Thread 514833200

>from The San Francisco call, February 01, 1910

Turn Back the Hindu Invasion

THE importation of Hindu coolies apparently proceeds in large volume. Every steamer from the orient brings a load of these highly undesirable people, most of whom are quite likely to become a public burden. They do not fit into the domestic or social economy of this country. As laborers they are inferior and any severity of climate incapacitates them from work. They are, in fact, the product of generations of lazy life under the tropics.

We do not know how or why these people have been induced to come to California. We can understand that certain powerful influences which desire to introduce the cheapest kind of labor may have been brought to bear, but now that public attention has been directed to the influx by The Call it may be hoped that some means may be found to stop it. The Hindus are not wanted in California. They are not wanted in any part of the United States.

It is a cruel kindness to bring these unfortunate people to this country. They are wholly unfitted for the strenuous life of the temperate zone and they are further handicapped by silly notions about caste and the special preparation of food in accord with caste rules. They are brought here to serve a selfish purpose, and they die off like flies in the cold season.

We have more Asiatics now in this country than is desirable, and the Hindus are the least useful and the most inefficient of the lot. They are dirty and quarrelsome as well as worthless in the field of labor.

Nobody wants these people in California except John P. Irish, Harrison Gray Otis and their corporal’s guard of followers. Their introduction is a menace to American civilization and it must be stopped. What sort of mongrel community is this, our California, like to become if these unassimilable breeds are to be permitted to occupy the labor field? We have fought the Chinese and the Japanese invasions with more or less success, but now we are threatened with something worse. If the immigration laws are not strong enough to hold off the incoming tide they must be strengthened, and in the meantime the officials of this port will be held strictly to account for a rigid enforcement of the laws as they stand.

>Detroit Times, September 20, 1910

HINDUS CONTINUE TO FLOCK TO U.S.

No Effort Made at Frisco to Stop Entry of Undesirables, Although Other Ports Bar Them.

The dumping place for the scum of the orient and India is San Francisco. From this port the scum is distributed throughout California, Washington and Oregon.

The scum of the orient is the Hindu. Dirty, diseased, with yards of filthy white, green or blue cotton wound around his head, the Hindu stalks through the streets of the coast cities. He is the worst type of immigrant. He is not averse to night citizen. His very mode of life makes him entirely foreign to the people of the United States, yet thanks to the leniency of the immigration commissioner at the port of San Francisco, Hart H. North, this class of undesirables is flocking by the hundreds into the United States, through San Francisco, with the arrival of every boat from the orient.

Why? Because the importation of the Hindu fits in well with the general scheme of the railroads, the big manufacturing plants and big business, to down labor on the coast. If a corporation can get a Hindu to work for $1.50 a day, what’s the use of paying twice that for an American? No, not all, is the answer of the corporations, and so the Hindus continue to arrive in San Francisco. Some of them are deported to their native land as criminals, but the big majority remain here to work for the railroads or the labor unions.

But the great danger is not so much these who are here; it is those who are coming. India is a large country. It is teeming with a population of over 300,000,000 millions of emaciated, sickly Hindus who are living, or rather existing, on starvation wages. Therefore, the reports from the United States of huge wages to be earned, compared to those paid in their country, has resulted in a steady influx of these orientals which promises to result in a problem harder to solve than that of the Chinese or the Japanese.

In India a clerk can be had for $10 a month; a man cook for $3 a month; a maid servant for $1 a month; carpenters, bricklayers, etc., 33 cents a day, etc. The scale of wages is less for a day’s work in India than the average American mechanic or laborer receives per hour.

These are the people who are flooding the west, the people that the railroads are welcoming with open arms and furnishing employment because they help them solve the problem of the high American workman starvation wages.

Charges have been made against the commission on immigration at San Francisco. These charges have resulted in nothing. Demands have been made that the port be closed to the Hindus as the other ports of the Pacific coast, on the ground that the Hindu is apt to become a public charge and that he practices polygamy. But although this has been found sufficient to stop their entry in other coast ports they continue to flock to San Francisco, where they are distributed around the country in railroad camps, vineyards, foundries, etc.

When the legislature of California convenes at the next session there will be a big row over the Hindu. Not only will the labor party demand that they be excluded but they will also demand that laws be passed prohibiting Asiatics from owning land within the state. California tried to stop Asiatic immigration when it faced the Japanese problem, but the federal government demanded that it be allowed to cope with the situation.

But since the federal government failed to stop that which the laborer thinks a menace to them and their families, they are out to take matters in their own hands and fight it to the bitter end—either to victory or defeat.

An excerpt from American lexicographer Noah Webster's "History of Animals" regarding the "Hindoo race":
>They are an effeminate, cowardly people, and have always been conquered when invaded, by the more hardy natives of the north. They make poor soldiers, but good slaves. Such is the character of the Hindoos