“I believe it is quite generally conceded that immigration from the Far East is detrimental to the welfare of the United States,” says the report, “not because it has heretofore been so extensive in numbers, but because of its peculiar effect upon the economic conditions and the possibilities of an almost unlimited increase in volume if left unregulated and unchecked. Our Oriental immigration problem, arising more than a quarter of a century ago, has never been satisfactorily solved; the exclusion laws need many amendments, not in purpose but in prescribed method.
“The Hindoo propaganda, as yet in its infancy, is calculated to give much trouble unless promptly met with measures based upon, and modeled to take advantage of our past experience in trying to arrange practicable and thorough, but at the same time unobjectionable, plans for the protection of the country against an influx of aliens who can not be readily and healthfully assimilated by our body politic.”
Of immigration by way of the insular possessions the Commissioner says: “It will be observed that 15,512 aliens came to continental from insular United States during the last seven years--10,948 from Hawaii, 3,950 from Porto Rico and 614 from the Philippines--and that of these, 10,740 landed at San Francisco, 3,910 at New York and 631 at Seattle.
“Aliens coming from Porto Rico have been handled with a fair degree of success, but those coming from Hawaii and the Philippines have given the service a great deal of trouble, the former with regard to the admission of aliens to the territory and their subsequent migration to the continent, and the latter with respect to the coming of aliens to the mainland from the Philippines only, the immigration service having nothing to do with respect to the admission of aliens to these possessions.
“It has been regarded as desirable to encourage the settlement in Hawaii of European aliens, and correspondingly to discourage the settlement there of aliens from the Orient, the idea being that the former does, and the latter does not, tend toward the ‘Americanization’ of the territory, which already has a large Asiatic population. Failure to retain the immigrants secured through the exercise by the Federal Government of a very liberal policy, is believed to be due to the fact that the conditions of work and labor are unsatisfactory and the standard of wages too low.”