Part 21

This computation distributes the immigrants from the United States according to their racial stock; thus the main part would be classified with those of British origin, a smaller part as "other European," and so on.

From the foregoing it is evident that Canada is now less than 60 per cent Nordic--probably less Nordic than the United States.

Canada has been the great obstacle to extending the American immigration quotas to the countries of the Western Hemisphere. The majority of its inhabitants are our own kinsmen, many of whom have already contributed elements of great value to our population. Others would be most welcome if they chose to come.

Our nation has been unwilling to put the slightest restriction on Canadian immigration, by applying a quota; and it was thought it would be invidious and discriminatory to apply a quota to the countries south of us, and not to the one to the north. That difficulty will have to be met firmly in the near future. One proposed solution has been to admit from Canada only those whose mother tongue is English.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 15: Acadie in the Micmac language means "place." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's pathetic poem, "Evangeline," embodies the anti-English sentiments of the early nineteenth century in New England and is founded largely on an error of spelling, which made "Arcadia" out of the Indian word. The expulsion of the French in 1758 was by Bostonians under Colonel John Winslow, and was justified by the refusal of the French to accept loyally the rule of the English.]

XVII

OUR NEIGHBORS ON THE SOUTH

Unlike Canada on our north, the countries south of the Rio Grande have been relatively little influenced by Nordic culture, to say nothing of anything resembling a Nordic conquest. The outlying territories of Mexico which were annexed to the United States were nearly empty lands and present Mexican influences in the Southwest are matters of more recent date.

Latin America is one of the major divisions of the World, and from the present point of view should no more be discussed as a unit than could Europe or Asia. Its original population represents one of the great racial divisions of mankind. Its twenty different nations now speak several different languages, and embrace representatives of all the important races of both hemispheres.

The general area gets such unity as it possesses from the Latin and Roman Catholic aspect of its culture as contrasted with the Protestant, Anglo-Saxon culture of America north of the Mexican border. This Latin civilization was originally Spanish (in Brazil Portuguese), but since the era of the revolutions which threw off the Spanish yoke, the Spanish influence has become more and more negligible, and locally has been somewhat supplanted by the French, and, to a small extent, by the Italian influence.

Latin America was never colonized at all in the sense that North America was colonized. English settlers with their families came to the New World to found homes, but the early history of Latin America was that of a series of plundering and proselyting expeditions, and such of the adventurers as tarried were usually men without families who had no desire to stay a day longer than was necessary to acquire a fortune and return to Europe. Add to these the military forces who came under compulsion, and the missionaries, administrators, and concessionaires of all kinds and one has the bulk of the early European immigration.

Under these circumstances the number of women who came with their husbands was naturally small, and most of the Europeans took Indian wives, frequently several of them, thus laying the basis for the half-breed population of the present day. In Paraguay, for instance, some of the colonial rulers are said to have had fifty or a hundred native concubines. If every descendant of these matings carries the Spanish name but has married mainly with Indian stock in the ten or fifteen generations since, it is easy to understand that present-day families may bear the names of hidalgos, of whose genetic traits they have virtually none.

The number of European immigrants was never large. During the sixteenth century, a period of active exploitation, the entire movement from Spain to America is thought to have represented only about 1000 or 1500 persons a year. With a high death rate, and the disposition on their part to return as soon as possible, there was no opportunity for the Spaniard to establish the basis of a civilization built upon his own race.

By 1553 foundling half-breeds numbered thousands in Spanish America and the viceroy Mendoza was obliged to establish an orphan school for them. Even at the end of the eighteenth century, when Humboldt visited Mexico City, he remarked that of the European-born Spaniards there, not one-tenth were women. The proportion of women must certainly have been still smaller in the provincial towns and on the frontiers.

So far as the present population goes back to the early days of Spanish dominion, it may be said to be Spanish by name and Indian by blood. The families, which in many Spanish American countries have social prestige because of descent from the conquerors and rulers of the Colonial Period, must therefore attach all importance to the family name, and little or none to the many other lines of descent which have entered into the composition of their present generation.

Honorable exception should be made in almost every one of the Spanish American republics of a small group of Whites that has consistently maintained its racial integrity and upheld intelligent ideals of racial progress, under most difficult conditions. In many of the countries, too, there are groups of far-seeing intellectuals who are working for the adoption of wise immigration policies, presenting sound and constructive measures of eugenic reform, and striving to awaken their fellow countrymen to the fact that a nation's capital is, in the last analysis, biological, and that permanent and satisfactory progress is possible only to a people with a healthy family life.

In many of the Latin American countries the Whites, or those who pass as such (for they have, in most cases, a large proportion of Indian blood) form an oligarchy or ruling caste occupying the higher positions in the political and ecclesiastical worlds. They also constitute the land-owning and professional classes, while commerce and industry are largely in the hands of foreigners or their descendants. In many cases these foreign immigrants marry into the best native families, and thus their children become a part of the ruling caste.

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Mexico. The restriction of European immigration into the United States under the National Origins Quota cutting off what had been the principal source of unskilled labor had an unexpected and undesirable effect in encouraging immigration from nearby countries of the Western Hemisphere, which were not under the quota, and particularly from Mexico. Industries accustomed to depend upon cheap, ignorant, and docile workers from Mediterranean or Alpine countries turned to the illiterate Indians on the South as a ready substitute. The stream of arrivals across the border, more illegal than legal, soon brought into the United States more than a million Mexicans. Only the unexpected depression beginning in 1929 stemmed this tide and apparently prevented Mexico from reconquering peacefully, by an immigrant invasion, the territory it had lost by the decision of war in 1848.

Since the sixteen million residents of Mexico are the nearest large body of people in a position to supply immigrants to the United States and ready to do so, a study of their composition is of the highest importance at the present time. Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest had seen the rise and fall of several relatively high native civilizations, and that of the Aztecs, which was destroyed by the Spaniards, had many noteworthy features. The combination of brutality and piety which dominated the conquerors led to the extermination as far as possible of every salient feature of the native culture. The country was, thereafter, exploited ruthlessly by the Spaniards, but the Spanish civilization, such as it was, did not succeed in establishing itself in this foreign soil. The history of the last four centuries has been a history of the gradual absorption of the foreigners by the Indian element. This is true alike of race and culture.

The large native population found here by the Spaniards was quickly reduced in numbers. A Spanish priest enumerates ten plagues which had decimated the people during his time, that is, during the first quarter of a century after the conquest. First the smallpox, brought by a Negro in one of Narvaez' ships. It is said to have destroyed more than half of the people in many of the provinces. The others were: the slaughter in the capture of Mexico City, the famine resulting from the widespread warfare; the abuses of overseers of the towns given in vassalage; the heavy tributes; the tremendous abuses in connection with the mines; the reconstruction of Mexico City by forced labor; the traffic in branded slaves; the abuses of transportation, with Indians as human beasts of burden; and the factional warfare among the Spaniards themselves, in which the Indians bore the brunt of the fighting. To these should be added particularly the other infectious diseases that the Spaniards introduced, such as tuberculosis and syphilis, as to which the aboriginal inhabitants had not the slightest immunity or resistance, through previous racial experience.

Under such conditions the native population of the hemisphere was probably reduced by 50 or 75 per cent in a few generations, and in the West Indies it was exterminated. Since then it has been steadily regaining ground on the mainland, though not in the islands, in many of which the Negro has replaced it.

The number of Spaniards who came at any time to Mexico is placed at 300,000 at the outside. Many of these certainly did not remain in the country and few of them brought their families. Under the conditions that existed in Mexico and the other conquered territories, it was universally recognized that the situation was not suitable for a white woman. While the Spanish Government encouraged men to take their wives out from Spain, few of them cared to do so, and probably most of the men who came to the colonies were unmarried. Spain put insuperable difficulties in the way of unmarried women who wanted to emigrate, so that Spanish women throughout the history of Mexico were few. The resulting population is therefore made up of the offspring of the Indians and of a few Spanish men mated to Indian women. Most of the Mexican population is still pure or nearly pure Indian. There is a considerable hybrid element which does most of the talking, and a negligible element that can be considered white in the strict sense of the term.

Mexican statistics commonly designate about 10 per cent of the population as white. But most of these have much Indian blood, and recent students doubt whether 3 per cent are properly to be described as white. Much of this genuine white element is in Mexico City, though the various states have their local and reputable white aristocracies, of which that in Yucatan is conspicuous for the maintenance of high standards of racial integrity.

The Mexican revolution which began in 1810 dislodged the overseas Spanish and substituted exploitation by the local hybrid group. Since then the general trend has been toward the rise to control of the Indians. The last period of revolution, which began in 1910 and may be said to be still in progress, has been marked by attempts to take away from the hybrid oligarchy the immense land properties which it had obtained and to distribute them to the Indians. While this has met with many difficulties, and has been realized only to a small extent, it has been at least the avowed objective of most of the revolutionists in the past two or three decades.

During recent years there has been a glorification of the Mexican Indian and his culture by North American writers. No doubt the Mexican Indian is well suited to his environment, and his traditional habits are well suited to him. This does not mean, however, that either has any important contribution to make to the United States which would be realized by a northward mass migration of agricultural and industrial serfs. On the contrary, the Mexican immigration to the United States, which is made up overwhelmingly of the poorer Indian element, has brought nothing but disadvantages. It has created, particularly in the Southwestern States, an exploited peasant class unconformable with the principles of American civilization. This population, neither physically nor mentally up to the prevailing standards, is producing a large contribution to the future American race, since every one of its numerous children born in the States becomes an American citizen by birth.

Tests made in the schools of southern California, in which the language handicap was discounted as far as possible, indicate that the average Mexican child was about as far below the average Negro child in abstract intellect as the average Negro child was below the average white child.

Physically, the race is conspicuous by its low resistance to tuberculosis, which has exterminated so large a part of the native population of the Western Hemisphere during the last four centuries. The New World had not been subject to tuberculosis and therefore offered a fertile field for the germs of this disease. The population of the Old World had been ravaged by it for many centuries, and in each generation the low resistants had been killed off so that a more immune stock had been gradually produced by natural selection.

Such studies as have been made in the Southwestern States indicate that the average Mexican family is at least half again as large as the average white family. Thus there is every reason to expect that, without a sharp limitation of such immigration, the Southwest will become more and more Mexicanized.

By 1928 Los Angeles County had more than a quarter of a million Mexicans, and the City of Los Angeles had the largest Mexican population of any city in the world, with the exception of Mexico City. Whole industries and whole agricultural areas had come to think themselves largely dependent on Mexican labor, while millions of American citizens were out of employment in every State of the Union. The dependence of agriculture in the Southwestern States on cheap Mexican labor, largely of a migratory nature, is particularly disastrous from a racial point of view, since the maintenance of American civilization depends largely on the maintenance of a healthy and prosperous farm population.

Nearly all of the Mexicans who came to the United States were seeking to better themselves economically and to avoid the murder and plunder that had been going on in their country for a score of years under the guise of revolution. Most of them intended to return home as soon as conditions became more satisfactory, but as conditions from year to year failed to improve, the Mexican population tended to become a permanent one. At the same time few of the Mexicans became American citizens, and in every community where they settled in racial groups there were unsatisfactory standards of education and sanitation.

Most of the Mexicans come with their families, thereby differing markedly from some of the other foreign groups, as the Bulgarians, Greeks, Spanish, and Filipinos, which consist mainly of unmarried men. These latter either return home after making money, or else intermarry with the other immigrant groups. The Mexican community, on the other hand, perpetuates itself and increases without much intermarriage with the other population.

Since the depression beginning in 1929 there has been a repatriation of a portion of the Mexican immigration of unknown size but undoubtedly considerable. Lack of work has led many to go home where they can live more economically and be among friends, and at the same time American authorities began to offer free transportation back to Mexico for those dependent on public charity, and willing to leave. Thus trainload after trainload returned, and at the same time a tightening of the immigration restrictions and procedures on the border cut down the flow of immigrants to almost nothing.

While the census of 1930 counted nearly a million and a half Mexicans in the United States, it is probable that the number has since then diminished, and it is of highest importance that it should not be allowed to increase. The Mexican Indian has no racial qualities to contribute to the United States population that are now needed, and if he has any cultural contribution to make it will not be made by the immigration of hundreds of thousands of illiterate and destitute laborers.

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Guatemala. More than half of the population of Guatemala is still pure Indian, and the half breed class which plays such an important part in Mexico and other countries is relatively less conspicuous there. The inconsiderable white population is made up in part of the descendants of old Spanish families and in part from more recent immigrants, especially Germans.

The proportion of Teutonic names among the rulers of Guatemala during the last generation has been growing steadily. With two million population Guatemala is the most powerful of the Central American countries, but the Indians tend to be little more than a subject race exploited by others, and the general progress of the country is therefore in some ways slow.

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Honduras suffers partly from its tropical situation but still more from the mixture of races, and the large amount of Negro blood in the population of the lowlands. By contrast with Guatemala the Indian element is here unimportant, and the people are Negroes and half-breeds, or a little of each. With its 600,000 population largely of mongrel origin, the Republic has been a backward member of the Central American group throughout most of its history. British Honduras is an unimportant area with much the same characteristics. The so-called Caribs along the coast are now scarcely distinguishable from pure Negroes.

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Salvador. Smaller than the State of New Jersey, Salvador has an importance out of proportion to its size because of the dense population and large amount of cultivable land together with a smaller amount of Negro mixture than in the adjoining Republics. With a population estimated at a million and a half (such a thing as a real census is almost unknown in Latin American countries), its people are largely of mixed blood with the Indian predominating, but the number of pure-blooded Indians is not large compared with Guatemala.

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Nicaragua, a synonym for turbulence in the minds of Americans, has also a population of highly mixed character. The Indians did not remain a distinct group as in Guatemala, nor were they largely exterminated as in Costa Rica. They were absorbed into a half-breed population of more than 600,000 which has also in the lowlands a large Negro admixture.

The upper classes of more or less remote European ancestry have maintained a semi-feudal political dominance that has been disastrous to the welfare of the country, and it is doubtful whether the Yankee influence, which during the last generation has been stronger in Nicaragua than in any of the other Latin American states except Panama, has been particularly useful.

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Costa Rica has always prided itself on being the whitest of the Central American Republics, and its history of relative peace and prosperity reflects this fact. Apart from a fringe of Indians and Negroes in the lowlands, the population of nearly 500,000 is concentrated in a beautiful and healthful inland region. The Indians of the country having been driven out or destroyed at an early day, the settlers of Costa Rica were unable to live as parasites exploiting serfs as did the upper classes in some of the other Central American countries, but were forced to settle on the land and work out their own salvation. While they were therefore considered in colonial days to be in a pitiable situation, the result was highly advantageous in the long run, for it has given the country a more nearly genuine population of citizens prepared to contribute to the progress and welfare of the country.

A large part of the Spanish blood in Costa Rica is supposed to be Galician, and therefore to have a considerable Nordic infusion. The Gallegos, as natives of this part of the Iberian Peninsula are called, are one of the most law-abiding and hard-working of the numerous peoples that comprise the Spanish Republic, and their descendants in Costa Rica reflect credit on their origin. In most of the other Latin American countries the Spanish element is supposed to be largely from Andalusia and therefore quite different in make-up, with a noteworthy Moorish element.

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Panama with its hybrid population of half a million, largely Negro in composition, is unimportant in the picture of Latin America. North American influence has transformed it economically, but cannot change mongrels into a sound and vigorous stock.

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Colombia has large numbers of Negroes in the hot lowlands, but the bulk of the six million population is Indian with a slight infusion of European blood. The upper class of Colombia represents the results of geographical isolation, the region until recently having been inaccessible; and by virtue of a sort of intellectual inbreeding it has long been the most conservative and least touched by foreign influence of all the Latin American "aristocracies." The upper-class Colombian prides himself with reason on the purity of his Spanish blood, and still lives to a large degree in the memories of the ancient colonial period. In Bogotá there is an intense anti-Negro social sentiment. The isolation of the half-breeds in Colombia has come nearer to producing a new racial group than is to be found elsewhere in Latin America.

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Venezuela, in spite of its nearly three million inhabitants, is an unimportant country, largely hybrid with extensive Negro infiltrations. As in many other Latin American countries, the number of Whites is officially put down as about 10 per cent, but as in most such instances it is doubtful whether one resident in fifty can properly be called a white man, except by courtesy.

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Guiana. The three Guianas, British, French, and Dutch, represent one of the least attractive parts of South America in almost every way.

British Guiana has 300,000 inhabitants of whom one-third are Negroes, another third Orientals, mostly Hindu, and the remainder is largely made up of crosses between these two elements, of a few thousand native Indians, and of a handful of Whites.

Dutch Guiana has a population well under a hundred thousand, largely Orientals imported to furnish coolie labor and including Hindus, Javanese, and Chinese. There are many Negroes and a couple of thousand Whites.