There is no disposition here to overlook or minimize the menace to our social and civic life involved in the presence of vast masses of undigested, unassimilated population of whatever race or kind--even of our own people, herded in colonies, dominating large communities, illiterate as regards our history and ideals, ignorant of our language, traditions, and customs. It constitutes a social problem of great magnitude and intricacy--though probably by no means so menacing as it is our fashion to believe. But it is not one directly affecting our political life or the operation of our political machinery to any such degree as it is the custom to declaim. There is little substantial evidence in these days that the foreign-born voter, as such, is a source of corruption or other evil influence in our politics. PRIMITIVE ATTITUDES TOWARD IMMIGRANTS Whether it is called an instinct, native in animal psychology, or an inheritance of mental habit and tradition handed down from remote times of family and tribal necessity, the fact is that we all regard the stranger with a suspicion, diminishing perhaps as we broaden with years, experience, and culture, but never entirely lost. Exceedingly few are those great souls who have no trace of it. Especially if the stranger wears a differently colored skin, expresses his thought by unfamiliar vocal sounds and inflections, practices customs of clothing, eating, marriage, religion, different from our own; lives in houses of peculiar shape and use--these things all partake, for the average person, of the outrageous and the dangerous, and usually subtly offend those habits of group taste which we somehow feel to have their roots in essential morality and the nature of things. From time immemorial, all states and communities have laid special disabilities and limitations upon the alien--all based ultimately upon this habitual suspicion of those who belong to another tribe or clan. As Edwin M. Borchard says:[1] The legal position of the alien has in the progress of time advanced from that of complete outlawry, in the days of early Rome and the Germanic tribes, to that of practical assimilation with nationals, at the present time. In the Twelve Tables of Rome, the alien and enemy were classed together, the word “hostis” being used interchangeably to designate both. Only the Roman citizen had rights recognized in law.... The Germanic tribes, in the early period, were hardly more hospitable to the alien than were the Twelve Tables of the Romans.