Spanish Transatlantic Line, Swedish American Line, United States Lines.

Mr. SCHULTE. Strictly passenger lines?

Mr. MAYPER. Oh, they carry freight too, but they are primarily passenger liners. They are built for passenger service, but they have some small-freight traffic.

So many statements have been made by those who preceded me that perhaps before I go into the merits of the bill myself, if I may, I should make just one or two comments on the statements made.

The question of the number of persons who have deserted: I quite agree with the Chairman that you can argue till doomsday on that and no one will know precisely the number that are actually smuggled in and have deserted. The only records that have any basis of authenticity at all are those that the Immigration Service issues yearly and that are based on the sworn statements of the masters of the ships. We have heard talk this morning and previously about the master swearing one thing to the United States Government officials and swearing something else to his own consul. Well, you may believe that if you please or you may not if you please, but it seems to me that a responsible master of a ship would not swear twice on the same matter and give different figures each time.

To bring the thing down to date as far as figures are concerned, I have before me the hearing of the subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations for the appropriation bill for the Department of Labor for 1936. Colonel MacCormack, testifying before that committee for the Immigration Service, made this statement, which is very short:

The reduction in the number of illegal entries is evidenced by the figures as to deserting seamen.

Now, this is Colonel MacCormack speaking:

The desertions ran formerly up to 23,000 or better a year but have dopped in recent years to a negligible figure.

Congressman BACON. How do you ascertain the figures as to deserting sea

men?

Colonel MACCORMACK. We have an almost absolute record. We have a check on the arrival and departure of alien seamen through reports that must be submitted to us, so we know very accurately what that situation is.

Mr. BACON. So at the present time you say there are very few deserting seamen?

Mr. MACCORMACK. Yes, sir; deserting seamen, who have always constituted a large percentage of illegal entries into the country, have dropped from a peak of 23,447 in 1927 to 664 in 1933, and at 972 in 1934. The desertions by years for the period 1925 to 1934 are as follows:

And then he gives the figures for 10 years consecutively, without giving you each year, the total for 10 years being 100,722, or an average of about 10,000 a year for the past 10 years.

Mr. SCHULTE. Desertions?

Mr. MAYPER. Right.

The CHAIRMAN. That is too much.

Mr. MAYPER. Absolutely. There is no question about it. I only want to correct the figures, Congressman, that is all.

Mr. SCHULTE. Then the gentleman there just made the statement that in 10 years there have been 100,000 desertions? Mr. MAYPER. That is right.

Mr. SCHULTE. In other words, there have been 100,000 aliens that have been brought in here by the shipping companies by these methods that we have heard described?

Mr MAYPER. That is not the whole story.

Mr. SCHULTE. It is as far as we are concerned.

Mr. MAYPER. I beg your pardon. We want the facts, and that is all we are after.

Mr. SCHULTE. Yes.

Mr. MAYPER. The seaman who is registered as a deserter is not always a deserter in the true sense of the word. We have the seamen's act, the La Follette Act of 1915. The mandatory provision of that law is that any member of a crew who desires to be discharged at a port of the United States must upon demand get half his pay and get his discharge papers. The Department of Labor, acting under that seamen's act, has established a regulation under which such a seaman who, under our seamen's act, must get shore leave if he demands it, may remain in the United States for 60 days to reship foreign.

Now, 100,000 of these came in in 10 years. Mr. Hurley, a representative of the Department of Labor, at similar hearings several years ago—and we are all just guessing about this thing; we have no accurate data-when asked the question what proportion of those who desert reship foreign

Mr. KRAMER. That is what I was going to ask you, how many went back.

Mr. MAYPER. Mr. Hurley representing the Department of Labor and at that time the expert in the Bureau of Immigration, estimates about two-thirds of those who are discharged as deserters do reship foreign. Now, let us make one-half, make anything you please, because there is no data.

Mr. KRAMER. Have you any accurate figures such as you just stated of those who came in and those who went out again?

Mr. SCHULTE. What objection has the gentleman to this bill? Mr. MAYPER. Plenty of them, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SCHULTE. You are representing companies that are willing to cooperate with this Government in stopping smuggling, I suppose? Mr. MAYPER. Whole-heartedly.

Mr. SCHULTE. And that is the sole purpose of this bill, to stop smuggling?

Mr. MAYPER. All I have heard this morning is what is the purpose of this bill, but I have not heard a word about how the purpose will be carried out by this bill. We have talked about the people that are smuggled without paying one bit of attention to the bill, and I would like to get down to brass tacks on the bill, if I may.

Mr. SCHULTE. You certainly may.

Mr. MAYPER. The bill contains, first, three provisions. The first is that they shall be examined as to whether they are bona fide or mala fide seamen. If he has a mala fide seaman he shall be taken off a ship, sent to an immigration station, or a jail where there is no immigration station, and be permitted to appeal through the miscellaneous machinery of the Immigration Service, in order to establish whether he is admissible as an immigrant. Now, please note those words. He must take his status as an immigrant, and his appeal is based on his immigration status. I have said before, Mr. Chairman,

and I have been challenged once or twice, but I think my statement is still correct; to me, that is the most stupid position in any bit of legislation I bave ever seen, to hold out to a seaman the possibility the right, to appeal and use the machinery of the Government to establish his right to enter the United States, when you know and I know that that appeal must be automatically dismissed by the Department of Labor.

The moment you approach the alien as an immigrant and say that - he must be considered as an immigrant and is given the right to appeal as an immigrant, then he must do what? The first thing he must present is an immigration visa. You asked a question of one of the speakers as to whether seamen have visas. They are members of the crew. The crew list is visaed, so that it applies to every member of the crew. But he certainly has no immigration visa, and no one without an immigration visa can, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, ever be permitted to enter the United States, no matter how desirable that person is.

The great trouble with these first two or three sections of this bill is that it was drafted, as you very well said, in 1920 or '21 or '22, and it has been before Congress all these years and no one has learned a word about it yet insofar as bringing it up to date.

Mr. KRAMER. It was formerly known as the "Furuseth bill." that right?

Is

Mr. MAYPER. Yes. It was drafted before we passed our 1924 immigration law, and that is the trouble with it. Despite our having brought this out time and again, the same old bill is put in the same old way, without even using the slightest intelligence, if I may use the word, to adapt it to our present legal machinery, to our present

statutes.

Now, to hold out the possibility of admitting a person to cumbersome appeal machinery, trying to use the immigration force to consider records of appeal for possibly hundreds or thousands-I don't know how many it might be of aliens who are detained on board, when we know that you must exclude them, that you cannot admit them, it seems to me almost the height of stupidity.

I will not go into the details of what you are going to do with a seaman who is held for special inquiry and is given the right of appeal. Where are you going to put him? How many immigration stations are there where facilities are available to detain the person? This has been brought out over and over again. It would mean that in many of the ports of entry throughout both coasts you would have to put the seaman in jail pending his appeal. And ships come and go; they do not wait for their seamen while the Department of Labor determines whether they are persons who are admissible or not. The ship will leave in due course, the seaman will be stranded here. He will be ordered excluded, because he cannot be ordered anything else. And he has lost his job, he has lost his contact with the ship, and he is sent back as a passenger on another vessel, and he will have to start all over again.

The CHAIRMAN. You agree with the people who are for the bill?
Mr. MAYPER. Whole-heartedly.

The CHAIRMAN. We have got to in some way stop this smuggling, whether under the guise of seamen or any other form.

Mr. MAYPER. We whole-heartedly agree with you. It has gone too far. I just pointed out to the witness speaking for the bill that I could not see how we could do it effectively, as I would like to see it done. Of course, if there is any way that we could get all the steamship companies together and find some method to stop it, that might be one solution. You admit that there is plenty of smuggling and they have no right here and it is pretty hard to pick them up. Some of them we pick up. Others we cannot pick up. They settle in our

community. Some of them are bad and some of them are "badder" and the situation has gone from bad to worse.

Mr. KRAMER. Have the steamship companies taken any steps at all within the last 2 years to prohibit the smuggling in of undesirable aliens and aliens of this character?

Mr. MAYPER. Mr. Congressman, I wish I could answer that question honestly and intelligently.

Mr. KRAMER. I know, but do you know steps that they have taken? Mr. MAYPER. From my contacts with the trans-Atlantic steamship lines, I would be willing to state that the masters of our liners, the big passenger liners, certainly are not in collusion with anybody for profit of any kind to smuggle in an alien seaman. I mean it is quite absurd to even think it, that the passenger liners that are in the regular service, that come and go with the mails just like express trains, engage in that. They need the good will of the governments on both sides of the ocean. They need a permanent personnel. They cannot have a labor turn-over every trip that they come in. Even their stewards, where the weakest link in the whole situation lies, they would like to have the same men. They deal with passengers who patronize them regularly.

Mr. SCHULTE. You are talking constantly of passenger lines. Some of your companies also own freight lines?

Mr. MAYPER. Yes, sir.

Mr. SCHULTE. You also have strictly freight boats; is that right? Mr. MAYPER. Some of the lines have strictly freight boats.

Mr. SCHULTE. That is right. That is where a good deal of the smuggling is coming from; is that right?

Mr. MAYPER. I do not know.

Mr. SCHULTE. The testimony was brought before the Senate committee that Chinese were paying up to $1,100 per head. I don't know whether they came over on passenger lines or whether they came over on freight lines, but they came over and they are here.

Mr. MAYPER. I do not know how many heads paid the $1,100, but I heard the statement before. I don't know.

Mr. FоCHT. You heard it here today. You heard it here by a man who represents a great organization and an organization that you recognize, this seamen's union, don't you?

Mr. MAYPER. Right.

Mr. FOCHT. Now, he stated that you did this for profit. What do you say about it? That is in the record there.

Mr. MAYPER. I say, Mr. Congressman, that that statement has been repeated so many times that people are commencing to believe it. I mean it is the same statement over and over again. But when you ask for proof

Mr. BLACKNEY (interposing). What do you say?

I

Mr. MAYPER. I don't know anything about Chinese seamen. am sorry. I am familiar with the transatlantic passenger liners. We do not employ Chinamen on our ships, except on a few of the large ships in the laundry departments.

Mr. SCHULTE. You are strictly on the Atlantic and not on the Pacific?

Mr. MAYPER. I don't know anything about the Pacific.

Mr. SCHULTE. Don't some of the lines that you represent sail the Pacific?

Mr. MAYPER. Some of the lines that are members of the Transatlantic Passenger Conference also have ships operating in the Pacific service, but I am not speaking for them. I do not know anything about the Pacific service. I am sorry.

Mr. KRAMER. Did I understand you to say that you represented the Hamburg Line?

Mr. MAYPER. They are a member of the conference; yes.

Mr. KRAMER. And the North German Lloyd, also?

Mr. MAYPER. Yes, sir.

Mr. KRAMER. Do you know anything about their activities recently.

Mr. MAYPER. No. I have read about certain investigations made by the committee of which Congressman Dickstein was the vice chairman, but I do not know anything about it.

Mr. KRAMER. You do not know anything about that?

Mr. MAYPER. No.

Mr. KRAMER. Do you come in contact with anyone that does know anything about it?

Mr. MAYPER. Hardly. It would be the lines themselves that would have the information.

Mr. KRAMER. Do those lines carry a good many Chinese on their boats?

Mr. MAYPER. I do not think so. Mr. KRAMER. In the passenger service? Mr. MAYPER. I am certain they do not. and the Europa each of those ships has had 10 Chinamen in their laundry departments. ships that I know of.

The CHAIRMAN. That is 10 too many.

I think on the Bremen until this year, anyway, Those are the only two

Mr. MAYPER. I do not know whether they have them now, Mr. Congressmen, but they did have them a year or two ago.

Mr. KRAMER. You have nothing to do with any of the other passenger lines, such as the Grace Line?

Mr. MAYPER. No; they are South American service, not transAtlantic.

The CHAIRMAN. Come right down to the objection to this bill. I think you have given us the picture now refuting certain statements. Mr. MAYPER. On the first two or three sections I think I made my statement. The next main point in the bill is the full crew provisions. Theoretically, we are supposed to take out, under this provision of the bill, section 6, as many members of the crew as we brought in.

Now, if the purpose of the bill is what the sponsors of the bill say it is, that they want to plug up the hole for the desertion of alien. seamen, how in the heaven's name will a provision which merely says you must take out as many members of the crew as you brought in