Breckinridge Long Quotes
We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.
Breckinridge Long, 1881-1958, U. S. State Department Refugee Affairs Director, Secret Memorandum to James Dunn and Adolph Berele Jr., 1940
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JOUAM was a nativist workingmen's organization founded in 1853 to resist the competition for jobs from immigration. See related quote for membership criteria. At its peak it had over 200,000 members. “Mechanics” was the term used for a wide variety of skilled craftsmen from plumbers to bricklayers. JOUAM is the oldest fraternal order in America.
A bill was introduced making literacy a requirement for immigration.
The huge waves of Eastern European immigrants, and the severe recession of the nation began to change public attitudes on immigration. Wage rates were going down as a result of the depression and the terribly poor immigrants would work for any low pay and inadvertently, the immigrants help suppress wages. Ironocally, those same immigrants who would work for any pay and conditions were among the leaders of the labor movement and the strikes for better wages and working conditions. See {625086}
The United States policies at the time encouraged tens of thousands of foreigners to study in America—especially mathematics, science and engineering. Then after they graduate we expel them despite the fact that we have a great labor shortage of these technical skill areas. The result is that the American economy lags in one of its most important areas, high technology for lack of qualified people to fill the jobs. Larger American companies then set up operations overseas and hire many of the people who we kicked out, so they do not pay any taxes to America. The best and most ambitious of these American trained foreigners, then start their own businesses abroad, create many jobs that never benefit Americans and then sell to America competing with American firms. New York City alone had tens of thousands of open jobs at very high salaries for which there were no Americans to fill while the New York schools had trained enough foreigners to fill the jobs, but our national policies forced the best and the brightest to leave and compete with us.
Ironically, where national quotas have been used in American immigration policy, it has rarely been used to keep nationals of countries with which we were having difficulty, out. In almost all cases, the national quotas have been used to discriminate against racial and religious minorities in America. Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, Catholics, Mormons and Jews have been the most frequent groups targeted. Even when we were in the midst of the Cold War, American policy was to accept immigrants from the Soviet Union and Cuba enthusiastically.
Most immigration reformers want to open immigration more widely. Ward wanted immigration restricted to certain ethnicities and limited. He wanted a uniformity of assimilation and not diversity.
Most immigration reformers want to open immigration more widely. Ward wanted immigration restricted to certain ethnicities and limited.
Samuel Miller Breckinridge Long was an American diplomat and politician. He served in the administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is infamous among Holocaust historians for making it difficult for European Jews to enter the United States in the 1930s and '40s.
