"Keep on Guarding the Gates" Current Opinion, June 1923, pp. 652-4.
Looking at the question [of immigration restriction] from the point of view of the good of the greatest number, there arises a grave suspicion that America has been, or at any rate can easily be, permanently injured by too liberal and long continued an admixture of unskilled handworkers who belong to poor racial stocks and whose steady infiltration not only fills our asylums and jails, but tends to deteriorate our native stock.
All participants in this controversy seem satisfied that the immigration quota laws, admitting three per cent of nationals domiciled here according to the census of 1910, have encouraged the emigration to the United States of those races and peoples which experience has shown become true Americans. No week passes but the press of the country resounds with praise of 400 immigrants just landed from Holland who have brought a million dollars and honest, law-abiding, industrious characters, with which to go into the business of farming in our sparsely occupied West; or of 300 Scotch mechanics, skilled workers with long apprenticeships behind them, men for whom a multitude of jobs are clamoring; or of a big shipload of Scandinavians, clean, hard-working, substantial fold, headed for the forests and farms of the North Central States, where the climate sufficiently resembles their own Sweden to make them perfectly at home.
Assimilate first. Assimilate and educate and raise the standard of life. Make Americans of the ignorant, unskilled Pole, Sicilian, Hungarian, Roumanian, Bulgar - low-grade peoples from the south and east of Europe - or if it prove impossible to assimilate them, shut off the further influx of these unassimilable races.…
Whether or not there is an actual labor shortage in the United States - or a labor surplus - there can be no question that we want better immigrants, not merely more. It did not require the demonstration of Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, of the Carnegie Institute in Washington, to prove to the country at large that the older type of immigration was better than the sort that began to flood the country after 1890. After a two years' study this scientist reports that certain races which come to our shores are "socially inadequate" and have a great proneness for becoming derelicts.
The direct money cost of maintaining these unfortunates is the smallest element in the total drain upon the nation, says Dr. Laughlin:
"The still greater cost in economic and social drag, and most of all, in racial deterioration, cannot be measured in dollars. We have found that in several types of inadequacy the children of immigrants fulfilled their quota (of inadequacy) to an extent several times greater than the immigrant parents."
Questioned by Chairman Johnson, he declared that in addition to the present medical, social and economic requirements, every immigrant should be examined in regard to potential parenthood, put through a series of psychological tests, and that data on his personal and family history be required of him before his passport is viséd.
Furthermore, registration of all aliens should be required, to supply facts to serve as the basis for an enlightened policy of elimination of the unfit from among our immigrants, encouragement of the fit and selection at the source, rather than deportation of defectives after they have made a long and often bankrupting journey to our shores.