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kind of an administrative order. I thought they had just been taken on as temporaries and could thus be easily separated.

Section 24 was a section of the immigration law which authorized the Secretary of Labor to deport all kinds of people. He could deport all persons who had been brought in as contract laborers and it also authorized the Secretary of Labor to make investigations to determine if persons had been brought in as contract laborers. That sounds perfectly harmless. Under other sections of the law, of course, the Secretary was authorized and directed not to admit into entrance persons who had communicable diseases, who were likely to become public charges, who were criminals, or were convicted of felonies, who were guilty of misconduct involving moral turpitude, or who were persons believed in the overthrow of government by force and violence.

Contract labor had been, in the early days of the immigration law, the habit of large employers of labor and had been quite substantial. It had been one of the problems. They would hire five hundred men in Dublin or Queenstown, bring then into the country, telling them that they would get a job. The American labor movement resented this because they were brought in on a contract to pay them a certain wage, and it was lower than the wages that the American working men thought they ought to have. It depressed wages.