The united American : a magazine of good citizenchip., June 01, 1926, Page 4, Image 4

Page Four
THE UNITED AMERICAN
June 1926
The Ultimate Method by Which the Immigrant May be Assimilated
By H. J. LANGOE
T F WE COULD establish practical farming schools
1
out in the open country for the immigrants who
amble through our gates, schools where they could
learn the practical side of farming in this new land,
as well as receive instructions in the language, the
history and the workings of our government, a lesser
number of them would be joining the bootlegging fra­
ternity and the gun-toting tribes that are getting to
be a real menace to society, not alone in the big
metropolitan centers in our country, but even out in
the smaller American communities where clean
citizens frequently are taking their lives in their
hands by opposing the law-violators and the denizens
of the underworld who have moved in with their
stock of degradation and shame.
Better it would be to maintain such schools out
there where there is negligable contamination, than
to maintain jails and penitentiaries, with jailers and
guards, instead of agricultural instructors and citizen­
ship teachers.
No matter how much emphasis is placed upon our
present laws restricting and regulating the immigra­
tion movement, it is undeniably clear that our states­
men injected too much popular “poison” and pre­
judice into these laws to meet the situation ade­
quately. Popular fancies built around unsound theo­
ries never survived for long, and the history of
statutes based upon such theories are in the same
category. So, after all, the problem of making Amer­
ica safe for the future does not hinge upon the elimi­
nation of certain types of people whose race and re­
ligion does not agree with those who- raised the issue.
No race or religion is more patent to citizenship than
any other. Standards in American citizenship will
be much below par as long as the implication is plain
that such distinctions have been written into the
American laws.
If we organized for practical training and educa­
tion of our immigrants along the lines followed in
England, where agricultural training schools are
now being conducted in several localities, to fit speci­
ally selected young men for scientific farming in the
Dominions of Australia and Canada, much of our
troubles with immigrant assimilation in the United
States would easily be overcome.
Emigration
to these colonies of healthy young Englishmen,
will be stimulated in proportion to their training and
fitness, so that all possible waste and misfit immigra­
tion may be eliminated.
England is setting a very good example for Amer­
ica to follow.
Would-be emigrants with a leaning for the cities
and a desire to get by without working, could easily
be eliminated, under some form of restriction, in
favor of the sturdy young men from the rural sec­
tions of the old -world-
With some native knowledge and interest for the
cultivation of the soil the latter type of immigrants
could be given ample preference by the American visa
authorities in the foreign ports of. embarkation and a
measure of assurance that the individual immigrant
would become a useful and constructive unit in the
American scheme of life could thereby be obtained.
The problem of adjusting the immigrant to Ameri­
can life, which is the first requisite to his assimila­
tion, could be accomplished in a decade or two if we
organized practical rural life training schools away
from the narrow guaged alleys of the city, out in the
open spaces where the immigrant could earn his live­
lihood and obtain the education necessary to render
him an intelligent workable unit, mentally knit into
the woof and warp of America. From everywhere
comes the cry of despair because of the movement
away from the farm and into the bright lights of the
cities by those who have made enough off the land
to be assured of a full measure of the artificial “en­
joyments” that the big cities hold. Thousands 'of
large farms with rich soil and plenty of adjacent un­
tilled land stand idle today, throughout the country,
because the owners have found rural life no longer
to their liking. Here and there a tenant works a few
acres but in most cases these farms and broad acres
are gradually slipping back into complete idleness.
Out on these farms the immigrant’s native skill and
energy could be put to’its best advantage and di­
verted into the main channel of American industrial
energy before it goes to waste.
No matter from what part of Europe the immi­
grant might come, no matter his most recent an­
cestral or racial classification or his religious prefer­
ences, no matter though he had been denied the ad­
vantages of a public education in his native land, if
America organized for extensive rural life training,
beyond the confines of the cramped city streets, we
should in no time recive the full benefit from the im­
migrant sources and see our idle land bloom anew,
yielding as they never yielded before. But those
who are “too good” to till the soil or who have robbed
the soil of its primitive wealth should, beforehand, by
adequate and just means be made to relinquish their
title and interest which on the face of it is purely a
speculative one.
These suggestions may at first seem drastic but
old and bad habits and well established selfishness, of
which we have plenty in America, must give way if
we are to stem the tide of bitterness that has every
potential ingredient in favor of the socialized state,
as an alternative to the prevailing wrongs.
The man who converts the removable natural re­
sources of the land, to which he holds title, to his profit
and leaves the land a barren waste, should be willing
to convey title to those who desire to put sinew and
brawn to work to restore the land to productivity,
in one form or another, if he himself is not at work
restoring the land to some form of usefulness in the
interest of the common good.
If justice and right is permitted to take its course
in America the inviolability of property rights will
never depreciate in the public mind and the genius
of the individual, will always be at a premium. Pri­
vate initiative will likewise be welcome everywhere
if it asks for no more than what is right and fair and
(Continued on Page Eleven)