Broken Homes: A Study of Family Desertion and its Social TreatmentColcord, Joanna C. (Joanna Carver)
General
Broken Homes: A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment
Colcord, Joanna C. (Joanna Carver)
Desertion and non-support
We should not stop when reciprocal extradition with Canada has been
secured; there is a similar situation on our southern border in states
from which escape into Mexico is easy. While American deserters are not
likely to go to other more remote countries than these two, immigration
into America from other countries creates desertion problems in other
places and presents us with a class of undesirables with whom it is
difficult to deal under existing immigration laws. In 1912 a report was
submitted to the Glasgow Parish Council showing the alarming amount of
dependency created in that one city by the emigration to America and the
Colonies of men without their families, and who subsequently drifted
into the status of deserters. This report makes the interesting
suggestion that no married man be permitted to emigrate without his
family unless he presents a "written sanction of the Parish Council or
other local authority," and further, that he be bound, under penalty of
deportation, to report himself to some authority in the country of his
destination, which would satisfy itself as to his conduct and insure
that he did his duty by wife and family.[47] Such a provision would of
course involve the revision of our own immigration laws, making wife and
family desertion a crime thereunder.
At present the law provides deportation only within five years after
entry, and for "persons who have been convicted of or admit having
committed a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral
turpitude," or who are sentenced to a term of one year or more in this
country, within five years of entry, for such crime (or who may suffer a
second conviction at any time after entry). This would clearly cover
bigamy committed within five years after entry; whether it could be
stretched to cover lesser forms of marital irresponsibility remains to
be determined. (It should be remembered that a man who brings in as his
wife, or later sends for, a woman to whom he is not married, can be
deported under quite other sections of the immigration law.)
2. Improvements in Court Procedure.--A sore point with the social
worker is the often ridiculously inadequate amounts that unwilling
husbands are put under court order to pay. They accuse the courts,
whether rightly or wrongly, of considering first what part of the man's
alleged earnings will be needed for him to live upon comfortably, and
then of making the order for whatever may be left over.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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