House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization
1921

WARSAW.

Concerning the general characteristics of aliens emigrating to the United States from Poland and the occupation or trade followed by them, reports Indicate’ such to be substantially as follows:

(a) Physically deficient.

(1) Wasted by disease and lack of food supplies.

(2) Reduced to an unprecedented state of life during period of war as the result of oppression and want.

(3) Present existence in squalor and filth.

( b ) Mentally deficient :

(1) Ill educated, if not illiterate, and too frequently with minds stultified as to admit of little betterment

(2) Abnormally twisted because of

(a) reaction from war strain,

(6) shock of revolutionary disorders,

(c) the dullness and stultification resulting from past years of oppression and abuse.

(c) Economically undesirable:

(1) Twenty percent is given as a round and generous estimate of productive laborers among present applicants for visas. This estimate is meant to include workers or those who may be expected to become workers from both sexes. The remaining percentage may be expected to be a drain on the resources of America for years.

(2) Of the 50 per cent of immigrants from Poland who may be termed efficients, 40 percent—of the total number of immigrants—will enter a trade as a middleman, not a producer. These will thrive on the efforts of their associates.

(3) The productive labor, small percentage as it Is, will be found in America In the sweat shops In the large centers of population. It is decidedly not agricultural but urban In character. In this report female applicants as house wives, etc., are of course termed as efficients.

(d) Socially undesirable :

(1) Eighty-five percent to 90 percent lack any conception of patriotic or national spirit, and the majority of this percentage is mentally Incapable of acquiring it.

(2) Seventy-five percent or upward will congregate in the large urban centers, such as New York or Baltimore, and add to undesirable congestion, already a grave civic problem.

(3) Immigrants of similar class are to be found already in the United States who, taken as a class and not individually, have proved unassimilable.

(4) All Europe is experiencing in the reaction from the war a corruption of moral standards. This may even be most noticeable in Germany. The introduction of these lowered standards can not fail but have its evil influence in the United States.

c) At the moment 90 percent may be regarded as a low estimate of the proportion represent ins the Jewish race among; emigrants to America from Poland.

(f) The unassimilubility of these classes politically is a fact too often proved in the past to bear any argument. 

Full text

Source(s):

Emergency Immigration Legislation: Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration, United States Senate, 66th Cong., 3rd sess., on H.R. 14461 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), p. 93-94.