Our Need for Immigrants
To the Editor:
The publication of “Democracy Needs the Open Door” by Professor Handlin in the January COMMENTARY is both timely and useful. For reasons better known than understood, literature in support of the idea of a more liberal immigration policy in the United States has practically ceased to exist. It is important that the public be made aware of the fact that there is another side to the question and that there are sound and important economic and social reasons why a more liberal policy would serve the interests of the United States.
Judge Simon H. Rifkind
New York City
To the Editor:
I have read the article by Professor Handlin with great interest. Everything he says is sound, economically. Yet, unfortunately for the success of the campaign to liberalize immigration, people who think on the subject are still under the influence of the doctrine of Francis A. Walker, that the coming of the immigrants produced a corresponding decline in the natural increase, and that for every million Europeans we took in, we lost a million native born.
We need to grapple with the problem that the United States is seriously under-populated today. Away from the overcrowded cities, life languishes for want of population. To be fully prosperous we should have 300,000,000. And we should welcome the millions of able workers whose upbringing has been paid for abroad.
Alvin Johnson
New York City
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We have received many interesting letters, some lengthy, on Will Herberg’s article “From Marxism to Judaism” in the January issue and Harold Rosenberg’s commentary on it, “Pledged to the Marvelous,” in the February. We will print a selection of these in our next issue, as well as Mr. Herberg’s commentary on Mr. Rosenberg,—Ed.
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