EMPIRE MIGRATION

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIV, Issue 97, 7 April 1934, Page 8

EMPIRE MIGRATION

Investigation of Schemes DISCUSSION IN ENGLAND Another reference in the House of Commons recently to Empire development and migration shows that there is a section of the House intent on keeping this subject before the public. Mr. Levy, Conservative member for Eiland, called attention to the distribution of the population of the British Empire and asked that the report on migration and settlement prepared by a departmental committee should be presented at the earliest possible moment. Mr. Levy said that, apart from the question of finding work for the unemployed, he was convinced that the spirit of adventure was not; dead, and that a number of young men and women now in employment in Great Britain would be quite prepared to go abroad, provided opportunities were available. The various schemes of overseas settlement lacked a business outlook. Imperial commissions should be appointed to survey on the spot the possibilities of each Dominion, colony or dependency. Such commissioners should consist, rot of politicans, but of farmers, surveyors, financiers, transport experts and so forth. Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, Undersecretary for the Dominions, assured the House that the proposals put forward by Mr. Levy would be taken fully into consideration by the interdepartmental committee which for the past year had been investigating the migration problem. There was a general agreement that existing economic conditions in the Dominions made it unlikely that the Dominions would welcome new imigrants at present. The committee was considering what principles should be adopted and what machinery should be employed when migration became again a practical proposition. That was simply the first stage in the working out of a policy. As noon as the committee had finished its work its report would be submitted by the Secretary of State to various voluntary societies and others interested, so as to obtain their views, but before a policy was finally decided upon the Dominion Governments would have to be consulted. What the Government was seeking was an agreed policy between the Dominions and themselves, because no migration eould be a success unless it was a co-operative effort entered into between the Dominion authorities anu the authorities at home. In the scheme drawn up by Sir Henry Page Croft it was suggested that it would bo possible to settle 40,000 families in ten years. That worked out at something like 160,000 individuals. During the < ecade immediately before the war, 2,168,507 persons proceeded from Great Britain to fhe Dominions and they were practically all settled by the infiltration process. In the ten years immediately following the passing of the Empire Settlement Act after the war 1,801,924 persons proceeded overseas. Therefore, he urged the House to disabuse themselves of the idea that people who advocated settlement by infiltration were lukewarm about the idea of migration. Tho question of marketing wag fundamental to tho whole question of migration. If the demand for Empire goods could be increased, then that would bo an excuse for encouraging more producers to go to the Dominions to satisfy that demand. At Ottawa it had been tried to get agreements to create conditions which would encourage a greater demand for Empire goods in the Empire markets, and these efforts had not succeeded.