Some Immigrant Neighbors
9781465652423
118 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Since we are going to study about “Some Immigrant Neighbors,” it is well to know just what we mean by the words “Immigrant” and “Neighbor.” Immigrant. The word Immigrant is confusing because it looks and sounds so much like the word “Emigrant,” but they are quite different. An Immigrant is one who comes into a country, generally with the intention of settling there. An Emigrant is one that goes out of a country, with the intention of settling in some other land. The people we are to study are the Immigrants who have come, and are coming, into America. Neighbor. Every one knows the meaning of the word neighbor. A neighbor is one who lives near another, across the street, or next door, or maybe in our own village or town. If you live in a large city it is not so easy to feel that the people who live near you are your neighbors. It was much easier years ago, when all that are now cities were only towns and villages, and many cities now well known were simply prairie with waving grass and flowers, roamed over by bands of Indians and trampled by the hoofs of countless bison. The word neighbor has a larger meaning than merely one who lives near another. There is a wonderful description of a neighbor, given by One who is the World’s Good Neighbor. He tells of the traveler who found a stranger lying by the roadside, wounded and helpless. At personal inconvenience and expense the traveler cared for the half dead man, and continued his aid until the stranger was again able to care for himself. We shall have gained a great deal from the study of this book, if we learn not only to look on these immigrants as neighbors, those who live near us, but if we seriously ask ourselves how we may be Good Neighbors to the strangers from across the sea. The Neighbors to be Studied. We are not going to talk about all of the thirty-nine races of immigrants that are separately listed by our government, but only about four of them. Some one says, “I hope you will tell about the ones I like.” Well, we hope before we are through you will like the ones we shall tell about, and we are sure you will, for you will be better acquainted, and it is wonderful how much more likable the immigrant is when you know him. Numbers. Although we are to study only Chinese, Jews, Russians and Italians, 333,694 of these four classes of immigrants landed in America in 1911; 920,299, almost a million, landed in the three years last past, and that is a large falling off as compared with some previous periods. In 1911 the Jews and Italians numbered thirty-five out of every hundred that came. You see that while we discuss but four classes, two of these are more than one-fourth of all that come. These numbers may suggest very little to us, but how they would have startled the fathers of our country. The warlike Miles Standish, or, in later years, the peppery Peter Stuyvesant, would have declared no such numbers could be brought across the sea in a year. The only ships our fathers knew were small wooden sailing vessels like our coasting schooners; the giant, floating hotels that we call steamships, that carry a big village every trip, were not dreamed of in those days. The sailing vessel took weeks and months to make the voyage; now we can reckon, almost to the hour, the time of the arrival of a great liner.
