Unsatisfactory Immigration Laws
Read more articles on Politics and Scattered Thoughts and Law and Legal Issues.November 27, 2007
Posted by Tiffany Aller
November 27, 2007
Posted by Tiffany Aller
174 Views
Hi, everyone!
As a follow-up to some of my previous posts on immigration in the United States here at ArsCompendium, I would like to share the following portion of a famous political speech. Please read through the speech instead of succumbing to the urge to skip to the bottom, where I’ve posted the author/bibliographic information.
“Our present immigration laws are unsatisfactory. We need every honest and efficient immigrant fitted to become an American citizen, every immigrant who comes here to stay, who brings here a strong body, a stout heart, a good head, and a resolute purpose to do his duty well in every way and to bring up his children as law-abiding and God-fearing members of the community. But there should be a comprehensive law enacted with the object of working a threefold improvement over our present system. First, we should aim to exclude absolutely not only all persons who are known to be believers in anarchistic principles or members of anarchistic societies, but also all persons who are of a low moral tendency or of unsavory reputation. This means that we should require a more thorough system of inspection abroad and a more rigid system of examination at our immigration ports, the former being especially necessary.
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. This would not keep out all anarchists, for many of them belong to the intelligent criminal class. But it would do what is also in point, that is, tend to decrease the sum of ignorance, so potent in producing the envy, suspicion, malignant passion, and hatred of order, out of which anarchistic sentiment inevitably springs. Finally, all persons should be excluded who are below a certain standard of economic fitness to enter our industrial field as competitors with American labor. There should be proper proof of personal capacity to earn an American living and enough money to insure a decent start under American conditions. This would stop the influx of cheap labor, and the resulting competition which gives rise to so much of bitterness in American industrial life; and it would dry up the springs of the pestilential social conditions in our great cities, where anarchistic organizations have their greatest possibility of growth.
Both the educational and economic tests in a wise immigration law should be designed to protect and elevate the general body politic and social. A very close supervision should be exercised over the steamship companies which mainly bring over the immigrants, and they should be held to a strict accountability for any infraction of the law.”
I would like to state that I think that the author of this speech is a very wise and prescient man. And no, I am not of an anti-immigrant mind; rather, I’m against:
Who is this orator, you ask?
None other than President Theodore Roosevelt, in his “First Annual Message” (a precursor to the State of the Union address) given on December 3rd, 1901. Read the speech in its entirety at “>The American Presidency Project.
(cross-posted to TiffanyTakesOn.Blogspot.com and TiffanyAller.Blogspot.com)
Yes, dear ArsC and ArticleAuthor friends, I am alive…still dealing with the drama that tends to be my life (newest updates posted at my blog over at Blogspot) but still alive. And hoping to write a great deal more in the near future, if that elusive day of calm ever does come.
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