The Immigrant And The Community

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE SPECIAL PROBLEMS OF THE IMMIGRANT GIRL Few American women realize that in the past five years more than half a million immigrant girls have come t to the United States to make their own way, to help the fathers and mothers they have left at home, and to see that their younger sisters and brothers are given some of the opportunities which poverty and isolation denied :o them. The nationality and the numbers of the young unmarried women, which the reports of the Commissioner- General of Immigration show have come to the United States during the five years from July i, 1910, to June 30, 1915, are given in the table on page 56. These numbers cannot but fail to be impressive. More than one half a million non-English-speaking girls and women under thirty years of age came during the five- year period, which included one year of the war (1915), and in consequence one year of greatly decreased immigration. Of this number more than a hundred thousand were Polish, and more than 84,000 of these Polish girls were under twenty-onVyears of age. Most American women have never heard of the Ruthenians, the representatives of the Ukrainians, who come from eastern Galicia and Hungary, and yet here are 23,101 of them under twenty-one years of age coming to the UnitedStates — more than the number of the Scandinavian girls whom we know so well. Ages Total 14 to 9 years of age Nationality 14 tO 21 22 to 29 years of age years of age English Speaking English, Scotch, Welsh. . Irish10,828 32,06925,230 21,65245,058 53,721Total51,89746,88298,779Non-english Speaking Bohemian and Moravian Croatian and Slovenian Dutch and Flemish5,489 10,215 2.";oo2,285 4,576 1,9797,774 14,791 4479Finnish6,8864,31311,199French6,5664,48111,047German31,21417,84349,057Greek4.8(112,6227,516Hebrew65,...