Six of the ten districts of the United Charities had foreign-speaking visitors. There were 14 in all--3 Italian, 8 Polish, 2 Bohemian, and 1 Hungarian. Nine of these speak other languages besides their own. All the Jewish Aid Society visitors speak Yiddish. The Funds to Parents' Department of the Juvenile Court has no foreign-born workers, but the Probation Department has 3--Polish, Italian, and Bohemian.
The five Red Cross chapters answering the questionnaire--New York, Brooklyn, Rochester, Buffalo, and Philadelphia--all employ foreign-speaking visitors--11 Italian, 8 Polish, 8 Yiddish, and 2 Russian.
Sixty-one of the members of the American Association for Family Welfare Work replied to questions about their methods of work and the devices they had found successful. Twenty-eight of these were not doing work with foreign born or were not doing work along the line indicated. The other 33 described their work and their difficulties, and made suggestions.
Twenty-two of the thirty-three agencies did not make use of the foreign-language visitor, although Fall River in the case of the French, and Topeka in the case of the Mexicans, overcame the language barrier by the fact that their secretaries spoke the language of their largest foreign-born group. Three others did not have foreign-born visitors on their staff, but reported that they had foreign-born volunteers. It is interesting to note that among the 22 cities without foreign-language visitors there are 9 cities with over 100,000 inhabitants, and all but 2 of them have large immigrant populations. The other 13 cities on the list are all places of less than 100,000 inhabitants, and it is probable that the case-work agencies in most of them do not have more than one worker.
The case-work agencies in some cities with large foreign-born populations come in contact with many of the foreign-born families in distress, but not in sufficiently large numbers to take the entire time of a visitor. In other cities, however, a large part of the work is with foreign-speaking families. In Stamford, Connecticut, for example, 70 per cent of the families cared for are foreign born, and 44 per cent are Italian. In Paterson, New Jersey, 120 of the 840 families were Italian.