American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [126]
The Immigration Service was supposed to be self-supporting, since it received a head tax of $4 for every immigrant, paid by steamship companies but passed along in their ticket prices. During 1910, the United States welcomed over 1 million immigrants, which meant over $4.1 million for the federal government. However, the head tax receipts simply went into the federal government’s general operating fund. In fact, in 1910 Congress only appropriated a fraction of that money— $2.6 million—for the operations of the immigration service. Washington was making a profit from immigration.
The economic effects of immigration went beyond the head tax. Immigrants brought more than $46 million with them to the United States in 1910 and sent back roughly $154 million to their relatives in Europe. From 1890 to 1922, GNP increased by nearly 400 percent, as millions of immigrants lent their labor to the factories, mines, and construction crews that built industrial America and created the near unprecedented wealth upon which the American Century was built.
When the U.S. Commission on Immigration, chaired by Vermont senator William Dillingham, finally released its report in 1911, it concluded that immigration was largely an economic issue. It found an oversupply of unskilled labor that lowered the standard of living for American wage earners. Newer immigrant groups, the commission concluded, no longer came over for the idealized reasons that supposedly drove previous immigrant groups. Instead, complained economist Henry Parker Willis, who served as an adviser to the commission, many new immigrants came only “to temporarily take advantage of the greater wages paid for industrial labor in this country.”
“Voluminous.” “Encyclopedic.” “Multitudinous.” These were some of the adjectives used to describe the forty-one volumes of the final report of the Dillingham Commission. Clocking in at just under 29,000 pages, it still stands as one of the most impressive reports ever conducted by the U.S. government. How many Greek bakers came to America in 1907? Seventy-three. How many Polish Jewish boys were in the fifth grade of Chicago’s public schools? One hundred and thirtytwo. The Dillingham Commission had the answers for these questions and many, many more.
The commission’s findings were hardly the stuff of hard-core restrictionists, and its data debunked many myths about immigration. It ultimately recommended that immigrants convicted of a crime within five years of entering the country be deported and that immigrant banks and employment agencies be more strictly regulated. It also considered barring unskilled immigrants who arrived without a wife or family, as well as limiting the number of immigrants per year by “race.” However, the commission’s favored method of restriction, after almost 30,000 pages of data, three years of research, and $1 million in expenses was . . . the literacy test.
Theodore Roosevelt had been a staunch supporter of the literacy test in his younger days, but had done little to secure its passage in his seven years as president. In 1912, Roosevelt was again running for president as the leader of the newly formed Progressive Party. Despite Roosevelt’s long record on immigration, there would be no talk of literacy tests, undesirable immigrants, or any kind of immigration regulation during his campaign.
His new party’s platform contained one section on “The Immigrant” that concerned itself only with dealing with the problems immigrants faced once here. It promised to secure greater opportunities for immigrants; denounced the “fatal policy of indifference and neglect” that left immigrants prey to abuse; recommended a policy of distributing immigrants away from overcrowded urban ghettos; and called for promoting assimilation. Considering that it was Roosevelt who first brought William Williams to Ellis Island, it can only be described as pure political chutzpah when the Progressive Bulletin, the mouthpiece for Roosevelt’s new party, denounced Taft’s appointment of Williams and his “reign of terror at Ellis