winter. She was on one of the steamers which had been diverted from New York to Boston. Her father from Newark had been waiting the long hours during which the immigrant train from Boston was continually announced for a later hour. Finally I noticed a girl dressed in black coming through; she was fairly staggering under the weight of two heavy straw baskets. The father looked dazed and a bit later I found her weeping in his arms. She had been held two months in Danzig where the sister with whom she had started had died of scarlet fever. The young girl had clung tenaciously to the sister's baggage, and now it was all that she had to turn over to the heart-broken parents. In another case a Slovak family in Bayonne had received a cable in December that their little fourteen-year-old girl was starting on her way from Czecho-Slovakia. In February when no word had come from Czecho-Slovakia, they cabled repeatedly through the steamship agent from whom they had bought her ticket. Finally they in despair came to us, and our worker at the port was able to ascertain that the little girl had died a month before of typhus. She had been taken away from the friends with whom she had been traveling. They did not understand and, swept along in the crowd, they left her behind--to die alone!

During the days of quarantine the emigrants are thoroughly deloused and disinfected. The final examination is given the morning they are taken on ship. Rejection is of course the most tragic experience that can overtake an emigrant. The laws universally demand that cases deported from the United States must be sent on from the European port within a limited time at the expense of the steamship company. However, there is no one who seems responsible for rejected cases. Consequently any number of pathetic men and women afflicted with trachoma, ring-worm, tuberculosis, or any of the many mandatory exclusion diseases are found hanging around the hotels. Patent doctors thrive on cures guaranteed to fix the emigrant and make it possible for him to continue on his way. Sleeping in the hotels, mingling in the crowds as these rejected cases do, they are a constant source of infection to the daily arriving emigrants. When their scant funds are spent, one finds them begging on the street or wandering ceaselessly from one steamship company to another asking piteously for help and advice which will make it possible to reach America, more than ever the land of their dreams.

Since the war no immigrant can come into the United States without a passport vised by a representative of the United States Consular Service. However, such a representative has no legal right to withhold such a visé unless there is some reason to doubt the validity of the passport or to suspect the individual of bolshevistic tendencies. The immigrant may be obviously feebleminded, or covered with vermin, and the consul may advise that he will be rejected, but if the immigrant insists, the visé must be granted. The next step is the physical examination at the port. The only check is the fact that the steamship company must pay the expenses of a reject back to the booking point and must also pay a fine of two hundred and fifty dollars for each person brought to the United States against the law. An agent confronted with a family of a mother and six children with a good American check sent by the father for seven steamship tickets is tempted to take a chance on the littlest boy who may not appear very bright. Subsequent experience, it may be said from a commercial point of view, has in the past justified them in taking this chance. But the fault is not entirely with an inadequate medical inspection or with a Washington decision which says that in the name of humanity it is fairer to let the mother with her little

468

UNITING OF NATIVE AND FOREIGN-BORN

feebleminded boy land temporarily on bond to see her husband and plan what is to be done, than it is to deport the mother and the child to a devastated village in Poland leaving the father and four children in the United States. The fault is with a system which makes it possible for people obviously ineligible for entry under the present United States laws, in good faith to break every tie of human relationship, to sell their property and to invest every cent in a ticket and every ounce of hope and faith in a future in America.

American Ports.-Now let us turn to the American side of the picture; first to the port or border points other than Ellis Island, through which over 25 per cent of the total immigration to the United States enters. Many people realized this latter fact for the first time this winter when steamship companies, because of the very strict quarantine measures of New York Harbor, Marconied their vessels at sea to change their destination from New York to Boston or Philadelphia. One boat even went to Portland, Maine.

Americans are prone to think in terms of Ellis Island, when we think of immigrant entry into United States. The fact that the second largest number of aliens enter the country by way of the Canadian border, from the Canadian port of St. John is illuminating. The Mexican border is also an important port of entry. There are international bridges, so-called, at Laredo and El Paso as well as at other points, where the immigration service has officials; but it may be said that the Mexican border is quite long and desolate, and that people have been known to wade across! Perhaps this fact accounts for the apparently increasing habit of aliens debarred or deported at Ellis Island, trying their luck at getting into the United States by way of Mexico. San Francisco and Seattle both have the exacting problem of the Oriental immigrant, the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Hindu coolie, in addition to an ever-increasing number of Mexicans, Russians, and Italians.

It is necessary to dismiss the port experience of the average immigrant admitted on "primary inspection," whose difficulties on the inland trip are being discussed elsewhere in the conference, and to turn to that group which for a variety of reasons is detained at the immigration stations because of failure to comply with some technicality of the United States immigration law. I wish it were possible to give some idea of the proportion of immigrants detained, in comparison with the number admitted or rejected. So far as I know such an analysis has never been made. The only figures available show the total number of immigrants excluded and deported. For the last six months of 1920 this number equaled 8,690. This number tells only half the story. A far larger number were detained and then finally admitted. It is this problem of detention which indicates a phase of work at our immigration stations which demands a change. There are two types of detention, that of temporary detention and that of special inquiry. The first are held for a period varying from a few hours to a month, because of insufficient money, for relatives to call, or because some other member of the family has been taken to a hospital. In the special inquiry group are those held because something developed in the inspection that suggests non-compliance with the requirements of law, such as illiteracy, liability to become a public charge, or some health deficiency. These cases of "S. I." are apt to drag over weeks and mont Many social workers today believe that standards of American efficiency and Americ consideration for helpless human beings are not being upheld in the treatment of th cases. Ellis Island being the largest immigration station presents the most serio situation.

At Ellis Island the immigrants sleep in large dormitories segregated according to sex. The bunks are double-deckers, screened in with wire, not only at the side but over the top so that the entrance is like a maze. They have no mattresses, but an adequate supply of blankets. What would happen in case of fire, one shudders to contemplate! Toilets-beautiful to observe as to tiled exterior, but cursed with antiquated and corroded plumbing, result in daily inconvenience. Enamel basins for washing are equipped with clip faucets, but lack a stopper "because the immigrant would flood the place." The result, according to one matron, is that the women Farely use this tiled washroom. They prefer the open basins in the detention room. The Island does some laundry work for the detained immigrant, but the clothes often come back so badly torn that the women with few belongings are reluctant to give up their garments. Many immigrants have been reduced, after the repeated disinfecting and delousing processes enroute, to the clothes on their backs. Mothers with little babies cannot wait a week for clean diapers. The result is that garments are washed out in the rooms where the women sit all day and hung over the radiators or near the windows to dry. That facilities for washing have human implications in an immigration station is apparently recognized by some branches of the United States Immigration Service because the Boston station is equipped with washtubs, clotheshorse, and ironing board, and the matron arranges so that the women can wash their clothes at night, leave them hanging, and have them fresh and clean the next morning.

Immigrants are fed by the steamship companies. There is plenty of food prepared carefully with consideration for racial tastes, but scant thought seems to be given to the needs of small children. Milk is brought around to the detention rooms in large cans, and mothers get it in cups for their babies. There are no means of heating or of modifying milk. Fortunately most immigrants' babies are breast-fed.

Lastly there is no occupation. Can you picture the state of mind of hundreds of people, the majority of whom have been held for several weeks in one room? "Bench-sitters" they are called. All day long they sit on the long wooden benches or they move restlessly up and down the slippery tiled floor. When the weather is warm they are allowed out in the sunshine for certain hours, and it is a God-send, but during the passed winter they were penned in detention rooms with barred windows, marshalled three times a day to the dining-room and occasionally to a concert or to movies in the main inspection room. The women of course have an endless number of children. Until recently, a mother had only to choose between her arms and a hard bench for her babe to lie on all day. The younger children wander listlessly up and down or gather in groups with children whose language they can understand. The room is filled with the din of hoarse voices talking in every language, of guards calling out names which they cannot pronounce of immigrants wanted outside. There is the uncertainty of how long they will be detained, the morbid retelling of experiences, the anxiety of not hearing from a child who may be ill in the seeing people carried out on stretchers to the hospital, or led the dread decision of exclusion or deportation having been well as physically the atmosphere of the room is depressing.

Physical conditions could be improved fairly easily if Congre added funds. Far more serious are conditions resulting from a bure... tion developed to handle numbers rapidly but ap the case of immigrants the commodity handled i oil or bales of cotton.

For instance if a child is taken sick it is sent at once to the hospital. If it is certified, the mother may visit it once a week on Sunday afternoon. For this visit she must get a card from the matron. Often mothers do not understand and in their peasant stoicism they wait patiently day after day for news of their child-missing the Sunday visit because they do not know enough to ask the matron for the card. One poor Slovak woman I knew to be called by the hospital authorities to decide whether the government or she herself would bury her baby laid out quietly on the morgue table. Another Polish Maria who left Poland in November of last year was held four weeks in Warsaw, six weeks in Danzig, two months in London, and when she finally arrived at Ellis Island on March 4, she was held there until May 17 because her eightyear-old daughter was taken from the ship to the Willard Parker Hospital suffering with measles. During all the weeks at Ellis Island, the mother was taken to see her child just once! Again it has been the custom, when appeals to Washington for the staying of exclusions have been refused, to put the deportation so quickly into operation that often girls have been deported from the Island when a brother, bringing in clean and worn clothes, was struggling to get a pass to see her from the information bureau on the Island, which declared that the girl was not on the Island. In another case, two Armenian girls traveling with their brothers were detained because of trachoma. One girl was released, to join her brothers in Springfield. The other girl was sent back without having a chance to see the other members of her family, who, when visited six months later, were still ignorant of why the sister had been sent back or whether she had ever arrived.

There has been an honest and concerted attempt on the part of the fifteen private welfare organizations at present represented on Ellis Island to penetrate this situation. In past months a corridor on the third floor has been equipped as a kindergarten and the older children from the detention rooms have had a few hours each day in this bright, sunny room where their hands and minds have been kept busy. After much persuasion a small room was cleared of some bales, and room was made for the installation of three cribs and a bathing outfit for tiny babies. Two of the organizations undertook to pay the salary of a kindergarten and a practical nurse. An indication of the attitude of mind directing the policies at Ellis Island lies in the fact that when the Secretary of Labor and the new commissioner were shown officially over the Island they were not shown the day nursery, and only stumbled on the kindergarten by chance!

In view of the situation it has made many of us grateful beyond words that a social-minded official with years of immigration experience behind him has been appointed and given a free hand by President Harding himself and told to improve conditions, an opportunity which as a public official our new commissioner, Mr. Husband, can best take advantage of if he is backed by a public opinion demanding an efficient and a social, rather than a political and mass administration of our immigration service. Last week I left Ellis Island late one evening on a seven o'clock ferry. On the right hand were the immigration buildings with their barred windows and closed doors giving no hint of the presence of the one thousand detained aliens whom I had just left sitting on benches in the main inspection hall. On the left were the rambling buildings of the Public Health Service. Some of the nurses were sitting enjoying the evening sunlight over the harbor and watching a multitude of little white-capped favus, or ring-worm, cases playing happily on the lawn. Further out on the piles of the ferry slip were the older patients in their long brown hospital gowns. They were peaceful

and quiet and quite free in the evening hours. It is to be hoped that the individual thought given to aliens by one branch of the United States Government will some day be duplicated on the other side of the Island by the United States Immigration Service.

THE SCHOOLING OF THE IMMIGRANT

A. ELEMENTARY ADULT EDUCATION FOR NATIVE AND

FOREIGN-BORN

Ruby Baughman, Americanization Training Department, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

It approaches the edge of rashness to mark out the limits of adult elementary education. And yet, there are a few outstanding approaches to the task. Concerning the need of a common national language there can be no debate. That single task is no small thing for a public-school system to segregate from its numerous other obligations, and to undertake as a unit of endeavor. The United States has spent twenty years and large funds of money at the business of making the American language the common speech of the Philippines. Surely the compact foreign possessions lying within our immediate national borders deserve as much time and money and intelligent effort.

With the disappearance of the frontier the population of the nation has huddled for the most part into great cities in physical proximity far too close, yet widely separated in social relations. Violent group antagonisms result. No adequate degree of neighborly comprehension can exist between American groups and immigrants in periods of storm and stress like the present, for reasons easily apparent. Compelled by circumstances over which they have no control the newly arrived strangers tend to agglomerate into colonies. Alien groups are necessarily adjacent to American institutions but not of them.

The immigrant is an intelligent human creature caught in a net of alien experiences which he does not comprehend, about which he may not ask, and concerning which his neighbors are prevented by one great obstacle from offering any explanation. That obstacle is the one thing that must be cleared away no matter what else may or may not be contributed to the general task of democratization.

This process by which adults acquire a second language is educational.. The nature of the process thus determines the social agency that must undertake the task. There is only one such agency in a democracy-the public school. If it is now inadequate to the task, then it must be rendered adequate. The most casual observer can perceive that the public school must be about that business quickly. The reduction of American-made adult illiteracy is a second piece of work easily discernible by the observant educational eye. The American government depends on the printed page as a means of dissemination of information, as a forum for public discussion. No considerable number of citizens may be safely excluded from this discussion by their own illiteracy.

Experiments in adult elementary education have contributed several important items to a new viewpoint in education. The first, perhaps, is a concept of the need of elasticity. Out of this grows the second, namely, a loss of faith in the real importance