have every qualification for residence in this country he is, in immigration idiom, "a desirable"-at any rate, not "an undesirable." So the inspectors pass him on into this country. But just as he is leaving their presence, hastening to his wife and child, one of the inspectors, with no other purpose perhaps than to "pass the time o' day," asks him where he was born. Then the tragedy! His reply absolutely bars his return to his home and family in this country. He is a native of British India and to British India he must be deported. There is no administrative discretion; the utmost that can be done, and only the Secretary of Labor can do it, is to permit him to visit his wife and child temporarily before being exiled to a far country in which he has not been since he was a baby.

For another instance, an alien who has resided in the United States a score of years, a thrifty workingman with an American-born wife, a man who has built a home and reared two boys of American birth, goes to the "old country" on a visit, leaving his family behind to care for the American home. During his absence the illiteracy test is inserted in the immigration law over the President's veto. Our Americanized alien knows nothing of this until his return. In every other respect he is admissible, but he can not read forty words in some language or dialect. Very delinquent he is, to be sure, to have lived all those years among Americans without acquiring the American virtue of forty-word literacy in some language or dialect; but to exclude him is to impose an intolerable hardship upon his American-born family as well as himself. Yet the Secretary of Labor has no greater discretion than to admit him. temporarily on a visit to his American home, his American-born wife and his

American-citizen sons, after whichexile.

A slightly different problem occurs when an immigrant family is admitted, all but one member, a girl it may be of sixteen or eighteen, who is certified by the official physicians to be a mental defective and must therefore be excluded. The family may protest that she is normal but naturally shy and is dazed by novel surroundings; private experts may testify to her normality; she may have been temporarily admitted from absolute necessity-as in war-time, and while awaiting deportation at the war's end may have demonstrated her normality even to the extent of making and saving money; yet, there is no discretion. She must be deported. Having been officially certified as "feeble-minded," or for "constitutional psychopathic inferiority," her exclusion is mandatory. Lest she get into the poor-house or an asylum at public expense, or become the ancestor of a line of American defectives, no security for the one nor proof as to the other can be taken by the Secretary of Labor as a condition of permanently admitting her to her family. She must be mercilessly separated from them and deported.

A somewhat similar problem is presented when a resident alien sends for his family to make him the American home he has hoped for and worked for, and upon his family's arrival one of the little children is officially certified as mentally defective. Not only must the defective child be returned, but the mother must go back with it as its natural guardian, and to a country in which she no longer has a home. There would be no difference if the father were a naturalized citizen, except that in this case the mother, being a citizen in virtue of her husband's citizenship, would not be compelled to go back except by the compulsion of a

mother's love. If reasonable discretion in dealing with such cases were lodged in the chief administrator, adjustments could often be made that would serve all the legitimate purposes of the immigration law without inflicting the unnecessarily severe hardships or promoting the immoralities that spring out of hopelessly interminable family separation.

A variety of these hardship cases arises in connection with the various grounds for exclusion, regarding which the administrative authority has no discretion but must follow the letter of the law. Could Congressmen be confronted with such rigid cases while voting for the law, it is inconceivable that they would legislate in cold blood to compel what the generalized form of the law as they enact it does compel the Secretary of Labor to do. Granted that in the interest of the country mental defectives and illiterates and Hindus and all the rest must as a general proposition be excluded, nevertheless, provision should be made to avoid or modify hardships to individuals. The remedy is simple. It has been proposed by Secretary Wilson but Congress has rejected it. To understand it one need but recall the old definition of chancery powers, which, as I recollect, is to the effect that chancery affords that special relief in individual cases which the law "by reason of its universality" can not anticipate. What is needed in connection with immigration procedure is a chancery power whereby the Secretary of Labor may be appropriately humane in individual cases of hardship which the immigration laws, by reason of their necessary universality of application, can not provide for. If the chief administrator of the alien exclusion laws were authorized to relieve individual hardships in his discretion, to the extent even of abso

lute admission if necessary, being required to state his reasons on the record and to report to Congress cases of extreme exercise of his discretion, the integrity of the exclusion laws could be conserved without the unnecessary individual suffering which generates the most difficult problems of immigrant administration-problems that are heavily charged with embarrassment to any administrative official who regards American ideals as an essential part of Americanism.

Besides the numerous problems with reference to exclusion from this country, of which I have suggestively indicated two or three classes, there are serious problems with reference to expulsion. These are often less embarrassing than the others, because the Secretary of Labor is invested with authority to decide all contested questions of fact. He can not expel a resident alien without himself first deciding upon evidence that the facts demand it. The trial is not a jury trial, nor a trial under all the safeguards of judicial process; but a considerate Secretary of Labor has the legal power to decide issues of fact as a considerate jury would. Beyond that, however, he has no discretionary powers as to the expulsion of resident aliens any more than he has as to the exclusion of immigrants. If he finds that a resident alien does in fact fall into any of the classes whose expulsion from the country is required by the immigration statutes, he must deport that alien regardless of the inhumanity involved and without the slightest reference to its stultification of American ideals.

If, for instance, and I allude to actual cases, there have come to this country several alien families, some of the members of which are girls ranging from eight to ten or possibly to twelve years of age; and if these girls when in

their early "teens" go to work in American stores or factories; and if, seduced by a yearning for finery which they can not buy out of their scant wages but which less industrious or perhaps less unfortunate girls indulge in without blame, they are further seduced by American men; and if, treading farther in that ugly path along the byways of life in the United States, they plunge into a prostitutional career; and if, in some police raid upon an American house of ill-fame, they are caught in the net and, instead of being discharged with a ten-dollar fine like their American-born associates, they are given over to an immigrant officer who in due course applies to the Secretary of Labor for a warrant of deportation, -in such cases the Secretary of Labor has no alternative but to deport these alien girls to a country they have not seen since childhood, a country in which they have no friends to go to; and this, notwithstanding piteous appeals from their fathers and mothers for permission to take their once lost but now found daughters back into their homes. If, then, we were charged with rearing prostitutes for a foreign market, could we complain?

A comprehensive class of expulsion cases out of which embarrassing problems arise includes aliens who have resided in the United States less than five years and were mental defectives in any degree when they came, or beggars, or diseased, or laborers under contract to come, or whose passage money was paid by a society, municipality or foreign government. In such cases the Secretary of Labor is bound to deport those aliens whom he decides upon the evidence to be within any of the classes described. The law gives him no alternative, although the mental defectiveness has wholly passed away, the beggar aliens have become useful members of society,

the importation contract be long since out of date, the contract-laborer has become an employer, or the passage money has been repaid long since out of income earned by useful work. No matter how the circumstances may have altered since the alien came, he must be deported if they existed at the time he came and he be caught in this country within five years after his arrival. This is also true of persons who were either prostitutes or "anarchists" when they came. Though the former have become virtuous mothers of American children, though the latter have become as thorough-going governmentalists as a Kaiser at the divine right extreme or a Jefferson or Lincoln at the democratic, nevertheless the Secretary of Labor must deport them for what they were when they came— if any friend of this country or enemy of the accused makes the accusation and proves it. For the Secretary to refuse would be at the least to challenge verbal assaults for maladministration.

Even in legitimate cases for expulsion, the questions of fact on which they hinge can not as a rule be determined fairly by administrative process. This almost mechanical proceeding is too arbitrary to be suited to American. ideals of fair-play when humane considerations are involved. The kind of process which determines whether an old public building shall be torn down or a new one be built is not at all adapted to determining whether a human being is unfit to continue residing in an American community. When human rights or duties are involved, the process of determination should be judicial, not administrative. There is really no very good reason why an alien who has acquired resident rights in the United States should not have his day in the courts of his vicinity before any administrative official of the central government is