Ed-' the uprooted peoples While half the world lacks labor to work its waste areas millions of landless people look for a new home By DOROTHY THOMPSON New York. FEW days ago, Percy J.. Clarey, president of the Australasian Council of Trade Unions declared at the meeting of the International Labor Organization in Philadelphia, that Australia, with a territory as large as the United States and a population of 7,000,000, would find it difficult at all times to defend herself unless she would reconsider after the war ends, her policy of strict immigration control. Mr. Clarey therewith unrolled one of the great geo-political problems of the world and one of the most pressing of human postwar problems. The British Commonwealth of sovereign nations containing Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada, occupies 7,500,-000 square miles in climates favorable for European settlement and contains in 'all populations of less than 31,000,000. New Zealand, for instance, climatically a paradise, covering 113,000 square miles, as large as Kansas and Indiana together, has a population of only 1,600,000, as contrasted with the 5,250,000 in these two American states. The British Commonwealth apart from the United Kingdom, Is two and a half times the area of the United States and has less than a fourth our population. Estimates as to how many people these areas could absorb vary, but no one doubts that they could support many times the present inhabitants. 'J HE relative feeling of weakness of the British, which repeatedly comes out in speeches such as the recent one of General Smuts, is founded on nothing but lack of population. In the English-speaking world there has been but one United States, and that phenomenon was created by generations of open immigration. Who doubts that that experiment of the Nineteenth Century can be repeated, and under more favorable circumstance on the basis of our experience? Mr. Berle recently expressed some hardly veiled apprehensions regardipg the internal, biological expansion of the peoples of the Soviet Union. For generations experts have been worrying about the declining white race. Meanwhile, exclusive of Russia, there are over three hundred million people crowded into that little peninsula of Asia, called Europe, millions of them' anxious to found new homes elsewhere, yet with the outlets all but closed not only within the British Commonwealth but in Latin-America and other sparsely populated areas. In this moment the discussion centers around the European Jews. The War Refugee Board, set up January 22 to rescue these and others in imminent danger of slaughter and to find havens, permanent or temporary for them somewhere, is dealing with the problem. Until the immigration quota of 22,000, still open for immigration into Palestine is exhausted, they will be sent there, and a Turkish ship, the S. S. Tari will shortly sail from Constanta to Turkey, carrying the first 1,500. But thereafter temporary havens must be found elsewhere, and it has been suggested that since all action depends on U. S. leadership, we must also furninh an example, and our authorities will be asked to open camps, so-called free ports, for their temporary haven. If these temporary havens for what are, in fact, enforced migrations, are simply internment camps, we will not be on our way toward any solution of the problem. But we "could begin constructively to meet it. The Jewish problem, though the most acute. Is only a small sector of the whole problem of mass migrations unexampled in centuries. JN THE modern world all re-settlements involve a problem of retraining. New countries need people with a pioneering spirit and welcome in the first line tho willing and able to till the soil. OH countries, on the other hand, have a surplus population in professional and business occupations and these are most inclined and encouraged to emigrate. But the Palestinian experiment has decisively proved that people who have never been connected with the land, can and will retrain themselves to csrry on a high and successful agriculture, provided that that is the way opportunity and security he, and provided colonization is based upon cooperative settlements. I cannot see why temporary havens, here and elsewhere, should not be used immediately for such retraining. It ought to be possible to establish great co-operative farms, for training and practice in all the general and special skills connected with agriculture, including carpentering, painting, the mechanics necessary to maintain and repair farm machinery as well as village crafts. Opportunity ought to be opened for the inhabitants of such "havens' to support themselves. Individuals with such training in pioneering pursuits and crafts would find readier welcome in underpopulated countries, and find it easier to support themselves later in dignity. The postwar period will demand imagination coupled with expert knowledge and of all the problems requiring both, the problem of again turning human beings from being social liabilities into social assets is the greatest. The earlier we begin to tackle it, the better.
