Replies

They complain that they have made homes and families here and to disrupt that would be a sin!

I agree with you, this is not our problem. Unless they were totally without family ties in their home country, they voluntarily broke family ties to come here. Sending them back would actually be restoring long term family ties if that were our our concern.

Although most immigrants do benefit from coming to this country, that should never be our overriding objective. Immigration should be for the benefit of the country, not for the benefit of the immigrant. We are no longer an under populated frontier country with a need for a large number of immigrants.

Therodore Roosevelt on immigration.
TS—ASSIMILATION OF. Where immigrants, or the sons of immigrants, do not heartily and in good faith throw in their lot with us, but cling to the speech, the customs, the ways of life, and the habits of thought of the Old World which they have left, they thereby harm both themselves and us. If they remain alien elements, unassimilated, and with interests separate from ours, they are mere obstructions to the current of our national life, and, moreover, can get no good from it themselves. In fact, though we ourselves also suffer from their perversity, it is they who really suffer most. It is an immense benefit to the European immigrant to change him into an American citizen. To bear the name of American is to bear the most honorable of titles; and whoever does not so believe has no business to bear the name at all, and, if he comes from Europe, the sooner he goes back there the better.Besides, the man who does not become Americanized nevertheless fails to remain a European, and becomes nothing at all. The immigrant cannot possibly remain what he was, or continue to be a member of the Old World society. If he tries to retain his old language, in few generations it becomes a barbarous jargon; if he tries to retain his old customs and ways of life, in a few generations he becomes an uncouth boor. He has cut himself off from the Old World, and cannot retain his connection with it; and if he wishes ever to amount to anything he must throw himself heart and soul, and without reservation, into the new life to which he has come. We cannot afford to permit squalid over crowding or the kind of living system which makes impossible the decencies and necessities of life. We cannot afford the low wage rates and the merely seasonal industries which mean the sacrifice of both individual and family life and morals to the industrial machinery. MMIGRANTS—OBLIGATION OF. We should provide for every immigrant, by day-schools for the young and night-schools for the adult, the chance to learn English; and if after, say, five years he has notlearned English, he should be sent back to the land from whence he came. . . . We should demand fullperformance of duty from them. Every man of themshould be required to serve a year with the colors, like our native-born youth, before being allowed to vote.Nothing would do more to make him feel an American among his fellow Americans, on an equality of rights,of duties, and of loyalty to the flag.