Iniquity

The Immigration Law is a universal target for abuse on account of the hardships which, in particular cases, it imposes upon immigrants. As a law, it probably produces little more hardships and injustice than most other laws, but because its inflictions have the merit of comparative novelty, they make good material for newspaper publicity. There are few better examples of the kind of stories which the law produces than this, an account of an incident which culminated last week at Ellis Island: A man of German birth, resident of the U. S. and possessor of his first citizenship papers, decided to import his wife and five children from Germany. They came. The five offspring were admitted as Germans. The mother was denied entrance because she had been born aboard a Dutch ship in the port of Antwerp, and the Dutch quota for 1923-1924 was exhausted. Perforce the mother retired to troubled Europe. But she left the children in this country, in the motherless care of a father, because at some future time when she returns to America--in a Dutch quota--there might not be an unfilled German quota to accommodate her children.