Our discussion of intermarriage seems to suggest that it is not likely to occur, for some time at least, in large numbers; that as far as hereditary effect on progeny is concerned, it is wholly premature to pass any judgment at present because of our limited knowledge; but that the social as well as the economic position of the contemporary Japanese in America does not seem conducive to the happiness of either the children of such unions or their parents.
Is Assimilation without Intermarriage Possible?
Let us now consider the third question:--"Is intermarriage necessary for the assimilation of the Japanese?" The people, who argue that the Japanese should be discriminated against because they are biologically unamalgable, thereby commit themselves to maintaining that intermarriage is the only way by which Japanese may become true Americans. Governor Stephens states that California's effort at Japanese exclusion is "based entirely on the principle of race self-preservation and the ethnological impossibility of successfully assimilating this constantly increasing flow of Oriental blood."[48] Without questioning whence he derived the authority for the assertion that the Japanese are ethnologically impossible of assimilation, we wish to refute the contention that the Japanese are unassimilable because they are racially impossible of amalgamation. We believe that racial amalgamation is not a prerequisite of assimilation. We have already shown that the customs and traditions, as well as the supreme law of the United States, do not demand that all Americans be of one and the same race. This fact alone is sufficient condemnation of those baseless utterances which seek an excuse for failure and negligence in successfully fulfilling the duty of Americanizing aliens by the camouflage of race difference.
But there are other powerful reasons to support our view that race intermixture is not the only way to Americanize the Japanese. And this we find in the strong influence of environment on the physical and mental make-up of man. Perhaps the most significant anthropological contribution of recent times is the establishment of the truth that race is not a fixed thing, but that it is a changeable thing; changeable according to the conditions of environment. Professor Boas, a recognized authority on anthropology, found, in a strictly scientific investigation concerning the changes in bodily form of immigrants and their descents in America, that aliens change considerably in physical form after they come to America. His conclusions are: