in my opinion, should be the sole test. Is a man guilty of moral turpitude if he violates the prohibition act? If so, then thousands upon thousands of citizens are thus branded. From general observations and judging from the vast and increasing number of violations, detected and undetected, the whole country seems to thumb its nose at prohibition.

American blue bloods are

It is not only aliens who are the worst offenders. just as lawbreaking. Go to any department store or jewelry shop anywhere and ascertain the many silver flasks and cocktail shakers that are sold. You will find the demand and sale most enormous. The alien does not violate the law with such implements.

Heretofore we have had percentage immigration and percentage prohibition; the two remained separate. Now they are to be joined in unholy wedlock. An alien bootlegger is about to fill an order for a bank president. En route to the banker's fashionable residence he is caught. The banker, who is as guilty as the bootlegger, is unwhipped of justice. His partner in crime, if this is his second offense, is deported. What of his wife and children who may be here? They remain behind to become public charges. Maybe the bank president will give them a few crumbs from his table.

It is notorious that at banquets and social functions where so-called 100 per cent Americans foregather in habiliments known as full dress cocktails inaugurate the festivities and champagne usually sets conversation agoing. Aliens are conspicuous by their absence at such lawbreaking parties.

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The dry" farmer in Kansas can drink his hard cider unmolested, but the newly arrived alien in New York City-let him make some wine in his home; it will go hard with him. Immediate deportation is what he faces for a second offense.

The charge that aliens are the real prohibition offenders is silly drivel. Those caught, it is true, are perhaps mostly aliens, but only because they can not slip through the toils of the law as easily as the richer native. The prohibition law is like a cobweb. It catches the little fiies, but the big ones break through.

Drinking knows no creed, race, or color; it is allencompassing. Drinking means buying and buying means selling. It is also charged that the aliens do the selling; that also is buncombe. But suppose it were true; who does the buying? Mostly citizens and natives. The one is as guilty as the other. Punishment should be equal, otherwise you undermine the alien's faith in our institutions and destroy every honest plan of so-called Americanization. Deportation of the seller and not the buyer means justice with scales unbalanced.

Is it not time to leave off harassing the alien? Should we not let them work out their own salvation with a little less drastic interference? It is claimed they do not Americanize fast enough, as though that process were an overnight affair. Americanization is an imperceptible change like the blending of dawn into day. It. is not accomplished by strait-jacket methods, by dragooning and deportation. By such methods you make the alien timid and afraid and suspicious of you. Every time you pass this sort of law, in equal degree you rob the alien of his confidence in you.

Some one has stated that the difficulty of Americanization is due to a lack of model. After whom should the alien pattern himself? Shall he fashion his life after Members of the House, the Senate, or the Immigration Committee, I wonder?

Mark Twain said that "there is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it ill behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us."

Thomas Huxley (Evolution and Ethics, p. 39) says: "I sometimes wonder whether people who talk so freely about extirpating the 'unfit' ever dispassionately considered their own history. Surely one must be very fit,' indeed, not to know of an occasion, or perhaps two, in one's life when it would have been only too easy to qualify for a place among the 'unfit.'". Let us therefore, pause and think well before we attempt to extirpate by deportation the so-called "unfit"; that is, violators of the Volstead Act. I am sure that many of us applying that test would find ourselves in the category of "unfit."

We were told that when the immigration law of 1924 was passed that that law would totally solve the immigration problem. The print of the statute is not yet dry and now we are told that further restrictions are necessary, and the alien is to be deported for violation of a law, which at best is unenforceable because it lacks the respect of the majority of people, citizens and noncitizens alike, throughout the land.

X

DEPORTATION OF ALIEN SEAMEN

HEARINGS

BEFORE

THE COMMITTEE ON

IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

SIXTY-EIGHTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

DEPORTATION OF ALIEN SEAMEN

COMMITTEE ON IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION,

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
Monday, January 26, 1925.

The committee this day met, Hon. William N. Vaile presiding. Mr. VAILE. This meeting was called for the purpose of consider ing proposed amendments to the pending deportation act, H. R. 11796, introduced by Mr. Holaday, proposed by Mr. Raker, concerning alien seamen. There are present this morning proponents and opponents of these proposed amendments. I will now ask Mr. Raker to make a short statement so as to get the matter before the committee, and then, I believe, we will hear the opponents of the measure in order to save time. We are already somewhat familiar with the views of the proponents.

Mr. RAKER. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, the proposed amendments were originally provided in an amendment proposed by Mr. Raker to committee print No. 3 of the deportation act by inserting on page 3, line 14:

(d) An alien employed on board any vessel arriving at a port of the United States who is certified by a medical officer of the United States Public Health Service to be afflicted with idiocy, imbecility, insanity, epilepsy, tuberculosis in any form, or a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease, shall be placed in a hospital designated by the immigration official in charge at the port of arrival for treatment at the expense of the owner, agent, or consignee of the vessel without deduction from his wages.

Upon certification by such a medical officer that the alien has been cured, he shall be permitted to enter the United States temporarily under the same conditions and limitations as if the vessel had arrived on the day of his discharge from the hospital; but, if it appears to the satisfaction of the immigration officer in charge at the port of arrival that it will not be possible within a reasonable time to effect a cure, such alien shall be deported, subject to the same conditions and limitations as in the case of any other alien subject to exclusion and deportation by reason of being afflicted with such disability or disease.

The committee adopted all of the provisions of that amendment by rewriting and making it applicable to the bill, except the last two provisions, which are designated as "h" and "i" so they came in committee print No. 3 to be known as "f" and " g. They will be known hereafter in the presentation as f" and " g " of committee print No. 3, found on pages 5 and 6; "f" reads as follows:

All vessels entering ports of the United States manned with crews, the majority of which, exclusive of licensed officers, have been engaged and taken! on at foreign ports, shall, when departing from the United States ports, carry a crew of at least equal number, and any such vessel which fails to comply with this requirement shall be refused clearance: Provided, however, That such vessel shall not be required when departing to carry in the crew any person to fill the place made vacant by the death or hospitalization of any member of the incoming crew.

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