Walker also took an interest in demographics later in his career , particularly towards the issues of immigration and birth rates . He published '' The Growth of the United States '' in 1882 and '' Restriction on Immigration '' in 1896 arguing for increasing restrictions out of concern about the diminished industrial and intellectual capacity of the most recent wave of immigrants . Walker also argued that unrestricted immigration was the major reason behind nineteenth-century Native American fertility decline , but while the argument was politically popular and became widely accepted in mobilizing restrictions on immigration , it rested upon a surprisingly facile statistical analysis that was later refuted . Writing on immigrants from southern Italy , Hungary , Austria , and Russia in '' The Atlantic '' , Walker claimed , The entrance into our political , social , and industrial life of such vast masses of peasantry , degraded below our utmost conceptions , is a matter which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm . These people have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement . They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of the olden time . They are beaten men from beaten races ; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence . Centuries are against them , as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us . They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self-care and self-government , such as belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak-trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains . Established in 1861 and opened in 1865 , the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ) saw its financial stability severely undermined following the Panic of 1873 and subsequent Long Depression . Seventy-five-year-old founder William Barton Rogers was elected interim president in 1878 after John Daniel Runkle stepped down . Rogers wrote Walker in June 1880 to offer him the Presidency , and Walker evidently debated the opportunity for some time as Rogers sent follow-up inquiries in January and February 1881 requesting his committed decision . Walker ultimately accepted in early May and was formally elected President by the MIT Corporation on May 25 , 1881 , resigning his Yale appointment in June and his Census directorship in November . However , the assassination attempt on President Garfield in July 1881 and the ensuing illness before Garfield 's death in September upset Walker 's transition and delayed his formal introduction to the faculty of MIT until November 5 , 1881 . On May 30 , 1882 , during Walker 's first Commencement exercises , Rogers died mid-speech where his last words were famously " bituminous coal "
assassination attempt
Assassination of James A. Garfield
Francis Amasa Walker