IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue 7398, 26 February 1902, Page 2

IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION.

In the December number of the National Review there is a wellwritten and interesting paper on " The Exclusion of Aliens and Undesirables from Australia and New Zealand." It is from the pen of the Hon. W. P. Reeves, New Zealand's Agent- General, who says that the two main immigration problems are tho inflow of coloured aliens and the nuisance caused by the European practice of shooting moral and physical rubbish into the colonies, and treating them " like waste plots of ground in the environs of cities, where sanitary arrangements are primitive." After a sketch of the history of Chinese immigration, and an explanation of the policy of the Colonial' Office, the Agent-General points out that immi-

grants are to be judged less by lace and colour than by quality. He then treats of the Kanaka question, and ventures the opinion that tke work on the sugar plantations can be done by white men better than by Kanakas. The objection to co'ouied immigrants is that 'dark races living among whites either blend with them or not." They do not bbud in the United States, hence a state of loathing, hatred, and fear; in South and Central America the races mingle, and a mongrel and degraded people is the result. On the question of the pauper, the AgentQtnerpl holds that socialistic democracies have a right to select with oa o those whom they take into partnership. " The prime obj c ot of the Labour patties must be so to shapa lawß and policy that work for all shall be no longer pu ii 7 eal dream, but a tangible reality. If, however, as fast as thi? ia done, the natural migratory law of population defeats the reformers their task is hopeless." The writer declares that if the conditions of modern industry are to be regulated at all, the socalled law of supply aDd demand mu.«t not- be allowod to override ; everything. He sees "no more unreason in trying to protect a country from possible inroads of destitution than in trying to inte:fore wish unrestricted competition in factories, with sweating, with child labour, with truck, with adulteration, with the enjoyment of colored labour,, or with any other of the bad influences which tend to lower the standaid of comfort."