The Trespassers (50 page)

The labor unions pressed onward and three years later one more small law was passed. It outlawed immigrant “contract labor,” and again none could quarrel too deeply with its purpose.

But the first bars had been put up. These first laws taught the nation that men and women could be kept out of free America by those who did not want them. The hard seeds of exclusion swelled and burgeoned; prejudice and bigotry proved mighty fertilizers. Whenever trying times came briefly to the nation, the seeds burst forth into strenuous life. And now the harvest widened beyond the wishes of labor.

Now others whipped up an appetite for restriction. Now the jingo press and professional chauvinists hungered for new laws; many Americans whose own parents or grandparents had come from Europe cried harshly that the endless streams of foreigners must be dammed up. Aliens lowered American standards; aliens snatched the jobs away. Yesterday it was all right to let them in; there were countless frontier acres to absorb them. But America was glutted now.

That was the growing theory. The yellow press and the haranguing patriots blazed it about the country. Each passing year, as the tide of immigration gushed through the harbor in New York, the hate-fed theory spread. And on facts or figures could kill or even halt it.

There
were
the facts, the large and sinewy facts. From 1890 to 1910, after the frontier days were ended, over 12 millions of Europe’s people crossed the wide sea, the largest number of any equal period in history. Yet with two panics to overcome, the twenty years saw an unparalleled wealth and growth for the country. Far from the unemployment of the theory, the number of employed rose from 23 million to 38 million, a gain of 15 million jobs. Coal production trebled in those twenty years; steel production increased 700 per cent; copper quadrupled; American railway tonnage nearly trebled and bank clearings did treble. The farms of America, too, had their golden age; the value of farm products advanced from over two billion dollars to over eight billions.

A hundred separate causes brought this wealth about. The surge of immigration, however, did not cause unemployment. It did not lower wages or standards. Labor’s wages went up, the eight-hour day spread. The immigrants in the coal mines of Pennsylvania won better wages than the native workers in the mines of West Virginia. In the steel mills, on the railroads, in the needle trades, where immigrant labor abounded, the standards of work and pay went steadily up and not down.

These were the splendid facts. But there were enough theorists to ignore them. The myth and the clamor grew.

A wave of new demands swept the land; calls for literacy tests reached such volume that in 1897 a bill authorizing them passed both houses of Congress. President Cleveland vetoed it. The calls kept on, and in 1912 another measure was passed, banning illiterates of certain classes. President Taft vetoed it. Three years later, a similar measure passed both houses. President Wilson vetoed it. And in 1917, once again another such bill was passed.

Then, to the Congress and to the nation, President Wilson protested that a literacy test would serve not as a test of character or fitness but as “a penalty for lack of opportunity in the home country.” Again he vetoed the bill.

This time, the measure passed above his veto. But even this Immigration Act of 1917 had one proviso that remembered the American purpose of long ago. For it did exempt from the test “all aliens who shall prove…that they are seeking admission …to avoid religious persecution…”

When the Great War ended in 1918, a fierce, war-born nationalism was left clamped on every land. Everywhere trade barriers went up, tariffs were heightened. And in the same mood, new immigration laws were born. Now in this mood all the nations devised new ways to exclude goods, to exclude people.

The United States felt the postwar leap of immigration. In 1920, nearly half a million immigrants arrived, and in the next year the number doubled. Many cautious ones remembered the years when the century was young, when a million foreigners arrived each twelvemonth. Again the sensational headlines and speeches fed the fears and hatreds, roused new demands for exclusion and even deportation. The labor unions did their share of the shouting. The literacy test had failed as a padlock on the doors.

One June 3, 1921, the first numerical limitations were enacted by Congress. The first quotas were set up. The quota for each country was to be three per cent of the number of natives of that country living in the United States in 1910. For the first time the great land of promise measured out its welcome on a clicking turnstile—so much per country per year.

But the quotas in this temporary measure were large. Some 68,000 Germans could still enter each year, 42,000 Italians, 31,000 Poles—all in all, 357,803 quota immigrants might still make their way to American opportunity. The padlock was still too fragile. The agitation roared on.

And so the Immigration Act of 1924 came into being. A new set of quotas was authorized, a harsher set, a tighter set. And this number-fraught law provided no soft quota exceptions for the religious or political refugee. From that day forward—apart from certain special treaty visas, diplomatic visas, preference quotas, visitors’ visas, and nonquota visas—from that day forward an immigrant was an immigrant, one digit under the quota. No matter what the need, no matter what the danger that drove him, an immigrant was an immigrant and subject to a numerical destiny.

The new act contained the “National Origins Clause” for establishing the permanent quotas. By it, the quota for each country was to be proportioned to the number of inhabitants in the continental United States having the same national origin. The Census of 1920 was to be used.

The new quotas were not put into operation at once. An intermediary set was established, slashing the 1921 quotas to more acceptable figures. These were set at two per cent of the number of natives in 1890. For five years, these intermediary quotas ruled immigration to the United States. In round numbers, the possible Italian immigration was cut from the 42,000 of the first quota to 4000, the Polish from 31,000 to 6000, the German from 68,000 to 51,000, the Czech from 14,000 to 3000, the Norwegian from 12,000 to 6000, the Soviet Union from 24,000 to 2000, the British and North Irish from 77,000 to 34,000, with a separate quota of 29,000 for the Free State, the Swedish from 20,000 to 10,000, the Austrian from 7000 to 800, the Hungarian from 6000 to 500.

In 1929, the permanent quotas took hold. Some of the intermediary quotas were increased by a few hundred, by one or even two thousand, but some of the largest quotas were slashed once more. Germany’s new quota fell from 51,000 to 26,000, the Free State’s from 29,000 to 18,000, Norway’s from 6000 to 2000, Sweden’s from 10,000 to 3000. The only great jump was for Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That quota rose from 34,000 to 66,000.

And there the quotas stayed. Tight-lipped and deaf they were to stay through all the crisis years of the 1930’s.

And still the doors to America were not locked. Still it was possible for 153,774 foreigners to come in from all the nations each year. But in 1930, unemployment and depression laid hands upon the United States. Once again the old blame was pinned, the old cries arose. And President Hoover turned to the State Department to do what might be done.

There was something to be done. There was, for instance, the old clause about barring those “likely to become a public charge.” In consular slang, “the L.P.C. clause” had applied only to idiots, to the diseased, the unfit and crippled. But now a new interpretation was put upon the clause. Now began the new requirements of personal resources, the stricter demands of pledges to support, the closer rules for financial status of the affiant, the more positive guarantees. Now “an alien desiring to immigrate into the United States” began to find that unless he had a private fortune or relatives already established there, the L.P.C. clause alone could slam the door of a country in his face.

In the time that followed, immigration to America dropped to the lowest point in a hundred years. The unemployment did not cease, but the immigration very nearly did. From 1933 through 1938, while the unemployed grew in number from eight to ten to fifteen millions, not one alien hater could lay the blame on the continuing American welcome to strangers. For in that period of time, 51,863 more aliens left America’s shores than came toward them.

And in that period of dark time, with persecution and maniac credo howling across dictator-ruled lands, the number of unissued quota visas to all the countries of the world reached the total of 795,823.

Almost, not quite but almost, the nation that lay between the two oceans had followed the example of the whole closed or closing earth. In those years of the 1930, the great nation was working toward free trade, making reciprocal trade treaties, tearing down the barriers of high tariffs. But no comparable wisdom yet showed strong enough to batter down the other barriers of the immigration laws. They still stood, to keep out the greatest raw material, the richest natural resource of any nation anywhere—men and women who would love it, who would work in and for it.

One day it would come, that other wisdom. But as the new American quota year opened with the first minute of July in the year of 1939, that day had not yet dawned.

When fifteen days of the new quota year had gone by, Franz Vederle knew he could endure the silence no longer. Two or three days without notification from Zurich, yes, of course, one would expect it. Four or five days, perhaps. But after that each delivery of mail became an anguish because the official notice did not come. Letters, telegrams, the long-distance phone—no part of that old technique would answer his need. This could not go on and on and on, until once again their cases were tabled, forgotten, lost under the rush of newer cases.

There was one new attack on this old and wearing horror. It was a chance to take, a risk, a gamble. Who could tell how the official mind would react? But whatever the risk, whatever the gamble—He tossed through half a night looking at it from every angle. It would be a lot to ask of her, it would cause trouble, inconvenience to her. But in the morning he knew he would ask it, anyway.

He drew out the pocket address book in which he had written down her itinerary as far as she could give it to him. London, July 1–20—the Mayfair Chambers. He waited until Christa had gone to market, and then he went to the telephone and put in the call to London.

Vee had written several times, postcards and letters that were informed with the new closeness among them all. She seemed well and fit. Whatever her illness had been—it was the one topic she had carefully avoided when she had been with them—she seemed completely over it now. Her last letter had come a few days ago. “I suppose by now you have the visas and are leaving me stranded in Europe. So it’s turn about and
you
will be on the dock in New York when I get back in September.”

The call came through. He could hear the London operator announcing that Switzerland was calling.

“Franz, what’s wrong?” Her voice was good to hear. There was instant readiness in it.

“Vee, I must bother you once more. We have no visas yet—no word at all.”

“Damn them,” she said. “I could go and scratch their eyes out.”

He told her how he had been racking his brains searching for some new thing to do—different from the written request for news, for an interview.

“I’m going there myself, Vee,” he ended grimly. “No luxuries for me like scratching their eyes out. But I am going without writing first for an appointment. And I was wondering—last night I got the idea, if by some chance—”

Simultaneously she was saying, “I’ll go, too. I’ll meet you there, Franz. We’ll do it together. It might do some actual good to have me right there—a citizen. Anyway, I want to.”

“Could you, Vee? Could you do this, really? I’ve thought half the night whether I have the right to ask—”

“When can you get there? I’ll fly. I wonder if there’s a direct flight from London to Zurich—never mind, I’ll find out here.”

“I could be there tomorrow. I’ll go to the Bellevue Hotel and wait. Is that possible—your work, your own arrangements? Of course I will postpone this until you can manage—”

She brushed his worries aside. She could shift her appointments. She would wire him at the Bellevue when and how she was arriving.

When he told Christa of the plan with Vee and that he was going to Zurich on the night train, he saw an immediate reluctance stiffen her body. She resisted any positive step now, that was clear. But a strange question stirred in his mind as she asked whether it might not be wiser to wait things out a little longer. Was she afraid that this attempt might fail to speed the visas—or that it might succeed? He left it unanswered. But he was depressed with the sense that Christa now felt harassed and forced—by
him.
God, the thousand subtle, psychic wounds that could be dealt by a protracted repudiation like this one…

Only when he saw Vee step out of the plane the next afternoon at the Zurich airport did he again feel hopeful. Just to see her brought some reassurance for him that he could not explain. She was dressed in some dark-green silk with white lines in it, and he was aware that she was very slender and feminine in it. But she looked tired, a little pale. Before she saw that he was there, while her face was in repose, he even thought she looked sad, as if she hid some secret that came near the surface only when her guard was down. But when she saw him, her eyes lit up and she smiled and the secret look was gone.

“Vee, you are really so kind to come—”

“I’m just so boiling mad. And, anyway, I’ve been sort of bored and lonely. Oh, Franz, it’s good to see you. I missed you all, really I did.”

“Your letters sounded so busy and cheerful, I thought it was only we who missed you.”

“Oh, letters.”

He took her off to lunch in a small garden restaurant and they talked and planned and extravagantly hated the whole world of officialdom and felt an intimacy they did not verbalize. He admired the way she seemed so completely untroubled about the possible irritation the Consul General might feel at this unannounced visit.