s, Supplement
1907, page 392.

THE EFFECT OF THE SUPREME COURT DECISION.

The Congress of the United States, on February 20, 1907, passed what is
known as the Immigration Act. This Act covers twenty-three printed pages
affecting the immigration of all classes of peoples to the United
States. Among other provisions, Section 3 of this Act attempted to
prohibit the importation of alien women and girls for immoral purposes.
This section was made sufficiently broad to prohibit not only the
importation, but the keeping, even with the consent of the alien, of any
foreign woman or girl for immoral purposes. The Act is as follows:

Sec. 3. That the importation into the United States of any alien woman
or girl for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral
purpose, is hereby forbidden; and whoever shall, directly or indirectly,
import, or attempt to import, into the United States, any alien woman or
girl for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral purpose,
or whoever shall hold or attempt to hold any alien woman or girl for any
such purpose in pursuance of such illegal importation, or whoever shall
keep, maintain, control, support, or harbor in any house or other place,
for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral purpose, any
alien woman or girl, within three years after she shall have entered the
United States, shall, in every such case, be deemed guilty of a felony,
and on conviction thereof be imprisoned not more than five years and pay
a fine of not more than five thousand dollars; and any alien woman or
girl who shall be found an inmate of a house of prostitution or
practicing prostitution, at any time within three years after she shall
have entered the United States, shall be deemed to be unlawfully within
the United States and shall be deported as provided by sections twenty
and twenty-one of this Act.

It is this section of the Act under which the prosecutions in the
Northern District of Illinois were instituted by United States District
Attorney Sims in June of nineteen hundred and eight, and which resulted
in the imprisonment of so many procurers and keepers of houses of
ill-fame. Among the cases which were tried before a jury and which
resulted in a conviction of the keepers, was a case entitled United
States v. Keller and Ullman. These defendants were charged with having
harbored Irene Bodi, a native of Austria, within three years after she
had entered the United States, an