Alien immigrant /

Preface

The Alien Immigrant has been the subject of prolonged and bitter controversy, in which both sides have been guilty of some exaggeration. On the one hand, there are those who uphold the newcomers as an unmixed advantage to this country ; on the other, there are many who denounce their advent as an unmitigated evil. The object of this volume is to put both aspects of the case before the public as impartially as I can. The whole subject is one of great difficulty and complexity ; but I am not without hope that these pages may serve to throw some light on it.

They were written at a time when I was much occupied with other work, and they could

PREFACE viii

never have been completed at all had it not been for the invaluable help I received from my friend Mr. Godfrey Burchett, the Secretary of the Immigration Reform Association. I cannot too warmly or too gratefully acknowledge the debt I owe to his industry, ability, and experience.

W. EVANS-GORDON.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

Preface vii

I. East of Aldgate i

Chapter I

“ I take it if there is one certainty in the world it is this, that with the growth of immigration, and with the continual closing of the confines of States to the destitute immigrants of other countries, there is no country in the world which will not be compelled to consider and reconsider its position with regard to pauper immigration, unless it wishes permanently to degrade the status and the conditions of its own working classes.”

These words were spoken by Lord Rosebery in 1894. Five years previously the question of alien immigration had been considered by the House of Commons Committee which reported in 1889, and although restrictive legislation was not recommended at that time, the Report contemplated “the possibility of such legislation becoming necessary in the future, in view of the crowded condition of our great towns, the extreme pressure for existence among the poorer parts of the population, and the tendency of destitute foreigners to reduce still lower the social and material condition of our own poor.”

The evidence laid before the Committee did not enable it to reach any conclusion as to the number of aliens then to be found in London. No two witnesses and no two official documents agreed on the point. The position is unchanged in this respect. But it is manifest that the problem both as regards the number of aliens and the area affected is beyond all comparison graver and more urgent than it was thirteen years ago.

The necessity for action cannot be more forcibly illustrated than by the following extract from the Report of the Jewish Board of Guardians for 1901 : “ The Board has had to deal during the year under review with the large number of 2903 new cases. This raises the number of cases which received ordinary relief from the Board, or who were assisted to leave the country, to 5439, being 1120 more cases than in the previous year, and also considerably in excess of any previous annual record. . . . From the very outset the Board made known, both here and abroad, in the hope of checking the movement, that having regard to the overcrowded condition of the East End, and the congested condition of its trades, it could not in justice to the resident poor, and also in the true interest of the immigrants themselves, depart from its established custom in dealing with new comers; and that, in the main, the only relief it could offer to applicants arriving here in a helpless condition would be to assist them to return to the country they had left with such deplorable absence of foresight. ... The result of the application of these principles in the treatment of the total of 2903 new cases relieved by the Board in the past year was that 1399 were repatriated; 375 emigrated to places outside Europe, and 1 1 20, or 39 per cent, were added to the books of the Board.

“It would be hard to exaggerate the significance and pathos of these figures. The fruitless journeyings to and fro of the repatriated must have involved in travelling expenses alone an outlay from start to finish of at least ;^8ooo, of which sum the Board had to provide some ^3000. But serious as is the waste of such an amount, the expenditure of which can only have benefited the railway and shipping companies, there is an aspect of the case which is even more pitiable ; that is the physical and mental suffering of the 1900 men, women, and children"^ represented by the 1399 cases. It is an outrage against the dictates of common sense and humanity, that such a senseless and hopeless movement should ever have been directed towards these shores ; and the responsibility is heavy on those who encouraged and assisted it. . . . It should be recognized by all who are in a position to exert influence in arresting ill-considered emigration, that the Board, as the custodian of the interest of the foreign resident poor, must endeavour to prevent any increase of the congestion of the Jewish quarters of London, where practically living room is not to be found, and where labour is so poorly remunerated.” It may be said that this quotation refers to an exceptional year, and that the outcry then raised would be unreasonable now. As a matter of fact the Russians and Poles who arrived at the Port of London in the year 1900 numbered 17,939, and exceeded the arrivals of 1899 by 3000, and the arrivals of 1901 by 2000. It must be borne in mind that these immigrants are with few exceptions Jews.

Prior to the year 1901 the Board of Trade did not classify Roumanian immigrants separately.

* These persons belong to a class of immigrants who, in the words of Mr. L. L. Cohen, President of the Board, “ ought never to have come.”

Including Roumanians, the figures are, for 1900, 20,715 ; for 1901, 16,908 ; and for 1902, 22,029. It is clear that the year 1900 cannot be said to show a greatly exceptional state of affairs when the steady increase of Russian and Polish emigration since 1894 is considered. Here are the figures :

i

i

12,232

12,313

1899 •

14,927

15,958

21,013

Thus, leaving out the year 1 900, the immigration of Russians, Poles and Roumanians has increased nearly 400 per cent., and the increase which caused so much anxiety to the Jewish community in 1900 was surpassed in 1902 by 3074. The ill-considered emigration, therefore, continues. The necessity of preventing any increase of the congestion in the Jewish quarters of London is as urgent to-day as it was when the Report quoted was written. Living room is more difficult to find, and employment grows more scarce and worse paid. In the words of the Report, the whole movement “is an outrage on the dictates of common sense and humanity.”

In the Board of Trade Returns these immigrants are classified as aliens not stated to be en route to America or any other country. But the system of collecting and classifying the figures is so imperfect that it is impossible to draw any trustworthy inference from them except that the tide of immigration is steadily increasing in volume. These statistics are condemned as severely in the report of the recent Royal Commission on Alien Immigration as they were in that of the House of Commons Committee of 1888.

Great Britain, of course, receives immigrants from every land. And the movement of foreigners into this country has, at many periods of its history, been very considerable. It is only necessary to refer in this connection to the coming of the Huguenots and other persecuted Protestants, though before the Reformation a steady infiltration and settlement of aliens proceeded. But these foreigners, desirable and undesirable. Catholics and Calvinists, became merged in the population. Intermarriage made their descendants English.

There is a vital distinction between the immigration just mentioned and that of Hebrew people. Clannishness, tradition, a sort of historical fear of separation from their co-religionists, their obligation to observe peculiar ritual ordinances, added to the promptings and difficulties which tend to keep men of the same tongue and habits together in a strange land — all these things act as an inducement, almost as a spell, which brings the Jewish immigrants into the already crammed and congested areas of the East End, where their brethren are aggregated and segregated. And the native folk cannot assimilate this element, for intermarriage with Gentiles is forbidden by the precepts of the Jewish faith and is opposed to the Hebrew ideal. Mr. Harry Lewis, a most able Jewish writer, tells us in “The Jew in London” : “I shall endeavour to establish that the J ewish race, as a separate entity, has a future ; that its mission as such is far from completed ; and that it can look forward to something better than the painless euthanasia to which Mr. Russell apparently condemns it.” And again : “ Past experience certainly justifies us in believing' that we shall be able to resist assimilation.”

The Hebrew colony, then, unlike any other alien colony in the land, forms a solid and permanently distinct block— a race apart, as it were, in an enduring island of extraneous thought and custom. And the dense crowding in this island is intensified by what may, perhaps, be called the Ghetto habit — a habit due not to any primal tendency of the Jewish people, but to the calamitous conditions under which many of them have lived so long. Sir Samuel Montagu reminded the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration that the same thing is found in the great cities of almost all countries. “There is a Jewish quarter, and they crowd into it, where they would be better off if they were to spread out ; they were obliged to be in the Ghetto in Rome, and when the Ghetto gates were taken down, and they were allowed to dwell in any part of Rome, they did not go.”

Alike in the New World and in the Old, in countries which persecute and in countries which do not, we find the aggregation of Hebrew dwellers in crowded, and usually poverty-stricken and forlorn, districts of great towns. The efforts of the leaders of the community to disperse these settlers meet with opposition from the very victims of the habit ; and schemes for dissemination, though conceived in the finest spirit, have hitherto had but a trifling effect in meeting the difficulty. In fact, a few families sent to Reading and some other towns represent all that persuasion and

GHETTO CHILDREN, STEPNEY the granting of facilities have accomplished in England.

Including the children born of foreign parents living in this country, I estimate the number of aliens in the East End to-day to be not less than 80,000. Elsewhere I give the facts on which this estimate is founded. And even the figure just given does not include the very numerous English-born descendants of Jewish immigrants now dead. This class, nevertheless, has exercised an important influence in displacing the original population.

Almost every conclusion based on the official figures must be conjectural. But what is not conjectural is the presence of an enormous and ever increasing foreign colony in the most crowded quarter of the most crowded town in the world. Only those who know the East End as it is, can fully realize what this continuous alien invasion means for the English population.

What, then, is the East End like under the sway of the immigrant, and what is its future to be if it is to remain an asylum open to all without condition or restriction ?

Many English people living in the neighbourhood have summed up the situation to me in a phrase : “We are living in a foreign country.” This may seem exaggerated, but in a large part of the East End it is an accurate statement of fact.

East of Aldgate one walks into a foreign town. In the by-streets north and south of the main thoroughfares it is an exception to hear the English language spoken. The advertisements on the walls are in Yiddish and written in Hebrew characters. Notices of lodgings, &c., are in the same tongue. Nine-tenths of the names over the shops are foreign, and even where an English patronymic is seen, it is used for the most part by foreigners who have adopted it for purposes of their own.

When visiting the towns of Western Russia within the Jewish pale, I was surprised to find myself in the familiar surroundings of the East End. The life, the language, the people, the shops and their contents were the same.

Dwellings which quite recently were in the occupation of English working men and their families have been converted into workshops and small factories, in which the conditions frequently baffle description. The gardens which were formerly often to be seen, and which * were the pride and pleasure of the tenants, have nearly all disappeared, and these open spaces are now too often occupied by sweaters’ workshops

EAST OF ALDGATE ii

or are receptacles in which rags and garbage are piled.

No matter at what hour of the day or night one passes, the machines are heard, and through the windows, by the light of a dim lamp, the victims of the sweaters, imported from Wilna or Lodz, can be seen bending over their work in the endeavour “ to deliver their tale ” of shoddy or shoes.

In many instances, especially among the “greeners,” or new arrivals, these descendants of Pharaoh’s brickmakers, at two or three in the morning, after fifteen or eighteen hours of work, drop in their tracks in the workrooms from sheer exhaustion, and snatch a few hours’ sleep.

I wonder if it is understood by the outside world that in hundreds of houses in the East End a single room serves as workshop, kitchen, bedroom, and living-room.

It seems scarcely possible that children bred under such conditions can be healthy. But it is a fact that infant mortality among the Jewish population is low. This may be an example of hereditary immunity acquired in the Ghettos, but it is greatly to the credit of the Jewish people that they are excellent parents. Their women do not as a rule feed their new-born children artificially, and they wean them at a much later date than is customary in England. It is a well-known fact that infantile mortality is high among hand-reared children, and the care which Jewish mothers bestow on their babies lowers the death-rate among them.

But these worthy descendants of Jacob are supplanters all round. For instance the streets are daily more invaded and obstructed by alien hawkers and costers, upon whose barrows and trucks a marvellous miscellany of wares can be found. The increase of these street trades has caused, and is causing, serious difficulty to the Local Authority, and the native-bred coster — in the very hour of his triumph in song — is being steadily ousted.

The Christian fares as the Canaanite fared. He is expropriated. Chapel after chapel has been closed, many mission halls have been abandoned, and the congregations of the few that remain are dwindling every day. The Bishop of Stepney, speaking on November 24, 1902, said that East London was growing more and more poverty-stricken. In some districts every vestige of comfort had been absolutely wiped out, the foreigners coming in like an army of locusts, eating up the English inhabitants or driving them out. He prophesied that before his hair was grey the old parish church of Stepney would be standing amid an alien population. He recognized the vigour and intelligence among the aliens ; but the fact remained that they were swamping whole areas once populated by English people, and our churches were continually being left like islands in the midst of an alien sea.

Another result of the transformation of a large portion of the East End into a foreign colony is the effect it has had upon the observance of Sunday. This is keenly felt by the clergy of all denominations. The day of rest has become a day of unrest. Many of the streets are used as market-places, and are thronged with a multitude of buyers and sellers, through whom one must fight one’s way. There is a veritable babel of hawkers’ cries. And no one beholding the scene for the first time could believe that he was in an English town on an English Sunday. The foreign factories are in full swing, and most of the shops are open.

I have heard it argued that these districts should be treated on the same basis as the Chinese quarter of San Francisco, and that Christian usage should be regarded as a subordinate consideration. This point of view indicates, to my mind, a very serious state of things.

The desecration of the Sunday adds an important element to the increasing bitterness of feeling which is caused by the substitution of a foreign for an English population.

I have used the word “substitution.” It is a fact that no less than 107 streets in the borough of Stepney which were not populated by foreigners six years ago are wholly occupied by foreigners to-day, and the stress which is put upon our own people in consequence of this displacement is exemplified by the following extract from a paper read by the Rector of Spitalfields in March 1901, at a Conference on the Housing of the Poor :

^ “ The Whitechapel Union in its Spitalfields district overtops any district I know in point of overcrowding. For all London the average number of persons per acre is 57 ; for Bethnal Green it is 171, for Whitechapel it is 195, for Spitalfields it is 330. Where poverty most abounds congestion is greatest, the demand for rooms keenest, and rents highest. The rent demanded is frequently quite beyond the power of the wage-earner of the family to pay. But he secures the rooms and takes in lodgers.

“ I know two rooms where a poor family lives. The earnings of the man are small. The rent is high. At ten o’clock at night the family retire from the kitchen to the bedroom, and a gentlemanly-looking man, with frock coat and silk hat, enters the vacated kitchen, and makes his bed on the floor. He helps to pay the rent. From one of my parochial buildings I have seen through the thinly-veiled windows of a house, four men and six women retiring for the night in one room, the rent of which is Si', a week — all of them respectable, hard-working people, and the majority of them sleeping in beds on the floor.

“ I have had men with their wives and children, and with money in their pockets, come to me and appeal to me to find them room in which to live. At one of our Christmas teas about 200 poor children were assembled. After tea, as they sat together, I asked, ‘ How many of you live in a one-roomed home ? ’ Every hand but seven went up. ‘ How many live in a two-roomed home ? ’ Seven hands went up. ‘How many live in three rooms?’ None.

‘ How many of you live in a furnished room ? ’ All but twelve. So that, with the exception of those twelve children, all the rest were practically homeless ; for the wretched contents of a furnished room are not the property of the tenant, and the rent of one shilling a day or more is paid, in the great majority of cases, daily.

“ I have within the past few days had a census taken of one or two typical alleys and houses in my parish. In one alley there are ten houses — fifty-one rooms, nearly all about eight by nine feet — and two hundred and fifty-four people. In six instances only do two people occupy one room, and in other rooms the number varied from three to nine. In another court with six houses and twenty-two rooms were eighty-four people, again six, seven, eight and nine being the number living in one room in several instances. In one house with eight rooms are forty-five persons, one room containing nine persons, one eight, two seven, and another six. For these forty-five people there is one office, and in the case of nearly all tenement houses the washing for the family must be done by the aid of a pail which is put on the stove and serves for a copper on washing days.

“ There are practically no ovens, and such a thing as a home-made rice pudding is unknown to the children. The Whitechapel Poor Law U nion contains an enormous proportion of very poor, of casual labourers, and of men whom you can never describe as artizans. The poorer the person the greater the necessity for him to

DESERTED MISSION HALL, NOW FOREIGN CLUB, STEPNEY live near his work. In many cases the very nature of a man’s work compels him to live near it.

“May I instance Spitalfields Market? On market days in the summer the porters and others begin work at 4 o’clock in the morning, and throughout the year work begins every morning at 5 o’clock.

“What chance, too, has the dock labourer of work if he must live miles away from the docks and take a railway journey before he can apply for, and begin, work ? Men, women, and children are not herded together as we find them from choice.

“ Necessity compels them to live within a certain area, and the smallness and uncertainty of their earnings, together with the high rent, deprive them of the power to live under proper conditions.

“It may be fairly said that the alien has in this district been the cause largely of this increase in rent and of the decrease in the earning power of certain of the poor. What is, what must be, the moral result of life under such conditions as abound in this Union ? Depend upon it the character of the new century will be mainly determined by the kind of houses out of which the children come. Is it possible for a family to

B

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carry on all the duties of home life decently in one or two rooms ? In spite of every effort ;

made by parents anxious about their children’s '

home life, wherever crowding and mingling of ' the sexes exist, there is certain to be a familiarity which must be deplored. It is a distinct loss in the character of a nation when its people are not shocked by the sights and sounds which ought to shock them. It was upon this very question of the housing of the poor that a Royal Commission once asked Lord Shaftesbury the question, ‘ My lord, in your opinion does the pig make the sty or the sty the pig ? ’ Without hesitation the noble earl replied : ‘Unquestionably, the sty makes the pig.’ And even if the pig is a poor animal at best, he is certain to be made the poorer by being harboured in a foul and reeking gutter, with nothing but refuse for his litter, and nothing but garbage for his food.”

Or, to put it in the’phrase of Zola, “ L’homme gate le milieu, et puis le milieu gate I’homme.”

Chapter II

No question is more important to the English East Ender than the question of house room. His sentiment is particularly strong upon this subject, and it is justified by his needs. I fully concur in the opinion expressed before the Royal Commission by Mr. Harold Hodge, editor of the Saturday Review, and for many years a member of the Mansion House Housing Council.

“ The East Ender would rather be deprived of almost anything, he would rather lose his situation far, than he would lose his lodging. I have come across a great many cases of people who have been days and could not find house room, and for a man with a family of several children it is extremely difficult. So I think that makes it sufficiently intelligible why the English population feels so very strongly and bitterly on the point. And I do fear if something is not done a very unpleasant state of things socially may arise, and I also think that — it may sound alarmist — if any persons chose to make mischief, to organize the matter and go over there with the wish to stir up bad feeling against the alien population, he would find it extremely easy to do so.”

As a fact, the unpleasant state of things socially and the bad feeling which Mr. Hodge apprehends have already arisen. A racial riot, arising from a trivial incident, occurred quite recently in Bethnal Green. Many hundreds of people were involved, and the police declared that the state of feeling between Jew and Gentile gave them serious anxiety.

To the native workman displaced by the foreign immigrant it is no consolation to be told that improved transport facilities enable him to live outside the congested district. The necessity of living near his work or near those places where work is likely to be obtained, such as the docks, the markets, and the City, is as urgent for him as is the necessity which impels the aliens to congregate near their synagogue and in close contact with their fellow countrymen. In this connection the working hours which prevail in the district and the domestic arrangements which they necessitate must be borne in mind. There are many instances of families which have left the crowded areas and have returned.

“ They take points like this,” said Mr. Hodge. “ When your work begins early in the morning, at eight o’clock or seven o’clock ” — it often begins at five or six — “you have to catch a train the first thing in the morning right through the winter, and they find it is a very serious strain. They often have to go without any breakfast and then they have to come back.”

The English working man asks, with undeniable justice, why he should be turned out of the most convenient neighbourhood to make room for a foreign population, and why his rent should be raised from 50 to 100 per cent, in consequence of the demand for house accommodation which foreigners have created. These questions are daily put to me. I confess I am unable to answer them. I cannot understand why a single family, much less thousands of families, should be forced to submit to displacement in this way. Yet in all that has been said and written by the advocates of unrestricted immigration I have searched in vain for a word of sympathy with these evicted people. It would seem that they ought to look upon it as an advantage to have their homes taken from them, and that those who venture to protest are anti-Semites and unworthy of consideration.

In no district is the pressure of alien immigration felt more severely than in Stepney. The following figures show to what extent overcrowding prevails there : The total population in 1901 was 298,600. Those inhabiting tenements of one to four rooms numbered 209,200, or 70 per cent, of the total population.

The persons returned as “over-crowded” in 1901 amounted to 99,179, an increase of 10,496 since the year 1891. This means that one-third of the population is over-crowded. Stepney is the only district where over-crowding has increased and is increasing. In every other London borough it either has diminished or is diminishing.

Congestion has reached this point in Stepney during the decade in spite of an extensive emigration of the native population. At a moderate estimate, 52,000* English "people left this district during that period. Their displacement was, beyond question, chiefly due to the continuous inflow of aliens. The same process is in operation in all the adjoining districts.

* Evidence of Mr. Edgar Harper, Statistical Officer of the London County Council, before the Royal Commission.

I think it was Dr. Johnson who said that he had never met a man who could not bear the misfortunes of others with Christian fortitude. And I have observed that this wholesale displacement of our people in the East End is regarded with much philosophic calm by their fellow countrymen who live at a distance, whose homes have not been invaded, and who are not subjected to the daily terror of being turned into the streets. To them it is easy to preach about the traditional policy of England, &c.

The housing problem has been much in men’s minds. I should be interested to know how it is proposed to solve it if, in addition to providing decent homes for our own working classes, we are to undertake the accommodation of the houseless poor of Eastern Europe. Great and costly schemes have been completed, and others are in contemplation, for the better housing of wage-earners in cities. Private and municipal enterprise are alike engaged in these efforts, but in the East End it is the foreigners who profit by them. Almost every new building erected is in whole or in part occupied by them, and even in the magnificent dwellings built by the London County Council on the Boundary Street site in Shoreditch and Bethnal

Green we find already that out of 1034 persons accommodated 202 are aliens.

It is self-evident that the absorption in the East End of more than 80,000 people from outside cannot have been accomplished without a great disturbance of the previous population.

I have endeavoured to show the extent of that disturbance and the hardship and suffering which have attended it. I will now attempt to explain in some detail how the native population is got rid of.