A. Piatt Andrew

A. Piatt Andrew, a congressman from Massachusetts, discounts the fears of anti-immigrationists who claim that new immigrants harm American society. Writing in the June 1914 issue of the North American Review, he points out that Americans have always feared the impact of immigrants on American society, and those fears have always been groundless. In the early nineteenth century, for example, many Americans were certain that the large influx of Irish immigrants would cause America to crumble. Instead, the Irish became mainstays of the labor market and influential in politics and other areas of American life. In the following excerpt, Andrew maintains that the Immigration Commission’s massive study of immigrants, researched between 1907 and 1910 and resulting in a forty-one-volume report, turned up no hard evidence of inferiority on the part of the new immigrants...