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Friday, June 23, 2023

Importing Cheap Laborers from Japan, China, Italy Will Create Its Own Problems, Warns Editor, June 22, 1923

Cheap Labor

Not being satisfied with one race problem, many thoughtless people in the south are advocating looser immigration laws and the importation of cheap foreign labor to take the place of the Negro who is leaving the Southern plantation to work in Northern industries. One planter thinks he could do wonders on his acres with Japanese; another thinks Chinese would do well; others think Italians would be better still.

None of these advocates of cheap foreign labor seem to know history every well; they ignore all that can be learned from past experience and refuse to look into the future at all. How long do you think cheap foreign labor would stay cheap in America? About as long as it would take the imported laborer to make one good crop.

Japanese, Chinese and Italians are not Negroes. A white man can keep a lot of negroes poor by keeping them forever in debt for unnecessary things. An ignorant Negro maybe persuaded to mortgage his years’ work for a flivver or a phonograph. Not so your Japanese, your Chinese or your Italian. The European and Asiatic will save the greater part of his earnings and buy the land he tills or take his earnings back to his native land. If he is persuaded to come into the south, he will work the Southerner’s land for himself, not for the Southerner. No plantation owner is going to lie back in the shade and live off Mr. European or Mr. Asiatic very long. It would be only a matter of a few years before his sons would be working for this same European and seeking the hand of the buxom, thrifty Italian girl in marriage. About the same time he would begin to lynch the Japs and the Chinaman.

The preservation of the South is not going to be found in foreign labor; the best that is in the South could easily be lost in a generation thru the importation of much foreign labor. The Southerner himself must go to work; we have grown up ignorant and lazy thru a dependence upon ignorant negro labor; we haven’t made the most of our opportunities because we have pursued the false notion that cheap methods of farming were the best methods. One intelligent white farmer in the East, employing one intelligent helper, may make as much net profit off 40 acres as a Southern plantation owner with 20 Negro families will make off a thousand acres. Those big plantation owners who have acquired much wealth have acquired it, not in profits from their agriculture, but from the general enhancement of real estate values.

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trouble until trouble troubles you. We would have no Negro problem if we had kept our hands off Africa. We would have no Japanese problem if we had kept our hands off Japan. The curse of the South to-day is cheap labor; cheap labor cheapens everything, including its employers.

From the editorial page of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., Friday, June 22, 1923, W.O. Saunders, editor.

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