future of our country, and hence of the world.

The author makes grateful acknowledgment to all who have a.s.sisted by suggestion or otherwise. He has tried to give credit to the authors whose works he has used. He is under special obligation for counsel and many courtesies to Josiah Strong, one of the modern patriot-prophets who has sought to awaken Americans to their Christian duty and privilege.

HOWARD B. GROSE.

_Briarcliff Manor, June, 1906._

INTRODUCTION

A million immigrants!

A million opportunities!

A million obligations!

This in brief is the message of _Aliens or Americans?_

A young man who came to this country young enough to get the benefit of our public schools, and who then took a course in Columbia University, writes: "Now, at twenty-one, I am a free American, with only one strong desire; and that is to do something for my fellow-men, so that when my time comes to leave the world, I may leave it a bit the better." These are the words of a Russian Jew; and that Russian is a better American, that Jew is a better Christian, than many a descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers.

In this country every man is an American who has American ideals, the American spirit, American conceptions of life, American habits. A man is foreign not because he was born in a foreign land, but because he clings to foreign customs and ideas.

I do not fear foreigners half so much as I fear Americans who impose on them and brutally abuse them. Such Americans are the most dangerous enemies to our inst.i.tutions, utterly foreign to their true spirit. Such Americans are the real foreigners.

Most of those who come to us are predisposed in favor of our inst.i.tutions. They are generally unacquainted with the true character of those inst.i.tutions, but they all know that America is the land of freedom and of plenty, and they are favorably inclined toward the ideas and the obligations which are bound up with these blessings. They are open to American influence, and quickly respond to a new and a better environment.

They naturally look up to us, and if with fair and friendly treatment we win their confidence, they are easily transformed into enthusiastic Americans. But if by terms of opprobrium, such as "sheeny" and "dago,"

we convince them that they are held in contempt, and if by oppression and fraud we render them suspicious of us, we can easily compact them into ma.s.ses, hostile to us and dangerous to our inst.i.tutions and organized for the express purpose of resisting all Americanizing influences.

Whether immigrants remain _Aliens_ or become _Americans_ depends less on them than on ourselves.

JOSIAH STRONG.

_New York, June 26, 1906._

_We may well ask whether this insweeping immigration is to foreignize us, or we are to Americanize it. Our safety demands the a.s.similation of these strange populations, and the process of a.s.similation becomes slower and more difficult as the proportion of foreigners increases._

--Josiah Strong.

THE ALIEN ADVANCE

"And ELISHA prayed, and said, Jehovah, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And Jehovah opened the eyes of the young man: and he saw" (2 Kings vi. 17). Elisha's prayer is peculiarly fitting now. The first need of American Protestantism is for clear vision, to discern the supreme issues involved in immigration, recognize the spiritual significance and divine providence in and behind this marvelous migration of peoples, and so see Christian obligation as to rise to the mission of evangelizing these representatives of all nations gathered on American soil.--_The Author._

Out of the remote and little-known regions of northern, eastern, and southern Europe forever marches a vast and endless army. Nondescript and ever-changing in personnel, without leaders or organization, this great force, moving at the rate of nearly 1,500,000 each year, is invading the civilized world.--_J. D. Whelpley._

Political optimism is one of the vices of the American people. There is a popular faith that "G.o.d takes care of children, fools, and the United States." Until within a few years probably not one in a hundred of our population has ever questioned the security of our future. Such optimism is as senseless as pessimism is faithless. The one is as foolish as the other is wicked.--_Josiah Strong._

I

THE ALIEN ADVANCE

_I. A Year's Immigration a.n.a.lyzed_

[Sidenote: A Million a Year]

What does a million of immigrants a year mean? Possibly something of more significance to us if we put it this way, that at present one in every eighty persons in the entire United States has arrived from foreign sh.o.r.es within twelve months. Of this inpouring human tide one of the latest writers on immigration says, in a striking pa.s.sage:

[Sidenote: The Peaceful Invasion]

"Like a mighty stream, it finds its source in a hundred rivulets. The huts of the mountains and the hovels of the plains are the springs which feed; the fecundity of the races of the old world the inexhaustible source. It is a march the like of which the world has never seen, and the moving columns are animated by but one idea--that of escaping from evils which have made existence intolerable, and of reaching the free air of countries where conditions are better shaped to the welfare of the ma.s.ses of the people.

[Sidenote: Variety of Peoples]

"It is a vast procession of varied humanity. In tongue it is polyglot; in dress all climes from pole to equator are indicated, and all religions and beliefs enlist their followers. There is no age limit, for young and old travel side by side. There is no s.e.x limitation, for the women are as keen as, if not more so than, the men; and babes in arms are here in no mean numbers. The army carries its equipment on its back, but in no prescribed form. The allowance is meager, it is true, but the household G.o.ds of a family sprung from the same soil as a hundred previous generations may possibly be contained in shapeless bags or bundles. Forever moving, always in the same direction, this marching army comes out of the shadow, converges to natural points of distribution, ma.s.ses along the international highways, and its vanguard disappears, absorbed where it finds a resting-place."[1]

[Sidenote: The Ellis Island Inflow]

See the living stream pour into America through the raceway of Ellis Island.[2] There is no such sight to be seen elsewhere on the planet.

Suppose for the moment that all the immigrants of 1905 came in by that wide open way, as eight tenths of them actually did. If your station had been by that gateway, where you could watch the human tide flowing through, and if the stream had been steady, on every day of the 365 you would have seen more than 2,800 living beings--men, women, and children, of almost every conceivable condition except that of wealth or eminence--pa.s.s from the examination "pens" into the liberty of American opportunity. Since the stream was spasmodic, its numbers did reach as high in a single day as 11,343.

[Sidenote: A Motley Procession]

Imagine an army of nearly 20,000 a week marching in upon an unprotected country. At the head come the motley and strange-looking migrants--largely refugee Jews--from the far Russian Empire and the regions of Hungary and Roumania. At the daily rate of 2,800 it would take this indescribable a.s.sortment more than 166 days to pa.s.s in single file. Then the Italians would consume about eighty days more. For over eight months you would have watched so large a proportion of illiteracy, incompetency, and insensibility to American ideals, that you would be tempted to despair of the Republic. Nor would you lose the sense of nightmare when the English and Irish were consuming forty-two days in pa.s.sing, for the "green" of the Emerald Isle is vivid at Ellis Island, and the best cla.s.s of the English stay at home. The flaxen-haired and open-faced Scandinavians would lighten the picture, but with the equally st.u.r.dy Germans they would get by in only a month and four days.