Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/174

There is a misleading idea in certain quarters that 'the agricultural distribution of Italian immigrants' should be obtained simply through the employment of a large number of Italians as farm workers and farm hands. This would be only a palliative measure. The character of agricultural work is, by its very nature, precarious. The Italian immigrants would thus find employment during a few months of the year, when, for instance, at harvest time, there is an enormous demand for labor. . . . But after a comparatively short period of occupation they would lapse into enforced idleness, which would undoubtedly drive them back to the industrial centers. The only way to get at the root of the question is to transform a large portion of our immigrants into landowners or farmers.

To transform ignorant laborers, with but a few dollars in their possession, into landowners, is not a matter of a day or a year. It involves an expenditure of time and money. It is a matter of the assimilation of the immigrant and of the elevation of his standards of living. Thus, neither the interests of those states which desire immigrants who shall at once buy their land, nor the best interests of the Italian immigrants themselves, as set forth by Mr. Tosti, are met in a wholesale distribution of ignorant farm laborers. The difficulty of having large numbers of farm laborers in idleness for much of the time, to which Mr. Tosti also refers, is already present, as may be seen in the following statement, clipped from a newspaper of last summer:

Several of the largest planters in the delta have made contracts with the labor agencies in New York to secure for them gangs of Italian immigrants, who are now being brought south by the coach load. . . . The Italian laborers who are now being imported will not have very much to do until the cotton-picking season opens, and the immigrants will be maintained by the planters in comparative idleness until picking begins.

4. Do the Country Districts want the Kind of Immigrants whom it is proposed to send to them?—No distribution of our immigrants should be thought of if the states to which they are to be sent do not welcome them. A few years ago, the U. S. Immigration Investigating Commission asked the governors of the different states what nationalities of immigrants they desired, and in only two cases was any desire expressed for Slavs, Latins, Jews or Asiatics, and both of these two cases related to Italian farmers, with money, intending to become permanent settlers. A canvass of the same kind, made within six months by some gentlemen who are interested in the distribution scheme, showed that these preferences have undergone no appreciable change. In every case, in this recent canvass, the officials protested against the shipment of southern and eastern Europeans from the city slums into their states. In the south to-day, owing to the lessened efficiency of the negro, the greater demand for field laborers, and the movement from the country into the towns, the need of pickers in the cotton fields is very great in some sections, and the demand for vast hordes