TABLE NO. 1.-Citizenship of foreign-born white population by countries of birth, and quotas that would be available under per cents specified: Population (Table No. 1) based on census of 1910, and naturalization (Table No. 2) based on census of 1920-Continued.

TABLE NO. 2.-Citizenship of foreign-born white population by countries of birth, and quotas that would be available under per cents specified: Population (Table No. 1) based on census of 1910, and naturalization (Table No. 2) based on census of 1920. [NOTE.-The 3 per cent quota column in Table No. 1 shows the quotas under the present law and will serve for purposes of comparing the current quotas with those shown in this table.]

TABLE NO. 2.-Citizenship of foreign-born white population by countries of bequotas that would be available under per cents specified: Population (Table N based on census of 1910, and naturalization (Table No. 2) based on census of 1.Continued.

1 Egypt, Danzig, Esthonia, Fiume, Iceland, Latvia, included in totals.

The CHAIRMAN. Representative Cable has submitted a paper fr Dr. John M. Gillman, of the University of Pittsburgh. If there is : objection it will be laid aside and be printed in connection with t one we have authorized to be submitted by Doctor Jennings of Johns Hopkins, and the two will be by themselves.

Mr. CABLE. Í read that article in the paper, and wrote to get the information.

(The papers referred to are as follows:)

Hon. JOHN L. CABLE,

Washington, D. C.

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH,
SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION,
Pittsburgh, Pa., December 18, 1927

MY DEAR SIR: I take pleasure in reply to your request of the 17th, to forward to you a copy of my study of Doctor Laughlin's Report on Social Inadequacies in the United States.

If in any way I can be of further service to you, I shall be only too glad to re called upon.

Sincerely yours,

JNO. M. GILLMAN.

STATISTICS AND THE IMMIGRATION PROBLEM.

On November 21, 1922, Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, staff member of the eugenics record office of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D. C., and "expert eugenics agent" of the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization of the House of Representatives, appeared before that committee with the results of a study which he had made on the "individual physical, mental, and moral quality, and more particularly the potentiality of the immigrant as a parent of desirable Americans of the future."

As a basis for this study he had taken "the occurrence of the degree of specific degeneracy within the several nativity and racial groups of the United States,' as revealed by an enumeration "of the inmates of the custodial institutions of the several States and of the Federal Government." 112 Ten such degeneracies, or "social inadequacies," were subjected to this analysis; as follows: (1) Feeblemindedness; (2) insanity; (3) crime; (4) epilepsy; (5) inebriety (including drug habitues); (6) disease (including tuberculosis, syphilis, leprosy, and other chronic infections and legally separable diseases); (7) blindness; (8) deafness; (9) deformity (including cripples and ruptured); and (10) dependents (including ne'er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps and paupers).2

In this investigation Doctor Laughlin claims to have found " a measure of degeneracy which characterizes the several nativity groups of the United States." "The differences in institutional ratios, by races and nativity groups, found by these studies" he asserts "represent real differences in social values, which represent, in turn, real differences in inborn values of the family stocks from which the particular inmates have sprung. These degeneracies and hereditary handicaps are inherent in the blood." He further asserts that "making all logical allowances for environmental conditions, which may be unfavorable to the immigrant, the recent immigrants, as a whole, present a higher percentage of inborn socially inadequate qualities an do the older stocks."55 It goes without saying, therefore, that not the adequacy of the individual, but that of his family race or nationality becomes the test of his admissibility into the United States. Now, these conclusions are of serious import. They may go far in shaping our immigration policy of the near future. It is upon such evidence, for instance that rests the major part of the argument for changing the base year of our percentum immigration law from 1910 to 1890. Greater assurance of their validity might, therefore, be sought than the mere testimony of the chairman of the committee that he had examined Doctor Laughlin's "data and charts" and had found them "both biologically and statistically thorough, and apparently sound." In fact, even a casual perusal of the "Hearings" will raise very serious doubts as to the soundness of both the statistical methods used and the biological premises implied. For instance, as a biologist, does Doctor Laughlin really care to go on record as claiming that deformity can be proven a race characteristic and racially heritable. Is the state of being an orphan hereditary? But it is not necessary here to enter upon a detailed analysis of Doctor Laughlin's biological implications. Primarily Doctor Laughlin's is a statistical study. It is a study of "data and charts." And when examined in the light of the very elementary principles of statistics it is found that Doctor Laughlin has built upon three very doubtful premises, namely:

I. That an enumeration of these institutions, and particularly the enumeration as conducted by himself, sufficiently reveals the proportionate occurrence of these inadequacies among the various race and nativity groups.

II. That the data as gathered disclose significant differential occurrences among the various races and nationalities.

III. That the mere occurrence of an inadequacy within a group of individuals of a given race or nativity is a valid proof of the existence of susceptibilities toward the inadequacy as an inborn racial quality, Doctor Laughlin's fundamental biological assumption.

* *

I.-A. Sufficient ground exists to doubt that "a statistical survey of the race or nationality of the inmates of the custodial institutions of the several States and of the Federal Government" "most accurately and profitably reveals the "occurrence of the degree of specific degeneracy within the several

Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, 67th Congress, Third Session, Nov. 21, 1922, p. 729. The Report, as Serial 7-C, was released by the Superintendent of Documents in July, 1923.

* Page 730; Page 733; Page 752; Page 755;

6

Page 748; 7 Page 731.

nativity and racial groups of the United States."8 For instance, Doctor Laughlin himself admits "that only about 5 per cent of the feeble-minded persons needing custodial care are actually receiving it from their respective States. The rest remain in the care of their own families * * * 59 Obviously, those families which by virtue of their better economic status can take care of their feeble-minded at home will be most inadequately represented in the statistics of the institutions for the feeble-minded. Without seeking further proof, it may be confidently asserted that these would generally be the families of the older American and earlier immigrant stocks, who in the course of a longer sojourn in this country have established themselves in economic competence. Conversely, poorer families, economically speaking, will have relatively larger proportionate institutional representation. In general these are the families of our more recent immigrants.

That this would hold true with varying proportions in the case of most of the remaining inadequacies is a foregone conclusion. The more economically competent will take care of their own insane, their epileptics, their deaf, their blind, their deformed, their orphans, etc., either within the family circle or in private sanitaria. On the other hand, the inadequates from among the foreign born and economically less able families will become inmates of our custodial institutions in apparently disproportionate numbers.

B. But besides this fundamental fallacy Doctor Laughlin further qualifies the soundness of his enumeration

a. Through an unrepresentative territorial selection of his data, and

b. Through a misinterpretation of these data in terms of an arbitrarily determined "quota.'

(a) At the time of the survey, 10 in 1921, there were 657 State and Feders! custodial institutions in the continental United States. Doctor Laughlin's study is based on information received from only 445 of these. A complete statistical census of all the institutions taken in 1916 showed a total inmate population of 394,991. Doctor Laughlin's inventory of the 445 institutions in 1921 yielded only 210,835 inmates, or a little over 50 per cent of the 1916 figures. Now, for diagnostic purposes, this sample of 50 per cent of the cases is quite acceptable. But for a racial-nativity analysis a sample to be acceptable must first be statistically weighted in accordance with the racial heterogeneity of our States.

As is well known, our foreign-born population, especially the immigrants of the last 30 to 40 years, are concentrated in our industrial States. The per cent of foreign born in the population of North Carolina, according to the census of 1920, was 0.3; of Rhode Island it was 28.7, to take the two extremes. Under the circumstances Doctor Laughlin's data should have been "corrected" for this selective factor in the enumeration, as well as for the age and sex distribution of each nativity group and for each of the various States. One or two examples will illustrate the point.

In the first two columns of Table I, which follows, are arranged the 48 States and the District of Columbia in order of the per cent proportion of their foreignborn population as of 1920. In the last two columns are shown the States for which Doctor Laughlin failed to secure data for the feeble-minded and the insane. A comparison of the four columns readily discloses the fact that as many as 16 of the 24 States lowest in percentage, but only 8 of the 24 States highest in percentage of foreign born were omitted in the enumeration of the feeble-minded, and that 7 of the lowest 24 States, with 15,555 inmates, and 5 of the highest 24, with only 3,094 inmates, were omitted in the enumeration of the insane. Not that these omissions were intentional for, as noted above, not all the institutions circularized returned the desired information. But the native proportion of the omitted feeble-minded of the 16 States, and the corresponding proportion of the omitted 15,555 insane of the 7 States, if added to the inadequates credited by Doctor Laughlin to the "native" group would appreciably decrease their relatively favorable standing."1

8 Page 730.

9 Page 736.

10 Page 734.

11 It should be noted also that not all the States institutionalize their inadequates to the same extent, and the States which provide least institutional care for their inadequates are among the most "native" States: that is, the States below the Mason and Dixon line.

1 The leaders (-) and figures indicate the States omitted. The figures are for the inmates as enumerated in 1916.

12

To obviate this criticism Doctor Laughlin proposes to test the representativeness of his data by means of the "probable error. The probable error is a mathematically determined quantity which indicates the limits within which a given statistical constant would fluctuate if more or larger samples of the groups of facts measured were taken. For instance, suppose we wished to determine the average height of a student body of an institution with an enrollment of 6,000. The statistician need not measure the height of every one of the 6,000 students. He would merely measure at random such student groups as the largest class in freshman English, the largest class in sophomore political science, the largest class in junior economics, and the largest class in senior social ethics. He would thus secure a set of measurements, say, of only 600, or 10 per cent of all the students. Say further that the computed average, or mean, amounted to 67 inches; also that P. E.-10.5. This on the basis of the mathematical theory of probabilities means that if he had measuerd every one of the 6,000 students the chances are even that the calculated mean would still have been found to lie between 66.5 and 67.5 inches-that is, 67±0.5 inches. But supposing, on the other hand, that as many as 50 per cent of the freshmen only were measured, and the average of, say, 65 inches obtained. A P. E. would be meaningless as indicative of the limits of the mean of the whole of the student population. The logical fact would remain that the mean height of freshmen can not be taken to represent the stature of the upperclassmen, no more than it can be taken to measure their own ultimate height when they reach the sophomore, junior, and senior years. So it is with the case at hand. An enumeration of the institutionalized inmates of the States with relatively large foreign-born populations can not be taken as representing fairly the race and nativity distributions of inmates in institutions of States where the population is mostly native. The probable error measures the limits of the mathematical values of statistical samples only in the case when the samples are drawn from a homogeneous mass of data. As a matter of fact, after he obtains his provable errors, Doctor Laughlin proceeds promptly to neglect them in his analysis. The reason, of course, is clear. Doctor Laughlin was told by one of his colleagues 13 that a finding should be at least two or three times larger than its P. E. in order to be satis

13 Loc. cit., page 734.

Page 772-773.

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