Resolved, That we urge upon Congress the retention of section 42 of the said act, and the adoption of such further restrictions as will prevent this country from being made the dumping ground of hordes of foreign immigrants for commercial purposes and to the injury of American labor. Adopted by the National General Assembly of Knights of Labor, November 9, 1908. JOHN W. HAYES, General Master Workman. I. D. CHAMBERLAIN, General Secretary-Treasurer. Whereas the Republican party platforms of 1896 and 1900 contained planks favoring the further restriction of immigration; and Whereas the representatives of that party have been in complete control of the Congress of the United States for the past ten years and have failed to carry out these pledges: Therefore be it Resolved by the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen in seventh biennial convention assembled, at Buffalo, N. Y., this 24th day of May, 1905, That we criticise the representatives of the Republican party in Congress for their failure to make good their pledges with regard to legislation for a further restriction of immigration. RESOLUTION OF P. O. S. OF A. DISTRICT CONVENTION, HELD AT WOOLRICH, PA., NOVEMBER 27, 1909. Resolved, That we urge the enactment of an immigration law that will properly restrict immigration with a per capita tax and examination that will require physical, mental, and other attainments, and a fine of $500 on transportation companies that bring over improper persons, when their unfitness was clearly discernible by the agents of the companies transporting them. LEGISLATIVE RESOLUTION UNANIMOUSLY ADOPTED BY THE AMERICAN PURITY FEDER ATION, AT BURLINGTON, IOWA, OCTOBER 21, 1909. Whereas the Immigration Commission reports thousands of undeniably undesirable persons being brought to this country every year by the foreign steamships for the profit in the traffic: Therefore be it Resolved, That the American Purity Federation urges the Congress of the United States to increase the steamship head tax, to debar undesirable aliens by the illiteracy test, a money requirement and a character certificate, to require young girls to be accompanied by or to come to a near relative, and to fine the steamships $300 for bringing an undesirable alien, when the undesirability could have been ascertained before embarkation; and be it still further Resolved, That this federation heartily indorses the efficient enforcement of the law inaugurated by Commissioner William Williams at Ellis Island. The Republican platform of 1896 said: "For the protection of the equality of American citizenship and of wages of our working men against the fatal competition of low-priced labor, we demand that the immigration laws be thoroughly enforced and so extended as to exclude from entrance to the United States those who can neither read nor write." The Republican platform of 1900 said: "In the further interests of American workmen we favor a more effective restriction of the immigration of cheap labor from foreign lands." President McKinley, in his inaugural address, March 4, 1897, said: "Illiteracy must be banished from the land if we shall attain that destiny as the foremost nation of the world," etc. President Roosevelt said in his message to Congress December 3, 1901: "The second object of a proper immigration law ought to be to secure by a careful and not merely perfunctory educational test some intelligent capacity to appreciate American institutions and act sanely as American citizens. Both the educational and economic test in a wise immigration law should be designed to protect and elevate the great body politic and social." Thereupon the committee adjourned. |