American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [103]
AMERICANS TRIED TO BALANCE concerns about newcomers with the country’s traditional role in welcoming immigrants. Allan McLaughlin, a doctor with the U.S. Marine-Hospital Service, was one of those who framed the immigration debate within the boundaries of the political center. The complete exclusion of immigrants, he argued, was “illogical, bigoted, and un-American,” while a completely open door was “an act of lunacy” and a “crime against the body politic.”
Instead, McLaughlin called for the strict enforcement of the present law. That was also Frank Sargent’s position. He made clear he had no desire to see a closed-door policy and believed that America had need of “a high class of aliens who are healthy and will become selfsupporting.” The real question was how to divide desirable immigrants from the undesirable.
“The advocates of absolutely unrestricted immigration are too few to be taken into account,” noted The Outlook. Prescott Hall could only count about a handful of people who believed in a completely opendoor policy, the most prominent being William Lloyd Garrison Jr., the son of the famed abolitionist. When pro-immigration lawyer Max Kohler debated restrictionist academic Jeremiah Jenks in 1911, he applauded the fact that twenty-four thousand immigrants had been rejected in the previous year, thereby proving the effectiveness of the law. He also wanted no restrictions on “healthy, willing, industrious immigrants, whom this country needs as much as they need this country.”
With remarkable flexibility, Theodore Roosevelt found himself operating within that debate. When immigration supporters complained about the restrictionist leanings of William Williams, Roosevelt named an ethnically diverse panel to investigate him. Later, when restrictionists complained about the lax enforcement of laws under Robert Watchorn, the president named an IRL member to investigate. Only Roosevelt could have pulled it off.
For all of his early bluster about immigration, Roosevelt was surprisingly mute about the issue in his final years in the White House. The young patrician who had once supported the literacy test and corrected a New York newspaper for calling him an opponent of restriction, was replaced by an older, more politically savvy man. Roosevelt began his presidency bemoaning the deficiencies of immigration law and calling for more categories of exclusion. In his last Annual Message to Congress, Roosevelt never once mentioned immigration.
Dr. Victor Safford struck at the heart of Roosevelt’s conflicted mind. A close friend of Edward McSweeney, the doctor believed that Roosevelt had discovered “that while it was good politics to have stringent immigration laws to point to, it was poor practical politics to enforce them impartially.”
This was how Roosevelt straddled the immigration question. In his openness to ethnic and religious groups, he satisfied immigrants and their defenders. In his rhetorical concerns about the quality of new immigrants, he satisfied restrictionists, but at the end of the day all of his talk about restriction was little more than bluster. On immigration, the straight-talking reformer blurs into an amorphous, but highly successful politician.
It was the kind of ideological flexibility and pragmatism that would have pleased George Washington Plunkitt.
Chapter 10
Likely to Become a Public Charge
In many important respects, indeed, the foreign immigrant is the very anti-type of the pauper. . . . Their very presence here shows the desire for bettering one’s condition and the energy to set about it that is so characteristically a lack in the true pauper.
—Kate Holladay Claghorn, 1904
It is therefore high time that aliens of poor physique should be debarred from our shores. When we raise horse or cattle or dogs or sheep, we select good, strong healthy stock. If we have any concern for the physical development of our race, we should certainly