TR’s morally balanced approach to immigration

In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a private letter criticizing a restrictive resolution on Japanese immigrants recently passed by the California legislature: “The California legislature would have had an entire right to protest as emphatically as possible against the admission of Japanese laborers, for their very frugality, abstemiousness and clannishness make them formidable to our laboring class, and you may not know that they have begun to offer a serious problem in Hawaii—all the more serious because they keep an entirely distinct and alien mass.” TR also points out that the Japanese do not permit any foreigners to own land in Japan, “and where they drawn one kind of a sharp line against us, they have no right whatever to object our drawing another kind of a line against them.” He would not have objected to the California legislature passing a resolution “courteous and proper in its terms, which would really have achieved the object they were after. But I do object to, and feel humiliated by, the foolish offensiveness of the resolution they passed.” [Letter, May 6, 1905, to George Kennan, The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, edited by H.W. Brands, NY, Cooper Square Press, 2001, p. 380.]

Here is a morally and intellectually balanced man. Roosevelt is saying that we have every right to keep out foreigners if we don’t like their effect on our society, but at the same time he shows that he respects them as human beings and insists that they be treated respectfully. We more modern Americans have lost the moral soundness of a TR. We feel the only way we can show our respect to prospective immigrants is to hand over our society to them; anything short of that is a manifestation of hatred.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 08, 2002 02:36 PM | Send