Americanization; Civics; Immigrants -- United States; Naturalization -- United States; Noncitizens -- United States
| || Spanish | 13.6
| || Serbian | 12.8
| || Cuban | 12.1
| || Portuguese | 5.5
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[note 1: _Abstracts_, vol. i, pp. 485, 486.]
[note 2: Classed as “Recent” by Immigration Commission.]
Prof. Edward A. Ross, who, of all the students of this question, is
one of the most uncompromising in generalizing from the reports of
the Immigration Commission to the disadvantage of the “newer” races,
deduced that “with the change in nationalities came a great change
in the civic attitude of the immigrants.”[105] He made little or
no allowance for the fact that the “civic attitude” of the “newer”
immigrants naturally would not have had time to develop as in the
case of those who had been here longer; he made even less for any
changes in industrial and social life in this country which might
help to account for this alleged change in attitude, by intensifying
the hardships of the only kind of employment “newer” immigrants
could get, by low wages due to an overstocked labor market, or by
the increased herding of foreign born in city slums, which last,
of itself, might tend to retard the process of adjustment and
assimilation. Prof. John B. Clark saw something of this, when he
remarked that “there is far more likeness between different branches
of the European family than there is between the economic conditions
into which immigrants came in the third quarter of the last century
and those into which they come to-day. Then they could have farms for
the asking, while now most of them go into mills, mines, shops, and
railroad plants, or become employees or tenants on farms owned by
others.”[106]
Prof. John R. Commons, discussing the differences in the proportions
naturalized among the various racial groups, calls attention to
the fact that “it is not so much a difference in willingness as a
difference in opportunity.... In course of time these differences
will diminish, and the Italian and the Slav will approach the
Irishman and the German in their share of American suffrage.”[107]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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