Aliens or Americans?

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, And through them presses a wild, motley throng-- Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes, Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Celt, and Slav, Flying the old world's poverty and scorn; These bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws. In street and alley what strange tongues are these, Accents of menace alien to our air, Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!

O Liberty, White Goddess! is it well To leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast Fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of fate, Lift the downtrodden, but with the hand of steel Stay those who to thy sacred portals come To waste the gifts of freedom. Have a care Lest from thy brow the clustered stars be torn And trampled in the dust. For so of old The thronging Goth and Vandal trampled Rome. And where the temples of the Caesars stood The lean wolf unmolested made her lair.

--Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

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TO ONE WHO CHERISHES AMERICAN IDEALS, WHO HAS INCULCATED LOVE OF COUNTRY IN HER CHILDREN, AND SOUGHT TO INSPIRE IT IN ALL--MY WIFE

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

Preface 9

Introduction, by Josiah Strong 13

I. The Alien Advance 15

II. Alien Admission and Restriction 51

III. Problems of Legislation and Distribution 87

IV. The New Immigration 121

V. The Eastern Invasion 157

VI. The Foreign Peril of the City 193

VII. Immigration and the National Character 231

VIII. The Home Mission Opportunity 267

APPENDIXES

A. Tables of Immigrants Admitted and Debarred 305

B. The Immigration Laws 309

C. Work of Leading Denominations for the Foreign Population 314

D. Bibliography 321

ILLUSTRATIONS

Coming Americans Frontispiece

The Inflowing Tide 18

Ellis Island Immigration Station 34

Receiving Room at Ellis Island 59

Detained for Special Examination 74

An Appeal from the Special Inquiry Board to Commissioner Watchorn 94

The Landing at the Battery in New York 102

A German Family 128

Italian and Swiss Girls 144

A Group of Twelve Different Nationalities 166

Three Types of Immigrants 180

A Group of Immigrants Just Arrived at Ellis Island 198

An Italian Family Crowded in a New York Tenement 210

Four Nationalities 236

Portuguese and Spanish Children 256

An Italian Sunday School in New England 283

Sketch Maps and Charts

Immigration at the Port of New York for 1906 32

Immigrant Distribution by States for 1905 106

Immigrant Distribution by Races: Scandinavian 108 Canadian and British 109 Irish 114 Germanic 115 French and Iberic 146 Slavic 171

Changes in Sources of Immigration Causing Increase of Illiteracy 125

Countries from which the Slavs Come 161

Distribution of Slavs in the United States 163

Wave of Immigration for Eighty-seven Years 308

Colored Chart of Races of Immigrants for 1905 End

PREFACE

It is not a question as to whether the aliens will come. They have come, millions of them; they are now coming, at the rate of a million a year. They come from every clime, country, and condition; and they are of every sort: good, bad, and indifferent, literate and illiterate, virtuous and vicious, ambitious and aimless, strong and weak, skilled and unskilled, married and single, old and young, Christian and infidel, Jew and pagan. They form to-day the raw material of the American citizenship of to-morrow. What they will be and do then depends largely upon what our American Protestant Christianity does for them now.