This brings us to the question of the effect of immigration on the amount and distribution of wealth in the United States. It is frequently pointed out that we receive yearly a net increase of half a million or so of able-bodied laborers, for whose upbringing and education we, as a nation, have expended nothing. It is stated that it is cheaper to import laborers than to raise them. The truth of this assertion depends first of all on the quality of the laborer. It may be cheaper in the long run to rear laborers of the American type than to import Portuguese, Russians, and East Indians. Furthermore, while we do not pay directly for the laborers, we pay a great deal for their residence in this country. The estimated amount of money sent abroad by aliens in 1907, $275,000,000, is probably higher than the total for an average year. Suppose $200,000,000 be taken as an average amount.[313] These remittances do not represent commercial payments for imports, but are savings actually withdrawn from the wealth of this country and sent abroad to be expended there. So that for each able-bodied alien laborer who enters the country something like $400 goes out. In a sense a good deal of this money might be considered as actual payment for the importation of the laborers, since much of it goes for traveling expenses, debts incurred to provide for emigration, etc.[314] Whether immigration has increased either the total or per capita wealth of the nation may be open to question. One thing, however, is certain—it has profoundly affected the distribution of wealth in the country. It has been sufficiently demonstrated that the successive waves of immigration have represented an ever cheapening labor supply. As the country has grown in wealth and prosperity the employers of labor have found that they could secure their workers at relatively, if not absolutely, lower rates decade after decade. Whenever conditions became such that the native laboring force, if left to themselves, might have successfully demanded better conditions or higher remuneration, there has appeared an inexhaustible supply of foreign laborers, ready and willing to take what was unsatisfactory to the natives, or less. The workman already in the country, whether native or foreign, has been continually robbed of his advantage. Thus the gap between capital and labor, between the rich and the poor, has grown ever wider. Not only have wages been kept from rising, but conditions of labor have persisted and been tolerated which an American laboring force would never have submitted to. The accounts of terrible accidents in mines and foundries arouse sincere feelings of sympathy in our breasts for the poor foreigners who have to suffer so. They would incite a storm of indignant protest which would not be stilled until remedies were provided, if those who are subjected to such conditions were our own kin brothers.[315]