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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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immigration. It was when immigration was just being considered to be a problem in this country. We'd been taking in a million immigrants a year. The new immigration law had just been passed and there had been great objection to it. That was the law which Lothrop Stoddard and that outfit - “The Great White Father” crowd, with all the business about the dolichocephalic and brachycephalic - were pushing. Many of us had been down to hear the testimony before the committee and we were quite shocked at that. We thought it was wrong. We wrote quite a good little brief on what was the proper immigration policy of the United States. We tried to get that into the Democratic platform. We succeeded in getting something, which indicated the reason the law was bad - it was a Republican law - that it should be modified, that one man was as good as another. It was aimed frankly against the Italians and the Jews. Our reaction was that men should be taken for their own worth. We recognized that free immigration was making a population problem. If that was what the case was, all right, slow it down, but be sure that there was an economic and social reason. We even proposed a commission which could vary the number of immigrants that would be allowed to enter in one year periods, depending upon economic conditions here. It would slow down immigration during periods when there was lack of work here, lack of economic expansion and increase





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