LET THEM COME IN!
Meyer, Ernest L.
Let Them Come In! By ERNEST L. MEYER EDITOR'S NOTE: Two articles discussing America's immigration policies, both from regular contributors to The Progressive, arrived the same day. One is the...
...Kirtley F. Mather, famous Harvard geologist, author of a forthcoming book, Enough and to Spare, who said in an interview: "The earth's resources are now so bountiful that there are enough goods to provide for the comfgrt^aivi" efficiency of every human being...
...WE ARE strangely and fearfully constructed...
...They should listen to an expert like Prof...
...Four out of five of them agreed that immigration must be stopped and refugees deported because "the more immigrants we receive and the more refugees we harbor after the war, the more of our citizens will be unemployed," and because "America is for Americans," and because "millions would migrate here if we allowed them to come and if we permit this, many of our own citizens would go hungry in the competition for jobs...
...Only recently the na-tional convention of the American Legion passed a resolution demanding that all immigration to this country be stopped and refugees deported after the war...
...The Malthusian theory that population presses upon food supply has been utterly discredited in the light of modern invention...
...We are the offshoots of aliens who fled the poverty or the religious and political suppressions of Europe and Asia...
...But the "America for Americans" crowd howls that "the more immigrants we receive and the more refugees we harbor after the war, the more our own citizens will be unemployed...
...Those who came generations ago kept alive the flame of integrity and freedom that welded a unique nation...
...One is the discussion beloio by Mr...
...The notion is not founded in fact...
...They make us feel understanding, humanitarian...
...We weep and we curs on reading the revelations in diaries and novels of the tortures endured by 'Jews and radicals and anti-fascists crushed under the iron heel...
...And we murmur: "Something ought to be done about it...
...Immigrants All Thus are the archaic stupidities of a Reynolds and a Legion allowed to seep through to the multitudes while the voice of compassion is lost in the night...
...We have admitted to these shores 1,000 refugees from the concentration camps of Italy and settled them in a temporary shelter at Fort Ontario, Oswego, N. Y. This little token payment of our debt tohuirjande-cency was denounced by such corporals FTeaction as Westbrook Peg!er_ajid Sen...
...voice of wisdom, too...
...Throughout our nation's history, the periods of greatest prosperity have coincided with the periods of the great waves of immigration...
...The earth's resources are enough end to spare for this generation and genera-tionsto come...
...Worse than that, we sit by mutely while the fascist-minded of our own country start the very fires that are consuming the hapless minorities of Hitler-dominated Europe...
...The Reynolds caught on...
...And those who come today, if we allow them, will tend the flame...
...And he urged his followers to deluge their Congressmen with letters demanding the end of ^CD/immigration now...
...Unemployment and hunger are not the result of a universal, implacable law, but of economic stupidity and man's failure to embark on a program of full production...
...We can absorb thousands upon thousands of immigrants without scuttling our national well-being...
...We are swayed by outrage and grief when we see a film like "The Seventh Cross," a document of terror under the shadow of the swastika...
...JTh^j&syS^shuman population is not incre^sjng fSster than there are means of siistjjnjnf'it...
...The scientist's thesis is particularly applicable to America, rich, not only in resources but in the technological equipment for exploiting and expanding them...
...They cry that the American frontier has vanished, that we have reached the limits of productive expansion...
...Reynolds roared: "Once the foot is jii ttie door, thousands of refugees will follow, and once they are here they will never be returned...
...They think in terms of an agrarian past...
...We are, after all, save for a comparatively...
...V V We burn with wrath at the mounting newspaper records of Nazi atrocities in occupied countries...
...For example: the United States has made a pitifully small .gesture toward salvaging the fugitives from the terror...
...Let us look for a moment not at what immigrants owe us, but at what we owe them...
...A few days ago the "inquiring reporter" of the New York Daily News interviewed citizens on their reaction to the Legion demand...
...Let's leave mercy out of it—the act of backing up with action the hollow protestations of brotherhood with Hitler's oppressed...
...small minority, a nation of immigrants but olice~or twi6e or thrice remojved_ from" The foreign generations whence we s_p4?sng...
...These emotional explosions make us feel good...
...The second, approaching the subject somewhat differently, isby£&&: William Hesseltine, and will appear in an_£#tfyissue of The Progressive...
...And we do nothing...
...Yet, while we weep at the movies at the horrors Hitler is visiting upon the oppressed, we are mute while the American fascists howl for a ban on all immigration...
...Fear Of The Defeatists Those who support a complete ban on immigration are the defeatists in our midst...
...This formula is unhappily winning the approval of the man in the street...
...Yes, and the...
...Robert Reynolds of North Caj^ojina...
...They know, especially the fugitives from the Nazi terror, the nightmare of a slave state...
...Meyer...
...We see people drowning and refuse to toss them a lifeline because, we say, of the high price of hemp...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 42
