Francis A. Walker

Francis A. Walker was an economics professor at Yale University, the president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and president of the American Statistical Association and the American Economic Association in the late nineteenth century. In the following viewpoint, Walker contends that although immigrants who arrived in the United States during the first half of the 1800s benefited the young country, immigrants who arrived during the second half of the nineteenth century have become a burden. America no longer has the open land for immigrants to settle. The prices for agricultural goods have fallen, thereby reducing the farmers’ ability to pay for unskilled immigrant labor to sow and harvest the crops. Unemployment has also become a serious problem across the country, he asserts, for skilled and unskilled workers alike. But perhaps the biggest...