David S. Jordan to Woodrow Wilson

Will you kindly permit me a word as to the anti–alien land bills now before the legislature of California? The motif of the proposed legislation seems to be the desire of the individuals to make political capital by nagging the Japanese. This comes up in some form with every Legislature.

The “gentleman’s agreement of 1907” has been rigidly enforced in Japan. No Japanese laborers have come here for six years and none to British Columbia, Mexico, or Hawaii. The number of Japanese does not increase. They are for the most part, with some unfortunate exceptions, quiet, industrious, clean and law–abiding people. Their ownership of land involves no visible “menace” to anyone, and they are quite as “assimilable” as most of the people from Southern Europe. In view of the coming exposition, and in view of the exigencies of fair play there is every reason, I think, for letting well enough alone.

There is a strong feeling, which I share, against unchecked immigration of unskilled laborers from Japan or China. We do not want to see on the coast a stratification of labor, with a bottom layer of workmen underpaid because Asiatic ––Asiatic because underpaid. But there is no question of this sort at present.

I take it that any and all statutes of the state directed against Japanese or Chinese by name, or through the cheap subterfuge of “aliens not eligible to become citizens” are unconstitutional. No state has any right to deal with a foreign nation except through the federal government. No state can deal directly with the people of a foreign government as such nor with any group of them as members of another nationality.

A state must, I take it, treat all aliens alike, for aliens in the United States are, in a sense “wards of the nations”, and derive their rights of travel or residence primarily from international treaties.

It may be that these proposed California statutes will assume the form of prohibition of land–ownership by all aliens.

This raises a large question of policy, and there is something to be said on either side. But in view of the large and undefined amount of British capital invested in lands, power plants and railways in California, it is not a matter to be decided offhand, and as a side–issue to a petty anti–Japanese crusade.

I think that the State Department is wise in not dictating to the California Legislature. Mr. Roosevelt lost some points of advantage some years ago by over–emphasis. No one can say that a treaty has been violated or that rights under the federal constitution have been infringed until the courts have so decided.