Henry Cabot Lodge
“The existing laws of the United States now exclude certain classes of immigrants who would be most undesirable additions to our population. The excluded classes are extremely limited and do not by any means cover all or even any considerable part of the immigrants whose presence here is undesirable or injurious. There can be no doubt that there is a very earnest desire on the part of the American people to restrict further and much more extensively than has yet been done foreign immigration to the United States.
Restricting immigration has two side, economic and social. There is no one thing which does so much to bring about a reduction of wages and to injure the American wage earner as the unlimited introduction of foreign labor through unrestricted immigration. Statistics show that the change in the character of our immigration has been accompanied by a corresponding decline in its quality.
The number of skilled persons trained to some occupation or pursuit has fallen off, while the number of those without occupation or training – who are totally unskilled – has risen to enormous proportions. This low, unskilled labor is the deadliest enemy of the American wage earner, and does more than anything toward lowering his wages and forcing down his standard of living.
Even if the current laws were enforced intelligently and thoroughly, there is no reason to suppose that they would have an adequate effect in checking the evil which they were designed to stop. It is perfectly clear, after the experience of several [decades], that the only relief which can come to the American wage earner from the competition of low-class immigrant labor must be by laws restricting the total number of immigrants.
If we have any regard for the welfare, the wages, or the standard of life of American workers, we should take immediate steps to restrict foreign immigration.
But the danger which this immigration threatens to the quality of our citizenship is far worse. That which concerns us to know and that which is more vital to us as a people is whether the quality of our citizenship is endangered by the present course and character of immigration to the United States.
When we speak of classes of immigrants, we mean their moral and intellectual characters, which represents the soul of a population and which represent the product of all their past, the inheritance of all their ancestors, and the motives of all their conduct. The population of each nation possesses an indestructible stock of ideas, traditions, sentiments, modes of thought, and unconscious inheritance from their ancestors, upon which argument [cultural exposure] has no effect. What makes a population are their mental and, above all, their moral characteristics, the slow growth and accumulation of centuries of toil and conflict. These are the qualities which determine their social efficiency as a people.
Those qualities are moral far more than intellectual, and it is on moral qualities of the American population that our history, our victories, and all our future rest. There is a limit to the capacity of any population for assimilating and elevating foreign immigrants, and when unlimited numbers of populations of lesser morality or cultural narrative pour into a nation it is running the most frightful risk that any population can run. The lowering of a great population means not only its own decline but that of human civilization.
More precious even than forms of government are the mental and moral qualities which make what we call our American Ideal. While it stands unimpaired, all is safe. When it declines all is imperiled. It is exposed to danger by changing the quality of our population and citizenship through the wholesale infusion of foreign populations whose traditions, whose thoughts and beliefs are wholly alien to ours and who never assimilate into our culture.
The danger has begun. It is large enough to warn us to act while there is yet time and while it can be done. There lies the peril at the portals of our land – the pressing tide of unrestricted immigration.
The time has certainly come, if not to stop at least to check, to sift, and restrict those immigrants. In careless strength [and Democrat demographic gerrymandering], we have kept our gates wide open to all the world. If we do not close them, we should at least place sentinels beside them to challenge those who would pass through. The gates which admit people to the United States and to citizenship in the great republic should no longer be left unguarded.” – Henry Cabot Lodge: For Immigration Restrictions, March 16, 1896; Annals Vol. 12, p. 88
