Theodore Roosevelt on immigration
So what did one of the four presidents on Mount Rushmore think about immigration? I have personally verified all of the quotes and their sources.
On 1 February 1916, for example, Roosevelt advocated measures for strengthening and ensuring the "loyalty" of American immigrants:
"Let us say to the immigrant not that we hope he will learn English, but that he has got to learn it. Let the immigrant who does not learn it go back. He has got to consider the interest of the United States or he should not stay here. He must be made to see that his opportunities in this country depend upon his knowing English and observing American standards. The employer cannot be permitted to regard him only as an industrial asset.
"We must in every way possible encourage the immigrant to rise, help him up, give him a chance to help himself. If we try to carry him he may well prove not well worth carrying. We must in turn insist upon his showing the same standard of fealty to this country and to join with us in raising the level of our common American citizenship.
"If I could I would have the kind of restriction which would not allow any immigrant to come here unless I was content that his grandchildren would be fellow-citizens of my grandchildren. They will not be so if he lives in a boarding house at $2.50 per month with ten other boarders and contracts tuberculosis and contributes to the next generation a body of citizens inferior not only morally and spiritually but also physically."1
A few months later, Roosevelt expanded on this theme in a series of Memorial Day speeches he delivered in St. Louis:
"The effort to keep our citizenship divided against itself," the colonel continued, "by the use of the hyphen and along the lines of national origin is certain to a breed of spirit of bitterness and prejudice and dislike between great bodies of our citizens. If some citizens band together as German-Americans or Irish-Americans, then after a while others are certain to band together as English-Americans or Scandinavian-Americans, and every such banding together, every attempt to make for political purposes a German-American alliance or a Scandinavian-American alliance, means down at the bottom an effort against the interest of straight-out American citizenship, an effort to bring into our nation the bitter Old World rivalries and jealousies and hatreds."2
Likewise, on 27 May 1918, Roosevelt urged in a speech at Des Moines, Iowa, that English be the sole language of instruction used in American schools:
In voicing his approval of the recent proclamation by Gov. Harding, ordering that English be the only medium of instruction in public or private schools in Iowa, Col. Roosevelt said:
"This is a nation