The Jap Tidal Wave.

Special Dispatch.

VANCOUVER, B.C., Friday, May 4. U.S. Immigration Commissioner Healey stated to The Times correspondent before he left for Seattle early in the week that he would confer with immigration agents in Seattle for the purpose of devising some means of preventing Japanese who come within the provisions of the labor contract law getting over the line from British Columbia into the United States. Mr. Healey said that his duties were to look after and care for immigrants coming in to the United States through British Columbia, to welcome them on he threshold of America is the name of Uncle Sam. Mr. Healey said this Japanese tidal wave took the United States Government by surprise, and he being the only available officer to handle the influx or try to handle it, at the British Columbia end, he had to take his coat off and go to work. But the machinery of his office was very limited, and he was free to confess that he was not able to prevent the Japanese making contracts while in British Columbia with Japanese contract laborers in Seattle and simply walking over the line to Seattle to fulfill the contracts.

As far as British Columbia is concerned, although the Japanese are coming in at the rate of from 50 to 100 daily, the number in Vancouver does not apparently increase, and it is pretty certain that, with the exception of some 500 Japanese shipped to the Skeena River canneries, the great majority of Japanese are arriving here simply en route to The States, and the health authorities do not encourage them to remain long in transit, for they are routed out of bed twice and three times a week, scared half to death by a posse of police, and fined heavily for daring to breathe in one-tenth the number of enclosed cubic inches that a white man is supposed to breathe in, and this in spite of the fact that if the Japs do not go to the overcrowded boarding houses there will be no shelter for them at all. Provincial Medical Health Officer Fagan says: "Japanese, I am determined, shall live like white men when in a white man's country," Japanese Consul Shenezen said to the fined Japs in the police court, "You must observe the laws of British Columbia as long as you are living in British Columbia."

Outside of the boarding house keepers, the only section of the community who are pleased at the advent of the Japs are the canners. The Japanese influx saves the cannery industry from annihilation. The canners combined to reduce the high price of fish, a price that took the profits completely out of the business but made the fisherman prosperous. The fishermen combined immediately after the cannerymen syndicated to buck the cannerymen's combine. Things looked black for the industry, when Mr. Jap came along and said to the cannerymen -- "We will fish for you and we will not join the Union. The Union simply wants to use us, then throw us away like a squeezed lemon." Ever since Mr. Jap said this the canners have been hard at work arranging with the Japs for the season's work. A fisherman must be a British subject, but that's easily got over and Englishmen are being made out of Japs on very short notice. And as the law governing such things in British Columbia is as full of holes as a sieve, the Union men can do nothin but rail at the government for refusing to act. The 500 Japs sent up the Skeena were to replace the Indians who, profiting by the teaching of the white man, struck in a body last year. The fishermen on the Fraser will be simply run out of the business in hundreds by the British Japanese fishermen and the cannery industry will be saved, but what of the white fisherman?