Great Britain has a law that requests that all aliens be registered. Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the new home secretary, announces that 272,000 are at present so registered. It is proposed to maintain a close supervision of these aliens and if any are found violating the law of the land, they are to be tried, and if convicted are to be deported.
The British government has a theory that alien people in the British Isles must show that their presence promotes the good of the country, first, last and all the time. So long as they behave themselves they will not be interfered with, but lawbreakers are to be persona non grata, and are to be shipped to the country from which they came.
The eminent wisdom of such a policy is at once apparent. Aliens in a nation are there only on sufferance and when they become a social nuisance and a public expense, the reasonable thing is to withdraw the privileges of residence and send them away.
A bill is now before Congress which provides for the registration of all aliens, a requirement at once reasonable and proper. Every citizen is registered, why not aliens?
Secretary of Labor Davis asserts that many thousands of people get into the country surreptitiously every year. They are here in direct violation of the law and have no right within our borders. They are here as the result of what he calls “immigrant bootlegging.” Registration would identify these persons and enable officials to enforce our present immigration laws.
It is a notorious fact, also, that much of our crime is committed by people of foreign birth, most of whom are not citizens.
Dr. William J. Mayo, one of the famous Mayo brothers, surgeons, of Rochester, Minnesota, is quoted as saying:
“The native American of Anglo-Saxon blood is a water drinker by nature. The bootleggers and traffikers in illicit liquor are usually of continental European blood.”
If this is correct it is an additional reason for demanding the registration of aliens.
We may well follow the excellent example of our British cousins and say to the foreigners within our gates: every inhabitant of this country, whether citizen or not, is under obligation to obey the laws. While you do so, you are welcome to the privileges of this nation, but when you violate those laws, you prove yourself unworthy of this opportunity. We don’t want you here and we shall send you back from whence you came.
Such a law, drastically and impartially enforced, would go a long way toward quelling the riot of lawlessness that is attaining astounding proportions. This is the believe of many civic leaders.
From page 9 of The Sandhill Citizen, Southern Pines, N.C., Friday, January 2, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92061634/1925-01-02/ed-1/seq-9/#words=JANUARY+2%2C+1925
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