Antonio Squadrito, Camela Squadrito and her child, Caterina; Mrs. Squadrito’s brother, Giovanni Pulejo, a barber; Felicia Pulejo, a nephew; Concetta Fomica, the pretty young cousin; Antonio Nastasia, a sixteen-year-old boy neighbor; Gaetano Mullura, in the same category; Nicola Curro, aged twenty-seven, an intimate friend of the family, a finished cabinet-maker; Nunzio Giunta, son of a prominent family of the village, a big, powerful fellow of twenty-three, just out of five years’ service in the police or Carabineers; Antonio Genino, twenty-one years of age, a cheese-maker going to a cousin in Philadelphia; and Salvatore Niceta, Benedetto Runzio, Luciano Sofia and Salvatore Damico, four farmer-boys from Gualtieri-Socosa, a detached village of the community, all going to the Banca Gelantado in Philadelphia, destined for the mines.
These boys afforded a very fine example of the latest methods of evading the contract-labor law. They had no contract in writing, merely the letter of an uncle of one of them promising work if they would come. He was not to employ them, but he would turn them over to men who would. This is the method by which scores of big corporations in America, which dare not import Italian laborers by reason of the law on this matter, do it by making the contract here with a relative or friend of some group of men in an Italian community, and the relative or friend brings them over. The men are instructed to answer the question as to whether they have been promised work or not by saying they have not. Out of 1903’s approximate million emigrants, only 1,086 were refused admittance as alien contract laborers. One large industrial corporation at Buffalo, N. Y., alone received nearly half that many, and those who passed successfully through to other parts of the country can be easily imagined. I do not hesitate to say that it is impossible to defeat this fraud by any operations on this side of the sea.
In a later chapter there will be shown the outlines of a plan which will offset the weaknesses of the enforcement of the alien contract-labor law, and I shall throw light in numbers of places on the true meaning of “assisted emigration.”
The first official procedure of the many and intricate ones necessary for the departure of emigrants and their admission to the United States was the obtaining of the passports for the male members of the party. The women and children are entered on the passport of some man of their family or party. The first step is getting the birth certificate from the secretary of the municipality in which one is born, so Antonio, the elder Pulejo, Concetta’s father, young Giunta, Curro, and the father of the Socosa boys went before Giacomo Marini, and when he had consulted the register and found that all had been duly born in Gualtieri, birth-certificates were issued, signed by himself and the president of the municipality, or mayor. As for myself, wishing to return as an Italian to America and not as an American, a birth-certificate was issued to me as having been born _nel commune di Londra_, son of Paolo Brandi and Migone Caterina. I regret to say it was necessary to take undue advantage of the old secretary to carry my point. Precious little good it did me, though.