{"value"=>"<p>The Immigration Department was chaired by Jeremiah W. Jenks, Professor of Political Economy and Politics at Cornell University. Two vice-chairmen of the department were Daniel J. Keefe, conservative president and virtual absolute ruler of the International Longshoremen's Association, and the New York banker Isaac Seligman.</p> <p>In December of 1905 a national conference on immigration was held in New York City under the auspices of NCF. The conference was convened by the Executive Council to stimulate study of the effects on particular American geographical regions of the mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The conference consisted of \"representative men\" invited by the Executive Council to attend as delegates from the different geographical areas of the United States. This included regional delegates chosen by senators, congressmen, state governors, and mayors, and delegates selected by the department from a pool of professional men and women involved in education, health, law, religion and welfare. Encouraged by the success of the conference, in August 1906 the Executive Council organized the Immigration Department to look into the problems linked to the current mass immigration. Other studies concerned the swindling of foreign-speaking immigrants by confidence-men; whether immigration served the country's needs; whether the suspension by the United States of trade with China was linked to the illegal importation of Chinese laborers into western states; and the practical methods of distributing immigration to various geographical regions. Although not an object of study by NCF, the question of institutionalized racial and ethnic biases is reflected throughout the files.</p> <p>The files include:</p> <p>General correspondence. The correspondence of 1905 chiefly reflects the preparations for the National Conference on Immigration which included the recruitment of regional delegates and speakers. The correspondence after 1905 consists almost entirely of invitations sent to selected persons living in geographic localities affected by mass immigration to represent their communities as members of the Immigration Department. Although much of the correspondence is routine, there are letters of more than ordinary interest revealing fundamental biases about immigration, or reflecting on timely subjects such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the staunch opposition of organized labor to Chinese immigration; the geographical distribution of immigrant labor; and the competition of southern and western states for Nordic immigrants.</p> <p>Correspondence relating to the activities of the Immigration Department's Committee on Bankers and Ticket Sellers dealing with various schemes to defraud immigrants, and the good-will commission sent to Japan by NCF in 1907. Of particular interest are the letters of the suffragist and historian, Mary Roberts Coolidge, regarding the anti-Chinese bias of workingmen and trade unionists. There are also revealing letters by A.L.C. Atkinson, secretary and Acting-Governor of Hawaii, concerning the need to \"Americanize\" the islands of Hawaii as a means of making certain that they would not be \"Orientalized\". Other important correspondents are Eliot Norton (legal counsel to the Society of Italian Immigrants and a member of the Immigration Department's Special Committee on Bankers and Ticket-Sellers); Oscar Phelps Austin (Bureau of Statistics); the Austrian Immigrant Protective Society; William H. Allen; The American Tract Society; John Willis Baer; John R. Commons; Charles W. Eliot; the Immigration Restriction League; S.A. Hughes (Immigration Agent of the St. Louis & San Francisco Railroad Company); the Labor Information Office for Italians; W.D. Mahon (Amalgamated Association of Street & Electric Railway Employees of America); the lawyer, Gino Speranza, who defended Italian mineworkers; and Robert Watchorn (Commissioner of Immigration Service at Ellis Island).</p> <p>Miscellaneous papers including the minutes of the National Conference on Immigration of 1905, and speeches made at the conference; government documents of an investigation of the smuggling of Chinese laborers into Southern California; reports and affidavits on enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; letters, statements, and affidavits concerning an investigation into Chinese affairs in Boston in 1902-1904, along with suggestions on procedures to be followed in cases of criminal exploitation of illegal Chinese immigrants; investigators' dossiers on Chinese interpreters who were illegal aliens, and on Immigration Inspectors who had been convicted of blackmailing immigrants and other violations; material relating to alleged misconduct of immigration officials and law enforcement agents in New York City; investigation reports on the exploitation of immigrants by fake bankers, steamship ticket agents, and other confidence schemes; and other records concerning Chinese immigration, especially in New York City and Southern California.</p>"}