To the New York Herald Tribune:
Mr. Criscuolo’s letter in this morning’s Herald Tribune commenting on your recent editorial advocating enrollment of aliens is very wrong in tendency; but it is also very much to the point. It is perfectly true that if there is enrollment of aliens, then we may also, in the interest of consistency, have to have enrollment of citizens. If aliens are to be called upon, at the discretion of officials, for their registration cards, citizens must be given some means of proving that they are not aliens, and so they must presumably provide themselves with registration cards, too.
And so we shall have a full-fledged European police system established almost before we know it the American citizen will be required as he goes from place to place to “show his papers,” quite in the European style. And when that happens the real America will be dead.
The apparently innocent proposal of the Secretary of Labor for enrollment of aliens is, therefore, a very sinister proposal indeed—it is a step in the already alarming bureaucratization of the United States. But fortunately if we do not mistake the signs of the times the American people are becoming increasingly sick of the whole miserable business.
The Secretary thinks that his measure will make for efficiency in the administration of the immigration law. We are not sure whether it will or not. But of one thing we are sure: the enormous growth of government bureaus, in which the measure would be an important step makes not for efficiency but for an almost boundless waste.
And another thing is even vastly more important: it is that an ounce of freedom is worth a pound of efficiency or of material betterment. That is one of the cardinal principles upon which the country is founded. It is a sad thing if in the attempt to defend America against the aliens the real America is destroyed.
J. GRESHAM MACHEN
Princeton, N. J., Dec. 4, 1925.
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