III.  The control of immigration?  Another contemporary question is whether discrimination may rightfully be exercised in the admission of aliens to residence in our country.  Abstract considerations would suggest the desirability of equal treatment to all comers.  But certain practical effects must be considered.

(1) The admission of hordes of ill-educated and ill-disciplined immigrants from countries lower in the scale of progress than our own is a serious menace to the ideals and standards of living that we have at great cost evolved.  Our own morals and manners are not firmly enough fixed to be sure of withstanding the downward pull of more primitive conceptions and habits.  Their willingness to work for small wages lowers the remuneration of Americans; their contentment with wretched living conditions blocks our attempts to raise the general standard of life.  Many of them are unappreciative of American ideals, easily misled by corrupt politicians, and thus a deadweight against political and social advance.  We may, perhaps, disregard the poverty of the immigrant, if he is in good health and able to work; we may even disregard his lack of education, if he is mentally sound and reasonably intelligent.  But if some practicable method could be devised to lessen radically the incoming stream of those who are low in their standards of living, we should be spared the social indigestion from which we now suffer.  One feasible suggestion is to limit the number of immigrants annually admitted from each country to a certain small percentage of the number of natives of that country already resident here.  In that way the total number could be restricted without offense to any nation, and those peoples most easily assimilated would be admitted in greatest proportions.  In addition, naturalization should be permitted only after a number of years, during which the immigrant would be in danger of deportation for proved criminality, vicious indulgence, intemperance, shiftlessness, troublesome agitation, and other undesirable traits.

(2) The admission of peoples of very alien race to residence side by side with our own inevitably gives rise to friction and unpleasantness.  However irrational it may be, there are instinctive antipathies and distrusts between the different racial stocks.  The importation of the Negroes brought us a terrible racial problem, one for which there seems no satisfactory solution.  White men as a class dislike living side by side with them, and fiercely resent intermarriage, which might ultimately merge the races, as it seems to be doing in South America.  A general feeling of brotherhood and social democracy is greatly retarded by this racial chasm.[Footnote:  Cf.  J. M. Mecklin, Democracy and Race Friction.] It is earnestly to be hoped that Chinese, Japanese, Hindus, and other non-European races may not be admitted to residence here in any great degree; similar antipathies and resentments would be added to our existing discords.