The New York Tribune January 15, 1924 Uncle Sam's Revolving Door By: Rebecca DRUCKER It Operates On ELLIS ISLAND Under The Name Of The Quota Law And Explains Why Many Immigrants Have Nowhere To Go But Back The Dillingham restrictive immigration bill will doubtless live long after its temporary usefulness is over as a classic example of administrative humor. On its face it is a solemn enough document - an impressive mathematical formula with which to stay the avalanche of European immigration that waited to descend upon us with the coming of peace. Three per cent of the number of every foreign group now resident in the country to form the quota of each nationality admitted, nationality to be determined by birth - there were no shadows of ambiguity in that. No one foresaw the humorous possibilities of the formula - that it might one day result in such a situation as was set forth in a news item last week which described the arrival and detention of Aron KALMANOVITCH and his wife, with their eight month old baby, born in Constantinople. The same boat brought Moische SHIPGUEL and his wife, Ida, whose ten month old baby was also born in Constantinople while the family were on their way here. For a short time the cases baffled the officials. The parents, born in Russia, were eligible to enter. The children, born in Constantinople and arriving in excess of the Turkish quota, were not. By a triumphant Gilbertian solution the answer was clear. The parents could come in. The babies would have to be deported. Nor did people foresee the possible absurdity that people might believe themselves to be of one nationality and, by political changes too recent to be understood, belong to another - nor that, the boundaries being vague, the question of what quota they came under might be a deep mystery even to immigration officials themselves. This is all part of the richly humorous aspect of a world turned topsy-turvy by the war. But the humor does not reach these people who come from what deeps of tragic experience, over what strange and terrifying distances, to the brink of a magic freedom - to see a sunlit harbor through the grated windows of the detention quarters at Ellis Island, to be checked off, to receive a severe fumigation and a bath and to be shipped off on the next outgoing steamer. "Why are we here?" they ask in the detention quarter. The steamship ticket? That was honestly paid for. The passport? That is right. The Visas? They are all there - dozens of them to each passport. Health, morals, financial security - all are patiently and with fierce determination established. What is it then? One explains our system of quotas to them, but a mathematical equation is utterly useless to still these passionate inquiries. The fact of the matter is that, though the DILLINGHAM BILL provided a beautiful formula, it provided no machinery for putting the formula through. The snarl of excess quota cases at Ellis Island grows thicker every day. The immigration officials blame the steamship companies for bringing them in, but the steamship company has a smooth and perfectly unassailable alibi to get behind. No steamship ticket can be sold until a passport has been obtained and visa'd at the American consulate of each country. The consular offices of each country apparently have no machinery for combining to know the exact number of visa's they are still free to grant. The situation is complicated by the fact that in two months preceding the passage of the restrictive immigration law there was a stampede all through Europe for passports, and these were visa'd wholesale at all American consulates. The steamship companies are well within their right if they sell passage tickets on these visa's. Of course the law may penalize them for bring over these supernumeraries, it may fine them and charge them with the return of the unwanted aliens. It may censure them publicly, but their moral position remains slightly the more advantageous one. The old days of steamship exploitation are over. Here and there a corrupt steamship official, working with a corrupt government official, may combine to prey on a credulous peasant, but these cases are notably rare. Every immigrant has now some realistic comprhension of what America is - he has put away his childlike notion of an El Dorado. He has a realistic comprehension of the hardships through which he must pass to get to America and grimly provides for all that he can foresee. No; the real tragedy of these excess quota cases is that they are perfectly regular and official tragedies. If the immigrant's elemental, individual sense of justice does not comprehend at all the perfect official justice of his case, he may be excused. He has been hustled along through so many official corridors, he has been inspected and checked and fumigated so many times that it is little wonder that he has nothing but a blank stare left for the most astonishing event of all. If one could penetrate the fright and amazement and misery one might learn much. As, for instancde, where in the first place he finds the money to bring him over. Official fees, visa's, railroad fare - it costs each alien $300 to $400 to come even by steerage. it has cost a deported family of father, mother and three children about $1,000. It costs, reckoned in the money of the land, an untold number of lei or kronen or rubles. It is money for which every stick and stone of property, every dearest possession, has been sold. They do not risk it lightly. They have every assurance that government wax and tape can give them that the way is open before them - until they stub their toes against the final barrier. To what do they go back? "Their cases are too disastrous to talk about," said a welfare worker on the island. "They have sold everything to come here. A great many come with money sent them by their relatives. They have no homes to go back to, and often no friends. They are returned to the port of embarkation, and many of them, not having the money to go from the port to their homes, never get any further than that." It is perhaps not the part of the government to worry what becomes of John WIEZLER, seventy one years old, who arrived on the CARMANIA Nov. 28 to live with a son and daughter who waited for him anxiously. Just what goes on in the soul of the old peasan who has never been out of his village, who sells the farm that has been in the family for centuries to come over half the world to see his children and is turned back on the threshold, is no part of what an immigration official must know. Still, the life of an immigration official these days is not to be envied. The one who had the little snub nosed Jugo Slav boy in tow last Saturday hated his job as much as any man could. The little Jugo Slav wept quietly and wiped his blue eyes with a ragged sleeve, and the official shifted his quid and looked straight ahead and swore steadily, as he led the way to the tug that was to take the boy back. "It's a rotten deal, that's what I call it, that they're handing this kid. Mother and father are Germans, been here all through the war - this is the first chance they've had to send for the kid. It turns out the kid was born in Jugo Slavia - Jugo Slav quota full - can't let him in. Rotten shame, I call it if this country ain't big enough to accommodate one extra kid." The government tug was filled with weeping immigrants. Two girls, pale and pretty frightened, sat holding each other's hands tightly. Their aunt, a woman of some education, gave a fiery account of their plight. She, too, was being sent back. "They are my nieces," she said, Elizabeth and Margaret WEBER. Their father, a well to do cleaner and dyer in Summit, N. J., sent for them and for me. Their mother has taken out her first papers. Before I left Bucharest I asked the consul there to tell me if there was any likelihood of their being turned back. He said there was not. The consul in Havre told me it was impossible that I should be sent back even if the quotas were full because I had been in this country before and had lived here for seven years. I am taking these girls back to their grandfather, who is very poor and is seventy five years old. Their father would have given a bond for $30,000 for their release." A long previous residence in this country is no guaranty of admission to a returning immigrant. Louis FARKAS, who worked as a day laborer in the steel mills of Pennsylvania for nine years, went back to visit his aged father and mother and found the doors shut in his face when he returned - though a wife and family here are waiting for him. But - and this is quite the most painful part of the snarl - the immigration bill has contrived as many surprises for the official as it has for the alien. The clause which says that nationality shall be determined by place of birth has kept the Immigration Bureau in difficulties from the beginning. One of the earliest applications of this ruling, the case of Walter DAVIS, an officer in the British Royal Flying Corps, served to place the Immigration Bureau in an exceedingly ridiculous situation. Davis was born in Egypt, while his father, a soldier, was garrisoned there. The infant, Walter, left Egypt with his parents when he was five years old and never saw it again. Still, he had to be figured as an Egyptian and the Egyptian quota was full. He would have been quietly deported if his loud protests had not brought the manifest absurdity of the situation to the attention of Washington. One of Mr. Davi's pithiest protests is preserved in the archives. "If I had been born in a stable," he asked, "would I be a horse?" And so complete is the confusion, so worldwide and deep is the demoralization of all reasonable gauges for judgment, that it is precisely to that ridiculous standard that the department can cling for safety. It is precisely because the immigration authorities did not recognize the muddle that the newly created national boundaries in Europe have created that it finds itself floundering in its present morass. It did not take into consideration the fact that a Hungarian peasant in the east of what was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire has within the last few years become a Rumanian; that a peasant in the north has become a Czech and one in the south has become a Jugo Slav, and that these newly created or newly inflated states are not fairly represented by quotas based on the existing number of residents. Nor does it take into consideration the fact that in innumerable instances the alien himself does not know that he is now of a different nationality. He is of Hungarian stock, he speaks only Hungarian, and when he wants a passport he tramps stolidly to Budapest. It may be that he is a Czecho-Slovak now and should receive his passport from Prague. The Rumanian and Jugo Slav quotas, for instance, were much later in filling than the Hungarian quota, and the Czecho-Slovakian quota is still unexhausted. It may be that if the alien knew his true national status he would be spared much on entering. His ignorance, however, works disaster on no one more completely than himself. But the peasant of Central Europe is not alone in his ignorance. These large, vague, newly created boundaries all over Europe have left much in doubt. All along the new national lines lie debatable lands, and where a boundary line drives straight through a town even the town officials are hare put to it to judge on which side a man belongs. The aged husband and wife born in villages not five miles apart, who speak one and the same language, may not care much that one is suddenly become an Italian and the other an Austrian. They probably go on speaking the same language and thinking the same thoughts, regardless of the new map of Europe - until they arrive at Ellis Island and find that the doors are open to one and shut to the other. The quotas now exhausted are Africa, Austrailia, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Jugo Slavia, Other Asia Other Europe, Palestine, Poland, Portugal, New Zealand, Spain, Syria and Turkey. A defect in the communications appears to make an immediate stop in the coming of aliens of this nationality impossible. They continue to come in diminishing numbers for weeks and sometimes months after the quotas have been filled. Whether we have any responsibility to these supplicants, whether the Dillingham law can be made elastic enough to include them, is a problem that clamors loudly for solution.