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UTHENTIC reports from Europe that emigrants by the hundreds of thousands are crowding all the embarkation ports and are overflowing all shipping facilities in their mad rush to the United States, coupled with the steady increase in the number of foreign-born arrivals on our shores since the close of the European War,2 are evidence that the tide of immigration is setting in once more to the shores of the United States and that the American people are again confronted with this great national problem. But few realize the magnitude this immigrant invasion has assumed and still fewer appreciate its far-reaching effects upon the American people and nation, racially, socially, industrially and institutionally. A brief statistical survey of this tide as it has washed upon our shores the past one hundred years will assist in a comprehension of the tremendous increase in its volume prior to its temporary interruption by the European War.

A pictorial bird's eye view of this inflow of foreign born is given in the

1 Author of: The Slav Invasion and the Mine Workers (1904), The Coal Mine Workers (1905), Immigration and the Southern States (1905), The Immigrant Invasion (1913), Railway Operation and Finance (1913), Intercorporate Ownership and Interlocking Directorates of the Railroads of the United States (1914), The Tide of Immigration (1916), Warne's Book of Charts (1917), Warne's Elementary Course in Chartography (1917), Chartography in Ten Lessons (1919), Industrial Relations (1920), The Workers at War (1920).-The EDITOR.

2 More than 430,000 aliens arrived in the United States during the six months from January to July, 1920.

accompanying chart, reproduced from Warne's Book of Charts and which is based upon statistics from the Bureau of Immigration of the United States Department of Labor. In the past one hundred years this immigration has comprised more than 33,200,000 human beings. From an inflow of less than 129,000 for the ten years following 1820 it increased to more than 8,200,000 for the decade ending with 1909. The war period greatly reduced this volume but even including those four years immigration for the decade closing with 1919 gave an inflow of more than 6,347,000. Here is an increase in the one hundred years from a decennial yearly average of 12,900 to nearly 635,000. The largest ten-year immigration was from 1905 to 1914, its volume exceeding 10,100,000. Of the total of more than 33,200,000 immigrants as many as 26,200,000, or 79 per cent, came during the past fifty years, and as great a proportion as 30 per cent of the total, or 10,122,000, during the ten years prior to the beginning of the European War.

The temporary effects of the war upon the volume of immigration are indicated in the fact that while it reached nearly 5,175,000, or a yearly average of more than 1,000,000, for the five years immediately preceding, it decreased to 1,173,000, or an average inflow of only 235,000, for the five years following 1914. This is nearly 36,000 less than that for the single year immediately preceding the beginning of hostilities. The lowest

number of arrivals in any one of these five years was 110,618 in 1918, the smallest yearly immigration since 1862 just preceding the beginning of the Civil War.

Our total immigration of more than 33,200,000 and the yearly average by decades during the past one hundred years are summarized in the following table. These figures are for immigrant aliens only and do not include nonimmigrant arrivals; that is, those recorded as coming here for temporary purposes only and not for permanent residence. If the latter were included the totals would, of course, be much larger, especially for the more recent years before the war.

DECENNIAL IMMIGRATION THE PAST ONE HUNDRED YEARS

Not all the 33,200,000 immigrants are in the United States at the present time. Many have died and still others have emigrated. Our present foreignborn population is not yet known, the Bureau of the Census not having completed its tabulation of the last enumeration, but in 1910 there was a total foreign-born population in the United States of approximately 13,500,000 out of a total immigration down to that time of about 26,853,000.

While the figures in the preceding table impress one with the magnitude of the volume of immigration, at the same time they smooth out the differ

ences in the inflow from year to year and at different periods of time. By studying the yearly figures in the table of the accompanying chart and relating them to events of industrial or economic history, we are able to understand what is probably the most significant of all the operating forces or influences at work behind this great movement of population across the Atlantic.

For illustration, the number of immigrant arrivals strikingly decreased from nearly 428,000 in 1854 to 200,877 the following year, a decrease of more than one-half. This falling off reflected the effects of the greatest financial panic ever experienced in the history of the United States up to that time. The ensuing industrial depression was followed closely by the Civil War, and it was not until 1873 that the yearly inflow again reached as large a volume, the number being nearly 460,000. The year 1873 marks another panic, and a striking decrease the following years in the number of alien arrivals is again recorded. Beginning in the early eighties and accompanying increasing prosperity in all of our industries, the volume of immigration steadily increased until this tendency was interrupted by the panic of 1893. The financial disturbance in this country in 1907 was similarly followed by a striking decrease in immigration.

This close relation between industrial depression and decrease in immigration on the one hand and industrial prosperity and increase in immigration on the other is the economic explanation of the periodic waves of immigration that have washed our shores since 1820, and particularly so in more recent years. It points unmistakably to the economic characteristics of this great movement of population and to the fact that by far the greater part of it is due to the indus

This industrial demand for labor which is met most largely by immigration is for the rough, unskilled, or "common" kind, nearly 60 per cent of all incoming aliens being males without trained skill and lacking even the rudiments of an education.

This raises a hundred and one questions that in recent years have come to vex the American people. Can they continue to build a safe democracy not out of such material but out of too great a supply of such material?

Assimilation of the immigrant into American life in all its aspects and no other consummation of the presence among us of the foreign born should be entertained-rests primarily upon the opportunity for continuous employment in a gainful occupation at a wage sufficient at least to supply him and those dependent upon him with the necessities for physical existence. A needy alien in the United States out of work is not only retarded in assimilation but he also hinders or obstructs the operation of the forces of assimilation themselves. With continuous employment at a living wage the typical immigrant becomes an asset to all concerned and not a liability either to himself or to other workers or to the American people. Only that number

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of immigrants, then, should be permitted to enter at any one time for which there is opportunity for such employment without depriving those already here, foreign born as well as native, of similar opportunity. facts as to the existence of such a condition can be fairly accurately ascertained, as I have already suggested before the American Academy of Political and Social Science and the National Civic Federation, by the organization of federal governmental machinery for measuring the anticipated demand of our industries for unskilled workers at the prevailing American rate of wages.

This is the theory of immigration control upon which is based the principle of governmental regulation that will restrict it within the limits of an assimilative supply. Its foundation rests upon that view of American life which believes that the alien must become at the earliest possible moment an indistinguishable part of American society. It is not superficial sentimentality, neither is it misguided or humbug philanthropy; it is not based on economic exploitation of the alien by emphasizing his contribution to production. It is fundamentally humanitarian in that it seeks the ultimate welfare of both the immigrant and the American people.

This view it is now necessary to emphasize because the effects flowing out of the European War have brought to public attention with startling suddenness, like the rapid shifting of scenes on a moving-picture screen, aspects of immigration which heretofore have been regarded with unruffled complacency. We have been made conscious of the existence among us, in spirit as well as in name, of the hyphenated American-of the German-American, the Italian-American, and so on. We have found that our much