The Attorney General has no legislative authority. The 1918 act was amended expressly in 1920 to deprive the Secretary of any discretion whatsoever, and therefore supersedes proviso 9 in section 3 of the act of February 5, 1917, as to "anarchists and similar classes of aliens." But whatever the Attorney General "opined" we protest as un-American the admission of that "wild-eyed anarchist" and the deletion from the House Appropriation Hearings of January 8, 1935 of two pages of facts about "Red Emma's" and other Reds' admissions only finally to be printed in the 1938 hearings by order of the subcommittee on pages 273 and 274, just as we also protested the admission of Harold Pritchett by Secretary Perkins under a discretion after the Department of State consuls refused him an immigration visa because he was debarred under the act of October 16, 1918, excluding "anarchists and similar classes." If the Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of State were required to report all hardship deportation cases with all the pertinent facts, relief could be extended quickly and easily even by joint resolution. There would not be all these differences of opinion as to the effect of the provisions of the 1924 law upon certain discretionary alien admission authority lodged in the Secretary of Labor by the previous law of 1917. The exercise of these discretions in the 1917 law by the Secretary of Labor has become, as a result of the 1924 act, mere facts as I said for consuls to consider insofar as immigration visa issuance is concerned, and the fact that the Secretary of Labor has had the opinion of the Attorney General of December 26, 1933, for nearly 4 years and has not even attempted to use it, shows that opinion and her attitude are impossible. But I do not wish to argue the merits and demerits of that opinion further. I cite her obtaining it as proof positive of the present Secretary of Labor not being in complete accord with what the Department of State and its consuls are doing and what the country wants done in reducing immigration under the L. P. C. clause of the 1917 law and to show the need of amending the law. Let me repeat that the organizations and membership I represent feel just as strongly that these restrictive administrative efforts of consuls of the Department of State ought, as President Hoover at the time recommended in his annual messages, be put "on a more substantive basis of law," as they feel that the present ignoring and nullifying of existing mandatory alien-deportation statutes by the present Secretary of Labor and her former Commissioner and the present Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner ought not to be enacted into law or longer tolerated as administrative practice or law. Such autocratic administrative authority as is now being exercised without express warrant of law, and as is confessed by seeking it in the many Kerr-Coolidge bills, is entirely too much authority for any good official to want and for any bad official to have, in our opinion.

We are opposed to substituting an administration of persons for government of written laws. Such has not been popular in America, at least since 1776. It is bound to be accompanied by more favoritism and more vacilating administrative inequalities and hardships than is possible under an administration of written laws and established precedents, which all may know, if the written laws are "well and faithfully executed" and the precedents available to the public. To confer any such indefinite, wide, blanket authority like the Secretary seeks in her bills on an administrative official is bad legis

lative practice, a bad precedent, and prove to be a bad law. The very limitations in time and number in H. R. 6391 compromise and impeach the two legislative proposals in sections 2 and 9 of H. R. 6391, and are admissions such autocratic discretions are bad. Under section 9 as drafted by the Department even anarchists, persons ineligible to citizenship, prostitutes, or any other aliens could be allowed to stay the United States.

If any bill like H. R. 6391 or H. R. 9725 of the Seventy-third Congress is to pass, the discretionary authority should be eliminated by striking out the words "may permit to remain in the United States," and there should be substituted therefor such provision for the relief of hardship cases as the following: "Shall report annually to Congress and make available to the public in annual report or otherwise not later than January 15 each year the names of and all the facts about;" and the contents of paragraph (b) of the section should be stricken out and there should be inserted therefor some such paragraph as the following: "(b) Any alien so reported for whom Congress shall fail, at the session to which his name has been so reported by the Secretary of Labor, to enact relief legislation, shall be deported in accordance with law within 60 days of adjournment."

Some such formula for the relief of so-called hardship cases is American. To allow the Secretary of Labor or any other administrative officer or committee, composed of political officials, to autocratically nullify the law is bound to result in a fluctuating policy varying from alien coddling to alien baiting, and make a bad situation worse for both the alien and America.

On the other hand, the existing method of relief by private bills depends too much upon the alien's political pull or his friendly influence, or their knowledge of the ropes here, and available funds. I discuss all this because you will be confronted with it all by the Department of Labor in connection with the reporting of any general deportatiion or restriction legislation, such as these Reynolds bills.

Congress has extended relief repeatedly and quickly. In 1930 a special law, couched in general terms, was enacted as Public Law No. 499, of the Seventy-first Congress, that admitted the Ulrich woman, who had been convicted repeatedly of shoplifting in Germany. In 1936 Rosa Piar was admitted legally, Private Law 423, Seventy-fourth Congress, although she had committed perjury, deliberately impersonating an American citizen in order to avoid waiting her quota turn, and had later entered the United States illegally.

In the last Congress a bill for the relief of an alien was gotten through in 4 months although the alien admitted he had done time for a moral-turpitude crime in Italy. It was H. R. 4451. H. R. 4451 was introduced in the House on February 4, 1937, reported by the House committee February 17, passed by the House March 2, passed by the Senate May 3, and became Private Law 79 on May 14, 1937. The alien got relief 3 months and 10 days after his bill was introduced in the House.

The number of that private law, 79, shows that Congress had already that session extended mercy in 78 other instances to some one for something or other. The alien involved in this case admitted at deportation and habeas corpus proceedings he had committed a crime in Italy in 1917, and seems, if current reports were true, to have perjured himself at the time, and to have been guilty of having com

mitted still another moral turpitude crime in Italy in 1923, to have done which he must have subsequently entered the United States illegally. Conflicting statements as to the facts in this case show the need of a fact-finding formula about hardship case such as I have suggested in order that mercy will not be extended in nonmeritorious

cases.

The ease and dispatch with which the alien got relief in H. R. 4451 last Congress was publicized in the press around New York City by his lawyer, and the ease with which he got relief does seem unfair to other aliens who have had their bills and petitions pending all these months and even years, nearly 6,000 such cases having occurred in the Department of Labor the past 6 years.

Any bill amending the quota law of 1924 or the 1917 act could easily be made to further restrict immigration and to put L. P. C. discretionary consular authority on more of a substantive basis of law by merely inserting the 10 words "but not to exceed 20 percent of such quota," in paragraph 3 of subdivision (A) of section 6 of the Immigration Act of 1924, as amended, to read as follows:

(3) Any portion of the quota for each nationality for each year not required for the issuance of immigration visas to the classes specified in paragraphs 1 and 2, but not to exceed 20 percent of such quota, shall be made available for the issuance of immigration visas to other quota immigrants of such nationality.

This would exclude 80 percent of the present nonpreference alien class and leave an adequate 20 percent for all possible justifiable cases of new seed immigration and their families.

It does not relieve the effects of the demand of the incoming thousands of newcomers annually for jobs and relief, or for dependency upon us, or the effects on foreign born already here, or on our "onethird ill fed, ill clothed, and ill housed," and does minimize immigration in the public mind to classify the annual alien arrivals as nonimmigrants, nonquota, and even "statistical aliens," for the nonimmigrants, such as the embassy employees, as well as the "statistical," and every alien does sometimes often stay and take a job, just as does the student admitted nonquota, and just as do some of all the rest of the nonquota and nonimmigrant aliens get "lost in the crowd" to further increase unemployment, dependency, demands for relief, and the like. If illegally or unlawfully here, it must be true that when the census enumerator comes around or the relief dispenser shows up, most aliens are not so dumb as to be unduly in evidence or to reveal their lawbreaking. I have been told by a number of census enumerators that they felt aliens here illegally evaded them.

No other country permits any such alien influx or alien presence as we do. In fact, no other country of consequense will even tolerate aliens holding jobs its citizens can fill. Most countries require aliens to have permits to work, and our good neighbor on the south drastically forbids the employment of aliens. Mexico will not allow even our train crews to cross her border, but we allow her crews to cross ours. Even our musicians when they play abroad are required to get permits and to pay native musicians to sit idly by and listen to the music. Last year again only about 9,000 alien lawbreakers were deported and as many more allowed to depart voluntarily, which permits the alien to return legally. Meanwhile several thousand more alien lawbreakers had their deportations "stayed," and their "unrelinquished residence" here run into or further toward the 7-year period requisite

under the seventh proviso-discretion of the 1917 law for the Secretary of Labor to send them out with a letter and to readmit them to permanent residence.

Practically all of the about 6,000 alien lawbreakers whose deportations have been stayed, if allowed to stay much longer, will be in the position where, if they go out, they can be readmitted by the Secretary of Labor under the seventh proviso. Congress never intended any such use of the Seventh Proviso.

With reference to family separations abroad, there is a splendid provision in S. 407, section 2, that would prevent the hardship of disrupted families and resulting hardship cases here by forbidding our consuls to issue a visa to a member of a family, where such would result in separating that family abroad.

If family separations abroad and resulting hardship cases here are to be prevented, as all who have appeared at this hearing seem to agree they should be, the only way to prevent them is to prevent them, just as the only way to restrict immigration is to restrict immigration, and the only way to deport alien lawbreakers is to deport alien lawbreakers. You will never prevent family separations causing hardship cases here, and stirring the enmity and ill feeling of aliens here toward our Government, by requiring the alien father to get a family visa for all his family and then allowing him to separate from his family over there, as some argue must be done to allow the husband to come here in advance and find or make a home. All laws, if enforced, cause hardship to some person or persons, and, as a rule, to innocent persons, mostly relatives. And why not? How else is lawbreaking to be deterred? Why all this talk about law enforcement being a hardship to aliens? Our own citizens, if they commit crimes, are separated from their families and their friends. As I have said, deportation is not a crime or really criminal punishment, for the alien is merely sent back to his own homeland where he ought to be and which is his best refuge, or ought to be, or where he may get his just deserts or help change intolerable conditions there.

For years the organizations I represent have favored some such provision as section 3 in S. 407. For instance, in appearing before your Committee on Immigration on August 8, 1937, I said:

I have said something about an alien, with administrative indulgence and help, converting a temporary admission into a permanent admission for permanent residence. When a nonimmigrant visitor or nonquota student, or any other temporarily admitted alien, comes to the United States legally, he promises and swears that he will do nothing to change his temporary admission status, and that as soon as his temporary mission is fulfilled he will leave the country. To allow the law to be evaded and dodged by an alien who, when he comes in nonquota as a student or as a nonimmigrant visitor, to convert that more easily obtained temporary admission into a more difficult to obtain and numerical quota permanent admission, unless there very strong and most exceptional reasons for it beyond his machinations, seems to me to invite evasion of the law and lawbreaking. May I suggest an amendment that would cure the alleged deportation hardships of such aliens and remedy their breaking their promises and law evasions, as follows:

"An alien who enters the United States, either from a foreign territory or insular possession, either before or after the passage of this act, shall be promptly deported in the manner provided in sections 19 and 20 of the Immigration Act of February 5, 1917 (36 Stat., 889; U. S. C., title 8, secs. 155 and 156), as amended, regardless of when he entered, if he changes or does anything to change his temporary quota or nonimmigrant status or in violation of the implied or express terms of his quota or nonimmigrant temporary admission to the United States." 139737-39——14

In other words, at present we humanely make it easy for nonquota students and so forth and nonimmigrant aliens, visitors, and so forth to enter for a specified temporary time and purpose or mission. And then what do they do? They use that humane, exceptional admission to build up a hardship case. The present Secretary of Labor will stay their deportations for 7 years, as the Department's files show and then under her Canadian preexamination procedure arrangement and a racketeer like Goldsmith the rest is easy.

The immigration question is an economic question. It is too bad that factors of race, religion, and politics are sometimes dragged into it. Our great hope is to keep it free from any kind of partisanship. Leaving out of consideration the present unemployment situation, the question arises whether in the future we can absorb the hundreds of thousands of workers and dependents from abroad who will come under existing immigration laws with the return of prosperity, the admitted relaxing of L. P. C. provisions, and the more and more knowledge on the part of aliens and welfare workers of how to meet the L. P. C. requirements. Each year about 600,000 of our own boys and girls will reach the age of maturity and become applicants for employment. I submit they are entitled to first consideration.

Let me repeat again for emphasis that it does seem that any bill amending the quota law, as S. 407 and S. 409 propose, should do something about nonpreference aliens of whom over 100,000 that came during and before 1930, and are still coming, there having been probably about 30,000 during the last fiscal year. Under the law, in 1930, the last year before we felt the effects of the temporary depression, and before the consuls began to refuse visas in order to reduce the number of immigrants, which is now being relaxed, the following are the alien admissions for 1930:

Total quota available for Europe and the Near East

150, 414

Total number of visas issued to immigrants from Europe and Near East

First preference (farmers; should be in nonpreference group)
Nonpreference (mostly seeking work).

15, 106

102, 148

The method usually prposed to correct this economic problem is through a reduction in the size of the quotas as authorized in S. 407 or by suspension as in S. 409. These meet with opposition because they reduce in theory, even if not in actual practice, the opportunity for citizens and legally resident aliens to bring in the members of their immediate families. Whether or not quotas are reduced, this economic aspect of immigration could be handled some by a simple change in the present law and the mere insertion in section 6 of the 10 words I suggested excluding 80 percent of nonpreference aliens or new seed immigration having no relatives here.

Reference has been made at this hearing to the discredited so-called Wickersham report on law observance and law enforcement, which the Secretary of Labor has called her "Immigration bible," that has a direct bearing and about which I would like to say a few words. The part of the discredited Wickersham report covering alien deportation and law administration was really merely the finding and recommendation of a Baltimore immigration lawyer, assisted by