This issue was posed sharply at the World Socialist Congress held in Stuttgart, Germany, in August 1907. At the time, migration from Europe to the United States was at its height, while the U.S. rulers were on a drive to halt emigration from China, Japan, and other Asian countries. Washington’s racist, anti-working-class policies at home were coupled with its imperial aspirations abroad. In 1908 Tokyo and Washington signed a “gentleman’s agreement” halting Japanese immigration into the United States. Two years earlier the California legislature had excluded children of Japanese immigrants from the state’s schools. The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882 and in force for the next six decades, halted the entry of Chinese immigrants into the country.

The socialist movement in the United States at the time included a revolutionary left wing as well as a right wing that advocated reforming capitalism. The reformist leadership of the U.S. Socialist Party, along with the officialdom of the American Federation of Labor, backed Washington’s immigration restrictions. Pointing to how bosses used immigrant labor to hold down wages and sometimes as strikebreakers, they blamed Chinese and Japanese immigrants themselves, claiming that they took away jobs from “American” workers—similar to anti-immigrant rhetoric heard today.

Then, as today, foreign-born workers were a growing component of the U.S. labor force. In 1909 immigrants from eastern and southern Europe comprised one-third of the labor force in U.S. industry. Among iron and steelworkers, 58 percent were immigrants. By 1917, two-thirds of workers in the eastern coalfields, slaughterhouses, garment and textile shops, and munitions plants were born abroad.

At the 1904 International Socialist Congress held in Amsterdam, a resolution was presented by U.S. Socialist Party leader Morris Hillquit, along with delegates from Australia and the Netherlands, calling for restricting immigration of “backward races.” Meeting widespread opposition, the resolution was withdrawn.

Right-wing Socialist Party leader Victor Berger from Milwaukee, who in 1911 became the first elected SP member of U.S. Congress, harped on the supposed threat of the “yellow peril.” In a 1907 speech he said if something was not done, “this country is absolutely sure to become a black-and-yellow country within a few generations.” The SP National Committee voted to back exclusionary measures against such immigrants.  
 
1907 Socialist Congress in Stuttgart
Prior to the opening of the Stuttgart Congress, the U.S. Socialist Party leadership approved an immigration resolution to submit for discussion. It called for campaigning against “the willful importation of cheap foreign labor calculated to destroy labor organizations, to lower the standard of living of the working class, and to retard the ultimate realization of socialism.”

A left-wing minority of SP members strongly condemned the party’s position. Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs called it “utterly unsocialistic, reactionary, and in truth outrageous.”

The SP’s resolution became a source of controversy in the Stuttgart Congress’s commission on immigration and emigration. This meeting of the Socialist International was attended by 884 delegates from 25 countries, most from Europe, but also the United States, Argentina, Japan, India, Australia, and South Africa.

U.S. delegate Hillquit, defending his party’s resolution, argued that unlike “natural immigration” from Europe, “capitalism’s importation of foreign labor cheaper than that of native-born workers” is “a pool of unconscious strikebreakers.” He asserted, “Chinese and Japanese workers play that role today, as does the yellow race in general…. Do we want to grant privileges to foreign strikebreakers when they are locked in struggle with native-born workers? If we fail to take measure against the importation of Chinese strikebreakers, we will thrust the Socialist workers’ movement backwards.”

Kato Tokijiro, a representative of the Japanese Socialists, responded, “It would be a slap in the face to socialism if you were to exclude the poor, exploited Japanese…. It is the duty of Socialists to welcome these poor brothers, to defend them, and together with them to fight capitalism. The founder of socialism, above all Karl Marx, did not address themselves to individual countries but to all humanity. Internationalism is inscribed on our banner.”

V.I. Lenin, who attended the Congress as one of the Bolshevik party delegates, described the U.S. delegates’ proposal as “an attempt to defend narrow, craft interests.” In an article published in the newspaper Proletary shortly after the Congress, he said, “This is the same spirit of aristocratism that one finds among workers in some of the ‘civilised’ countries, who derive certain advantages from their privileged position, and are, therefore, inclined to forget the need for international class solidarity.” He noted that the Stuttgart delegates rejected this “petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness.”  
 
Lenin’s letter to socialists in U.S.
Lenin came back to this question several years later in a November 1915 letter to the Socialist Propaganda League (SPL), a left-wing formation within the Socialist Party in the United States. The SPL had been initiated by the grouping of Latvian immigrants in the SP.

Lenin wrote, “In our struggle for true internationalism and against ‘jingo-socialism,’ we always quote in our press the example of the opportunist leaders of the S.P. in America, who are in favor of restrictions of the immigration of Chinese and Japanese workers (especially after the Congress of Stuttgart, 1907, and against the decisions of Stuttgart).

“We think that one can not be internationalist and be at the same time in favor of such restrictions. And we assert that Socialists in America, especially English Socialists, belonging to the ruling, and oppressing nation, who are not against any restrictions of immigration, against the possession of colonies (Hawaii) and for the entire freedom of colonies, that such Socialists are in reality jingoes.”

Under the impact of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, the revolutionary wing of the American SP broke with the social-patriotic leadership and founded the Communist Party in 1919. Learning from Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, the early communists in the United States championed working-class internationalism and the rights of the most oppressed layers of the working class. Today the Socialist Workers Party, drawing on that political continuity, maintains the Bolsheviks’ proletarian course.
 
 
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