Abilene Weekly Reflector

SHADY IMMIGRATION

Report of Robert Watchorn, a Special Immigrant Inspector.

UNFIT PERSONS GET INTO AMERICA

Any One That Can "Walk Off a Ship" Can Get into Canadian Ports and Then Walk Across the Border into the United States.

Washington, Oct. 30.-Commissioner General Sargent, of the immigration bureau, yesterday made public a report from Robert Watchorn, special immigrant inspector, dated Paris, France, August 22, 1902. on the immigration of the United States by way of Canada. Mr. Watchorn says that Europeans who obviously are ineligible to enter the United States for several years have been directed by agents to Canadian ports with a view to effecting a surreptitious entrance into the United States across the international boundary. Intending immigrants, who, by reason of some disqualification, are rejected by the lines running to United States ports, are turned over to lines running to Canada and, with a few exceptions, they are accepted without question. Thousands every year thus find their way to Canada, thence to the United States.

Mr. Watchorn says: "Every steamship agent alludes to the fact that the United States immigration laws are now being strictly enforced there and in consequence the Canadian route is carnestly recommended as one where anyone is accepted who is capable of 'walking off the ship,' a statement which is invariably coupled with a gratuitous lesson in northern American geography, designed to impress on the emigrant's mind the cheering information that Montreal is a border city, from which a walk across the border is a very easy matter, unattended by any inconvenience whatever, there being no inspection of immigrants at said border.

"The efficient work of the immigration officials at New York and other ports of the United States not only tends to make a farce of the commendable scrutiny exercised at the Belgian, Holland and German ports, but serves to stimulate the work of the unprincipled and mercenary list of European steamship passenger agents who regularly send to Canada not only those whose admission to United States port is open to doubt, or those whose admission is known to be impossible, but also those who have been actually denied admission at a United States port and who have been duly deported therefrom according to law. So important a matter has this shady emigration become in certain Italian and Swiss towns that a score of agents exist where a nominal traffic could scarcely justify the maintenance of a single agency."

In conclusion the report urges that all roads into the United States be made equally straight and narrow.