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American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [243]

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now being enforced against the Hebrews in Russia.” Harrison also sent John Weber on a fact-finding trip to the Pale of Settlement to investigate the rise of anti-Semitism. Harrison was clearly concerned not only about the plight of the Russian Jews, but also about the effect that Jewish emigration might have on America. He wrote: “The immigration of these people to the United States—many other countries being closed to them—is largely increasing and is likely to assume proportions which may make it difficult to find homes and employment for them here and to seriously affect the labor market.” Harrison’s actual words hardly betray an anti-Semite. “The Hebrew is never a beggar; he has always kept the law—life by toil—often under severe and oppressive civil restrictions. It is also true that no race, sect, or class has more fully cared for its own than the Hebrew race. But the sudden transfer of such a multitude under conditions that tend to strip them of their small accumulations and to depress their energies and courage is neither good for them nor for us.” In the wake of the cholera and typhus outbreaks, Harrison’s 1892 Annual Message to Congress did argue that the “admission to our country and to the high privileges of its citizenship should be more restricted and more careful. We have, I think, a right and owe a duty to our own people, and especially to our working people, not only to keep out the vicious, the ignorant, the civil disturber, the pauper, and the contract laborer, but to check the too great flow of immigration now coming by further limitations.”

85 What was within: NYT, September 2, 1892.

86 Still, the brunt of: Markel, Quarantine! 120–121, 130.

86 The quarantine policy: Richardson, William E. Chandler, 417; Thomas M. Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 20; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 100; NYT, November 7, 1892.

87 Weber called Chandler’s bill: W. E. Chandler, “Shall Immigration Be Suspended?” NAR, January 1893; Richardson, William E. Chandler, 38; Weber, Autobiography, 133; Arthur Cassot, “Should We Restrict Immigration?” American Journal of Politics, September 1893.

87 Instead, Congress passed: Markel, Quarantine! 173–182; Edwin Maxey, “Federal Quarantine Laws,” Political Science Quarterly 23, no. 4 (December 1908).

87 The nation did get: William C. Van Vleck, The Administrative Control of Aliens: A Study in Administrative Law and Procedure (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971 [1932]), 8–9; Richard H. Sylvester, “The Immigration Question in Congress,” American Journal of Politics, June 1893; Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate, 20–21. An article in the Political Science Quarterly agreed, noting that although some had proposed extending “the policy adopted with reference to the Chinese, making race the test of fitness,” such a policy would be politically unpopular, cause diplomatic problems, and be “repugnant to the general theory that America is a haven for the oppressed of all mankind.” What was needed was a “less clumsy and offensive law.” Noble, “The Present State of the Immigration Question.”

88 The new manifests: Joseph H. Senner, “How We Restrict Immigration,” NAR, April 1894; Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate, 20–22.

89 These boards of special: Van Vleck, Administrative Control of Aliens, 46–53, 214; Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate, 24.

89 Health concerns: Fitzhugh Mullan, Plagues and Politics: The Story of the United States Public Health Service (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 40–48. 91 The epidemic scares: NYT, January 6, July 21, 1894; Joseph Senner, “The Immigration Question,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 1897.

92 The top three: Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 79; HW, January 8, 1898.

92 These changes were: NYT, March 6, August 29, 1892; Noble, “The Present State of the Immigration Question”; Henry Cabot

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