The great bulk of the present immigration proceeds from Italy, Austria, and Russia, and, furthermore, from some of the most undesirable sources of population of those countries. No one would object to the better class of Italians, Austrians, and Russians coming here in large numbers; but the point is that such better element does not come, and, furthermore, that immigration from such countries as Germany and the British Isles has fallen to a very low figure.Â
The great bulk of the present immigration settles in four of the Eastern States and most of it in the large cities of those States. Notwithstanding the well-known demand for agricultural labor in the Western States, thousands of foreigners keep pouring into our cities, declining to go where they might be wanted because they are neither physically or mentally fitted to go to these undeveloped parts of our country and do as did the early settlers from northern Europe.Â
...Past immigration was good because most of it was of the right kind and went to the right place. Capital cannot, and it would not if it could, employ much of the alien material that annually passes through Ellis Island, and thereafter chooses to settle in the crowded tenement districts of New York.Â
...A strict execution of our present laws makes it possible to keep out what may be termed the worst element of Europe (paupers, diseased persons, and those likely to become public charges), and to this extent these laws are most valuable….But these laws do not reach a large body of immigrants, who, while not of this class, are yet generally undesirable, because unintelligent, of low vitality, of poor physique, able to perform only the cheapest kind of manual labor, desirous of locating almost exclusively in the cities, by their competition tending to reduce the standard of living of the American wageworker, and unfitted mentally or morally for good citizenship.
THE dago shovelman sits by the railroad track
Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna.
A train whirls by, and men and women at tables
Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils,
Eat steaks running with brown gravy,
Strawberries and cream, eclaires and coffee.
The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna,
Washes it down with a dipper from the water-boy,
And goes back to the second half of a ten-hour day's work
Keeping the road-bed so the roses and jonquils
Shake hardly at all in the cut glass vases
Standing slender on the tables in the dining cars.
Immigrant families, by necessity, had to create a composite income based on the wages of the father and older children, income from boarders, and the earnings of women from work done at home. Louise More, in her study of wage-earning budgets in New York City in 1909, made a crucial observation about the family economy of immigrant and working-class families:
The number of families entirely dependent on the earnings of one person is small when compared with the number whose incomes include the earnings of the husband, wife, several children, some boarders. . . gifts from relatives, aid from charitable societies, insurance money in the case of death—several or all of these resources may enter into the total resources of that family in a year. Perhaps this income should more accurately be called the household income, for it represents the amount which comes into the family purse and of which the mother usually has the disbursement?
In most working-class families….the older children were required to [turn over their wages]. It was the “general custom for all boys and girls to bring their pay envelopes unopened and (the mother) had the entire disbursement of their wages, giving them 25 cents to one dollar a week spending money according to the prosperity of the family.†The unopened pay envelope was a sign of responsibility and respect for the work of the mother.
Amalia Morandi, an Italian garment worker, restated this pervasive theme: "I gave my pay envelope to my mother. . . I wouldn't dare open it up. . . I'd give it to my mother because I knew that she worked hard for us and I thought this was her compensation."
Mollie Linker articulated another aspect of this relationship: "I gave it all to my mother. It was the respect to bring and give your mother the money."
In the Old World, daughters were expected to support the work of their mothers in the home. But in America, to do this they had to leave the house and go into the factories. Yet mothers expected their daughters to respect the economic priorities of the household, and the sealed pay envelope was a new form of an old responsibility.
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Having money to spend on oneself was closely connected to breaking out of the family circle. Amalia Morandi, and Italian garment worker, was a “good girlâ€â€”she always brought her pay home and stayed close to her mother. But her sister was different:
She used to open the envelope and take a few dollars if she needed it. They (her sister and friend) would have costume balls and she would come home at 2 o’clock—that was terrible, especially for the Italian people. That was awful, when a woman, a girl at her age, which was 18 or 19, when they came home at 12 o’clock the neighbors would gossip, would say look at that girl coming home by herself. My mother would talk to her, it did no good. It went in one ear and out the other. And then one day she came home and she says to my mother, she wanted to give her board. And my mother says whatdaya mean by board—my mother knew what she meant. She says, oh I give you so much a week, and then the rest is for me. So my mother says alright, go ahead, do what you please.
* * * * *
This transformation of traditional values created particular problems for women. Caught between the desires of their children and devotion (and obedience) to their husbands, called on to reinforce the patriarchal wishes of their husbands, the women found themselves in the middle of emotionally explosive family situations. In addition, traditions of patriarchy demanded that female children be subordinate and inferior, and immigrant daughters were allowed little leeway in their desire for independence, schooling, and sexual freedom. Since these demands frequently also challenged the mother’s standards of proper female behavior, she had to steer a course between the authority and discipline of her husband, the wishes of her daughters, and her own sensibilities.
Since the foundations of the American commonwealth were laid in colonial times over 300 years ago, vigorous complaint and more or less bitter persecution have been aimed at newcomers to our shores. Also the congressional reports of about 1840 are full of abuse of English, Scotch, Welsh immigrants as paupers, criminals, and so forth.
Old citizens in Detroit of Irish and German descent have told me of the fierce tirades and propaganda directed against the great waves of Irish and Germans who came over from 1840 on for a few decades to escape civil, racial, and religious persecution in their native lands.
The “Know-Nothings,†lineal ancestors of the Ku-Klux Klan, bitterly denounced the Irish and Germans as mongrels, scum, foreigners, and a menace to our institutions, much as other great branches of the Caucasian race of glorious history and antecedents are berated to-day. All are riff-raff, unassimilables, “foreign devils,†swine not fit to associate with the great chosen people—a form of national pride and hallucination as old as the division of races and nations.
But to-day it is the Italians, Spanish, Poles, Jews, Greeks, Russians, Balkanians, and so forth, who are the racial lepers. And it is eminently fitting and proper that so many Members of this House with names as Irish as Paddy’s pig, are taking the floor these days to attack once more as their kind has attacked for seven bloody centuries the fearful fallacy of chosen peoples and inferior peoples. The fearful fallacy is that one is made to rule and the other to be abominated. . . .
 In this bill we find racial discrimination at its worst—a deliberate attempt to go back 84 years in our census taken every 10 years so that a blow may be aimed at peoples of eastern and southern Europe, particularly at our recent allies in the Great War—Poland and Italy.
Jews In Detroit Are Good Citizens
Of course the Jews too are aimed at, not directly, because they have no country in Europe they can call their own, but they are set down among the inferior peoples. Much of the animus against Poland and Russia, old and new, with the countries that have arisen from the ruins of the dead Czar’s European dominions, is directed against the Jew.
We have many American citizens of Jewish descent in Detroit, tens of thousands of them—active in every profession and every walk of life. They are particularly active in charities and merchandising. One of our greatest judges, if not the greatest, is a Jew. Surely no fair-minded person with a knowledge of the facts can say the Jews or Detroit are a menace to the city’s or the country’s well-being. . . .
Forty or fifty thousand Italian-Americans live in my district in Detroit. They are found in all walks and classes of life—common hard labor, the trades, business, law, medicine, dentistry, art, literature, banking, and so forth.
They rapidly become Americanized, build homes, and make themselves into good citizens. They brought hardihood, physique, hope, and good humor with them from their outdoor life in Sunny Italy, and they bear up under the terrific strain of life and work in busy Detroit.
One finds them by thousands digging streets, sewers, and building foundations, and in the automobile and iron and steel fabric factories of various sorts. They do the hard work that the native-born American dislikes. Rapidly they rise in life and join the so-called middle and upper classes. . . .
 The Italian-Americans of Detroit played a glorious part in the Great War. They showed themselves as patriotic as the native born in offering the supreme sacrifice.
In all, I am informed, over 300,000 Italian-speaking soldiers enlisted in the American Army, almost 10 percent of our total fighting force. Italians formed about 4 percent of the population of the United States and they formed 10 percent of the American military force. Their casualties were 12 percent. . . .
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Detroit Satisfied With The Poles
I wish to take the liberty of informing the House that from my personal knowledge and observation of tens of thousands of Polish-Americans living in my district in Detroit that their Americanism and patriotism are unassailable from any fair or just standpoint.
The Polish-Americans are as industrious and as frugal and as loyal to our institutions as any class of people who have come to the shores of this country in the past 300 years. They are essentially home builders, and they have come to this country to stay. They learn the English language as quickly as possible, and take pride in the rapidity with which they become assimilated and adopt our institutions.
Figures available to all show that in Detroit in the World War the proportion of American volunteers of Polish blood was greater than the proportion of Americans of any other racial descent. . . .
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Every American Has Foreign Ancestors
 The foreign born of my district writhe under the charge of being called “hyphenates.†The people of my own family were all hyphenates—English-Americans, German-Americans, Irish-Americans. They began to come in the first ship or so after the Mayflower. But they did not come too early to miss the charge of anti-Americanism. Roger Williams was driven out of the Puritan colony of Salem to die in the wilderness because he objected “violently†to blue laws and the burning or hanging of rheumatic old women on witchcraft charges. He would not “assimilate†and was “a grave menace to American Institutions and democratic government.â€
My family put 11 men and boys into the Revolutionary War, and I am sure they and their women and children did not suffer so bitterly and sacrifice until it hurt to establish the autocracy of bigotry and intolerance which exists in many quarters to-day in this country. Some of these men and boys shed their blood and left their bodies to rot on American battle fields. To me real Americanism and the American flag are the product of the blood of men and of the tears of women and children of a different type than the rampant “Americanizers†of to-day.
My mother’s father fought in the Civil War, leaving his six small children in Detroit when he marched away to the southern battle fields to fight against racial distinctions and protect his country.
. . . I learned more of the spirit of American history at my mother’s knee than I ever learned in my four years of high school study of American history and in my five and a half years of study at the great University of Michigan.
All that study convinces me that the racial discriminations of this bill are un-American. . . .
. . . Then I would be true to the principles for which my forefathers fought and true to the real spirit of the magnificent United States of to-day. I can not stultify myself by voting for the present bill and overwhelm my country with racial hatreds and racial lines and antagonisms drawn even tighter than they are to-day. [Applause.]
Thousands of immigrants of poor physique are recorded as such by the medical inspectors at Ellis Island, and a card to this effect sent to the registry clerk or immigrant inspector with the immigrant, but this mere note of physical defect carries little significance under the present law, and the vast majority of them are admitted by the immigration authorities, because it does not appear that the physical defect noted will make the immigrant a public charge. . . .Â
The real danger to the public health from immigration lies in that class of immigrants whose physique is much below American standards, whose employment is in the sweat-shop, and whose residence is the East Side tenement in New York City. The Mediterranean races, Syrians, Greeks and southern Italians, who are unused to a cold climate, and who often have insufficient clothing, also establish in their crowded quarters splendid [centers] for the dissemination of disease. The Hebrews, Syrians, Greeks, and southern Italians invariably crowd the most insanitary quarters of the great centers of population. And the various filthy and infected, though perhaps picturesque, foreign quarters constitute to-day the greatest existing menace to the public health.