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nothing else; that every Slavic Jewess should become a garment-worker;
that every Italian man should work on the roads; that the Lithuanian
and Hungarian, no matter what their training or their ability, should
be compelled to go into the steel-rolling mills. All this because they
land speaking no English, and not knowing how to place themselves in
occupations better adapted to their inclinations and qualifications.
No one knows how many educated and trained men and women are thus
turned into hewers of wood and drawers of water, to the ruin of their
own lives and the loss of the community.
The unregulated private employment office, the padrone and the
sweat-shop are the agencies who direct the newcomers to jobs, whether
it be in the city or out in the country camp.
Many of the new arrivals would gladly take up agriculture, if they
knew where to go, and were safeguarded against imposition--having a
fee taken, for instance, and then landed several hundred miles away,
penniless, to find all the jobs gone.
The immigrant on landing is very much like the child leaving school to
go to work, and requires vocational guidance just as sorely.
The needs of the alien are closely related to the general question of
unemployment. He suffers in an acute degree from the want of system in
the regularization of industry, and the fact that we have failed
to recognize unemployment, and all irregularity of employment as
a condition to be met and provided against by industry and the
community.
Americans take credit to themselves that so many immigrants do well,
succeed, become prosperous citizens and members of society, but wish
to shoulder none of the blame when the alien falls down by the way, or
lives under such home conditions that his babies die, and his older
children fall out of their grades, drift into the street trades or
find their way into the juvenile court. Americans forget how many of
all these evil results are due to the want of social machinery to
enable the alien to fit into his new surroundings, or the neglect to
set such social machinery agoing where it already exists. In the small
towns it is not unusual for health ordinances to be strictly enforced
in the English-speaking localities, and allowed to remain a dead
letter in the immigrant districts. In Chicago it was in the stockyards
district that garbage was dumped for many years; garbage, the product
of other wards, that the residents of those other wards insis
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