experience of the petitioning alien than either the judges or the
naturalization examiner. Upon the clerk, more than upon anyone else,
in the vast majority of cases, depends scrutiny of the declaration
of intention; usually he actually makes out the declaration for the
alien; if he is careful and familiar with the routine of form and
fact he makes it out, or sees that it is made out, correctly; if he
regards the whole business as a nuisance, has a prejudice against
immigrants as such or against the particular race represented by
this particular alien, or doesn’t like this individual, if he has
had a controversy with the Naturalization Service or is, for some
other reason, in an unfriendly mood, or if, as is more likely to
be the case, he is simply careless or unfamiliar with the technic
of the business--having very little of it to do--the interests of
the alien may suffer accordingly. The courts do not give the alien
the benefit of any allowance for clerical or other errors made or
permitted by the clerk if they relate in the slightest degree to any
material fact; the alien must guard himself against any such error,
or bear the consequences alone. In fact, the courts have repeatedly
held, as it is expressed in a brief in the case of Mulcrevy _vs._
San Francisco, in the United States Supreme Court, that the duties
in connection with naturalization performed by clerks of courts “are
not appurtenant to the office of clerk of court.... All of their
transactions with the Bureau of Naturalization, and these include
almost all of their service, are performed without any reference to
the court.”[86] In many instances, the clerks are greatly annoyed by
having this citizenship work thrust upon them; they take no pleasure
in having been “freely designated by Congress to serve the purposes
of the Federal government,” or in being thus “instrumentalities or
agencies of the Federal government,” as the Mulcrevy brief puts it,
and perform their duties in a careless, grudging, and ill-natured
spirit.
In most of the rural districts, naturalization business is very
light; sometimes there will be only two or three cases a year; there
are even courts in which a year or two might pass without any at all.
In such instances the labor is trivial; but for that very reason the
clerk is not alive to the importance of details, and the ratio of
mistakes may be the greater for that reason.
In the large cities, where the naturalization business is heavy,
there are usually deputy clerks devoting virtually all of their
attention to it; they keep in practice, and avoid errors. But it is
to be remembered that because this work is not “appurtenant to the
office of clerk of court,” neither the United States nor the state
contributes anything whatever to the remuneration of the clerk.
The alien pays for that, in a manner well calculated to create an
undesirable relationship all the way round. The clerk is put in this
regard largely at the mercy of the Naturalization Service, and the
result is not a happy one--as might very well be expected.
THE QUESTION OF ADEQUATE CLERICAL FORCE
The report of the New York State Commission of Immigration,
transmitted to the Legislature April 5, 1909, after the present
system had been in operation about two years, dealt with this matter
in connection with its comment upon delays in the naturalization
business in the courts, especially of New York City, which is
attributed chiefly to insufficiency of clerical force, due, in
its finding, to the operation of the following provision of the
naturalization law:
That the clerks of courts exercising jurisdiction in naturalization
proceedings shall be permitted to retain one-half of the fees in
any fiscal year, up to the sum of three thousand dollars, and that
all fees received by such clerks in naturalization proceedings in
excess of such amount shall be accounted for, and paid over to
said [Naturalization] Bureau, as in case of other fees to which
the United States may be entitled under the provisions of this
Act. The clerks of the various courts exercising jurisdiction in
naturalization proceedings shall pay all additional clerical force
that may be required in performing the duties imposed by this Act
upon the clerks of courts from fees received by such clerks in
naturalization proceedings.
And in case the clerk of any court exercising naturalization
jurisdiction collects fees in excess of the sum of six thousand
dollars in any fiscal year, the Secretary of Labor may allow
salaries, for naturalization purposes only, to pay for clerical
assistance, to be selected and employed by that clerk, additional
to the clerical force, for which clerks of courts are required
by this section to pay from fees received by such clerks in
naturalization proceedings, if in the opinion of said Secretary the
naturalization business of such clerk warrants further additional
assistance: _Provided_, That in no event shall the whole amount
allowed the clerk of a court and his assistants exceed the
one-half of the gross receipts of the office of said clerk from
naturalization fees during such fiscal year.[87]
WHEN THE CLERK POCKETS THE FEES
The clerk is not required to spend for additional clerical force
the portion of the fees _under three thousand dollars_ retained
by him. In some states he is required to surrender it as part of
the income of his office; but generally speaking he can put it in
his pocket if he chooses to do so, and allow the naturalization
business to become clogged and delayed. Sometimes he does just that.
The Naturalization Service has no redress, although it usually is
blamed by the uninformed for the ensuing situation. Of course the
alien has none, although he is the principal victim of it. The
possibilities of the arrangement are well illustrated in one great
Middle Western city, where there are two courts, one state and one
Federal, performing naturalization functions. The clerk of the
state court is very efficient and interested in the work; he spends
more than $3,000 on naturalization business, employing a deputy
at $1,800 and a stenographer at about $1,000 a year, and in rush
periods having extra force. The service to aliens in that court is
courteous, accurate, and expeditious. The clerk of the Federal court
does otherwise. He retains his $3,000, but employs an assistant at
only $1,200 without any stenographer, and the work is badly delayed.
A letter of complaint about this court mentions the fact that “I have
been advised by ... that the United States District Court will be
closed all day to-day.” Day after day, during 1918-19, the office of
the naturalization deputy clerk in that court was entirely closed,
so far as the aliens were concerned, owing to the insufficiency of
the clerical force. Generally, an overworked condition of a clerk’s
office leads, naturally, to hurry, discourtesy, and inevitable
delays, during which applicants and their witnesses will lose day
after day of working time in waiting for attention.
FORMS OF PETTY GRAFT
This sort of thing leads also to another evil, inevitable in such
an atmosphere. Petty officers of the court, policemen and others
having the run of the building, will tyrannize over the crowds of
aliens awaiting attention, and will pretend to have, or actually will
exercise, the power to put one person ahead of another or otherwise
effect an unfair discrimination in favor of those who will pay
something for the advantage. In one court there was found a definite
arrangement with a neighboring saloonkeeper, who collected the bribes
for a guard in the Federal building. The Naturalization Service has
been assiduous in its discouragement of this sort of thing, and has
had a good measure of success upon the minor grafters; but as the
law reads at present it can use only moral suasion upon the clerks
of courts to induce them to spend the retained share of the fees for
the purpose for which the retention obviously was authorized--the
_bona-fide_ employment of the extra clerical force needed to handle
the naturalization business.
The “moral suasion” business, however, has its limitations. While
the chief naturalization examiners, in charge of the districts in
the field, usually are on cordial terms with the clerks of their
various courts, the relations between the clerks and the office
of the bureau at Washington, maintained almost exclusively by
correspondence, with that correspondence almost invariably growing
out of some complaint or dereliction on the part of the clerk, are
not always so happy. The clerk has to send to Washington for all his
supplies of blanks and other stationery used in the naturalization
business. In one of the largest cities in the country there was a
delay of weeks in getting certain supplies from Washington, and the
petitioners suffered accordingly. The whole naturalization service
is habitually short-handed and correspondingly overworked; but the
penalty for the delays falls upon the head of the petitioner for
naturalization. When a clerk of a small court, or a large one, has
not on hand the blank forms upon which his declaration or petition
must be written in order to be valid, the alien, who may have
traveled with his witnesses scores of miles to file his paper, must
return to his home and wait some more. This is an occurrence by no
means infrequent.
Penalties are provided by law against clerks who fail to send
punctually to Washington the required periodical reports and
duplicates of papers. The Naturalization Bureau has been reluctant to
attempt enforcement of these penalties--it is a bit drastic to fine a
clerk $25 for a little delay in transmitting papers--and usually has
been content to send an examiner to the court to get the material.
But the correspondence growing out of such delays, and out of the
effort to induce clerks to spend their retained share of the fees
for clerical assistance, has added acerbity in many instances to the
irksomeness of a task “not appurtenant to the office of clerk of
court.”
Small irritations also add friction. For example, the clerk is
required to send his reports and papers by registered mail; there is
no provision to reimburse him for this; he can put in an expense
bill--and maybe get it after a long delay. This is exasperating,
whether one’s annual share of fees in a small office amounts to $10
or $3,000. There was a clerk in California who declined to answer
letters or have anything further to do with the Bureau after he
thought he had been badly treated in some such matter; he induced
the judge of his court to relinquish naturalization jurisdiction,
and then wrote to the Bureau that it could have the records in his
custody if it would send for them. The Bureau has a highly detached,
impersonal style of correspondence, admirably adapted to alienate
human sentiment and blight human interest.
“PERSONAL EQUATION” IN THE NATURALIZATION SERVICE
The executive arm of the government has the right to appear before
courts exercising naturalization jurisdiction, for the purpose, as
the law says:
of cross-examining the petitioner and the witnesses produced
in support of his petition concerning any matter touching, or in
any way affecting, his right of admission to citizenship, and shall
have the right to call witnesses, produce evidence, and be heard
in opposition to the granting of any petition in naturalization
proceedings.
This perfectly breathes the spirit exhibited as a general rule by the
representatives of the Naturalization Service. The alien petitioner,
having passed muster in respect of the clerk’s office, confronts the
representative of the government, presumably familiar with every
detail of technicality, in far too many cases bent upon preventing
his naturalization if by any possibility it can be done. Judge after
judge, in all parts of the country, answering the questionnaire of
the Americanization Study, describes the naturalization examiner as
a zealous young man, intent upon straining every technical point to
its utmost--against the petitioner.
In the original instructions issued by the Commissioner of
Naturalization on June 30, 1909, when the field service was
taken over by the Department of Commerce and Labor--of which the
Naturalization Bureau then became a part--he said to the division
chiefs:
There is one point which I desire especially to call to your
attention, and through you to the attention of those under your
charge and direction, and it is a point upon which I must insist.
The service is largely one not alone of an investigating nature,
but of an advisory and instructive character as well; it furnishes
the courts, the clerks of the courts, and the general public with
information--especially that part of the general public directly
interested in acquiring citizenship, or indirectly interested, as
witnesses to those who are seeking naturalization.
Referring particularly to applicants, he said, also:
They should further be made to understand that the substantial
effect of such exactions [requirements of the law] upon your part
is to protect them, after they once secure naturalization, from the
disappointment, embarrassment, and distress which must ensue in
case they secure naturalization without having complied with the
law.
These excerpts from the Commissioner’s instructions were quoted by
authority in a letter dated August 15, 1919, from one of the district
chief examiners to the writer; therefore they may fairly be taken
to represent not only the initial policy of the Naturalization
Service in beginning its work, but the policy to-day. As a statement
of general policy and attitude they leave nothing to be desired.
Furthermore, any fair consideration of the naturalization system must
take into account generously the background and historic perspective
of this business.
A SCRUPULOUSLY HONEST SERVICE
As it already has been made sufficiently clear, prior to the
enactment of the law of 1906, naturalization in the United States
was not only a chaotic but a scandalous thing. Many persons believe
now that it is “easy to get naturalized,” that upon payment of a few
dollars, or in consideration of political subserviency, promised or
expected, any alien can go, as it were, straight from the vessel
that brings him to the naturalization court and thence to the ballot
box! It used to be almost like that, but with the enactment of the
law of 1906 a revolution set in, and the condition now, generally
speaking, is quite otherwise. The pendulum has swung to the other
extreme. It is as difficult now to be naturalized as it used to be
easy. And it is quite natural that it should be so, in the reaction
of public sentiment from the old happy-go-lucky days, with the law’s
administration in the hands of a corps of men who, from top to
bottom, answer any test of honesty and zeal. In all the wide inquiry
upon which this volume is based, there was no hint anywhere of any
manner of corrupt practice on the part of anyone in the service. Such
faults and shortcomings as may be attributed to the Naturalization
Service are of an entirely different character.
At the outset, the principal function performed by the government was
that of investigation; the group of men who pursued the inquiries
about aliens petitioning for citizenship was little more than a
corps of detectives, bent upon ferreting out something, anything,
that would show the applicant to be unfit. To begin with, this work
was done under the direction of the Attorney-General of the United
States. All naturalization proceedings, in fact, were in charge of
special assistants to the various United States district attorneys,
the examiners operating under them as field investigators. The
politicians had a good deal to say about the selection of examiners.
Many, if not most of them, were former pension examiners. Some had
been in the postal service; some had had no experience at all in the
government employ.
Without implying any dereliction of intention on their part, then
or now, it may be said that few of them had legal training or
were otherwise fitted to conduct the government’s part in court
proceedings. The training of the examiners always has been of the
most haphazard, inadequate character. Even under the operation of
the Civil-Service laws, it was held that the kind of experience a
man ought to have for the field service was that of general contact
with the public--that of policemen, street-car conductors, and the
like. Yet, as the practice has grown up, these men have to appear
in important courts virtually in the guise of attorneys for the
government; they must know the law, not only as set forth in the
statutes, but as interpreted in innumerable decisions of Federal and
state courts.
NEED OF UNIFYING INFLUENCE
The chief examiners have done their best, but differences of
“personal equation” have resulted in a very wide diversity of
policy and attitude. There never has been any adequate unifying
influence in the service; supervision has been conducted largely
by correspondence, and the correspondence has not always been
self-consistent. Even in the matter of transmitting to the chief
examiners the decisions of courts in naturalization matters, there
has been a strong tendency to transmit chiefly those decisions
which supported the contentions of the Naturalization Bureau, so
that there have been cases in which examiners went on insisting upon
interpretations of the law which had been overruled, “getting away
with it” in courts whose judges did not keep close track of the
decisions, to the detriment of petitioners who could not know their
rights--since the alien, as a rule, has no one in court to protect
him, and rarely is in a position to take an appeal.
In the majority of the courts, particularly those far from the great
centers and having relatively little naturalization business, the
judges regard it as more or less of a nuisance, do not keep posted
about the law and decisions, and, looking upon the naturalization
examiner not only as the accredited representative of the government,
but as an expert in this field, follow his recommendations and
contentions; and here, again, there being no one in court to
represent the frightened or embarrassed petitioner, the point of view
of the examiner becomes that of the judge, and the law is handed down
accordingly. On the other hand, a few judges have taken the attitude
that they would not recognize an examiner who was not an attorney
admitted to practice before those particular courts.
“NOTHING TO LITIGATE!”
The Bureau of Naturalization has contended that a naturalization
hearing is not a “case”; that there is nothing to litigate; that
the examiner is present not as an attorney, but as a friend and
informant of the court, with which abides the final responsibility.
It holds that the petitioner does not need an attorney, the judge
being assumed to be of course as solicitous to protect the interests
of the petitioner as those of the country’s citizenship. No allowance
is made under this theory for judges like the one, for instance,
who regards it as his duty to “construe everything against the
petitioner”!
The operation of the system certainly leaves the petitioner
frequently, at least, in a most unsatisfactory and perilous posture;
as witness the matter of the seven-year limitation upon “old-law
declarations.” The crisis came in September, 1913, and there was
a decision soon afterward in the United States District Court
in New York ruling out all “old-law declarations.” A policy in
regard to these declarations should have been made then--a unified
policy, applicable throughout the Naturalization Service. Nothing
of the sort was done; the decision was heeded in some districts
and ignored in others, _for five years_!--until the Supreme Court
of the United States, sustaining the holding of the District Court
in New York, at one stroke guillotined, so to speak, thousands of
declarants under the old law. In many other matters there is still
not only uncertainty, but variety of interpretation and practice; a
regrettable lack in effect of the “uniform rule” contemplated by the
Constitution.
In many courts the point of view of the judge and that of the
naturalization examiner are at variance, and this leads in some cases
to open bitterness. Some examiners quibble and irritate the judge
with trivial objections; some judges constantly ignore important
provisions of the law urged upon them by the examiners. Between
such extremes the petitioner is a helpless shuttlecock at the time,
and later the victim of cancellation proceedings. There are “too
many cooks,” too little supervised and unified, and among them
the petitioner’s broth is spoiled. One of the crying needs of the
Naturalization Service is a permanent law officer, able and willing
and vigilant to watch the making of the statutes and decisions all
over the country, and to inform and guide the representatives of the
service in their interpretation of the law.
CONFUSED STATE OF THE EDUCATIONAL TEST
It shall be made to appear to the satisfaction of the court that,
during five years at least immediately preceding the date of his
application, he has behaved as a man of good moral character,
attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United
States, and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the
same.
Such is the substance of the law. It requires also that he must be
able to _speak_ the English language, and that each of his precious
two witnesses shall, of their own knowledge, certify that he is
“in every way qualified, in their opinion, to be a citizen of the
United States.” The barbed entanglement of technicalities through
which the petitioner must grope before the questions of substantial
qualification can be reached, we already have seen.
Now, what does it mean to be “attached to the principles of the
Constitution”? What manner of intellectual display is required
to prove one “well disposed to the good order and happiness of
the United States”? Around these two rather indefinite phrases
rages the whole storm of “Americanization” as it affects the alien
seeking to become one of us. Whether common sense, the notion of
the man-in-the-street, the average, plain-spoken layman, shall
prevail, or the ideas of a hypercritical “nativism,” depends upon
the “personal equation” of the judge, the clerk, the naturalization
examiner--or, rather, the diagonal of forces produced by the
concurrence or conflict of all three, aggravated or modified by that
of the petitioner and his witnesses.
A considerable--one might almost say an overwhelming--literature has
grown up about this part of the subject of immigration; of scores,
even hundreds, of books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters, diagrams,
moving-picture reels, lectures, and what not else, designed to
afford to aliens aspiring to citizenship that knowledge of “the
principles of the Constitution” which the applicant must display to
“the satisfaction of the court.” The number and variety of these
is impressive, even startling; they vary from the appallingly
elaborate and diffuse “Citizenship Textbook,” issued by the Bureau
of Naturalization itself, to the simple and lucid folder issued by
a judge at Duluth, Minnesota. One judge in Montana, who thinks “a
residence of ten years should be required” before final application,
has “a list of questions which every applicant who appears before me
must answer. He is also asked many questions not contained in this
list which go to his qualifications to become a citizen.” The printed
list occupies _nearly four newspaper columns of solid type_, and
covers everything relating to the governments of the United States,
the state of Montana, the local county, city, and ward--a body of
civic information beyond the ken, or the hope, of 999 out of 1,000
native-born Americans between the two oceans; yet, on the whole, only
what every citizen ought to know about the government which taxes and
rules him.
A judge in Missouri, who has “possibly two, not over,” of
naturalization cases in a year, holds that an applicant should have
“not merely an educational or intellectual test--for the more of
either a man has the worse he may be for the country--but I would
establish one of sentiment or principle, about as follows”:
Every applicant shall satisfy the court that he is familiar
with, and attached to, such sentiments as are expressed in such
writings as “A Man Without a Country,” “America,” “Declaration
of Independence,” etc., and that he is possessed of reasonable
opinions on necessity of government and duty of citizens to
support the government and its laws, the freedom of the press,
liberty of speech, obtaining redress for grievances, and a firm
opposition to rioting, violence, force, and secret societies or
orders countenancing or teaching overthrow of the government.
An Iowa judge says:
“Search the heart for the truth.” The chief thing is to have the
heart right--to have love and attachment for liberty, justice, and
humanity, and to be ready to die, if need be, for the maintenance
thereof. It might be well to have a uniform course of instruction
for applicants for citizenship, but I would not adhere to it too
strictly, if the heart proved to be right.... No good man, a true
lover of liberty, justice, and humanity, should be rejected, unless
he utterly fails to meet the other requirements of the law.
A Pennsylvania judge thinks little of educational requirements; that
they would exclude many desirable applicants.
The principle test that I apply is as to the honesty of the party.
Under an intellectual test many honest, hard-working men would
fail, while men who had the advantage of education would secure
naturalization.... Where men are required to support a family and
labor hard they have not much time to study.
A judge in Nebraska, who handles some 200 cases a year, declares:
The intellect is not a test of good citizenship. I know many people
with insufficient intellect to procure much education, who cannot
read nor write, who are excellent citizens; and many others who are
highly educated and too crooked to make good citizens.
A California judge avers:
My observation has been that many of our best citizens are those
who possess no extended education, and some of the most dangerous
are of those who possess high educational qualifications.
A judge in central New York, who has large experience with
naturalization, says:
Too much stress is laid upon information concerning the details
of our governmental system, and not enough upon the candidate’s
personal record, endeavors, and results. An Italian laborer who has
been unable to learn the number of Houses into which Congress is
divided, but is hard-working, steady, possessed of a desire to own
his home and bring his family up in our ways, is more useful to us
than some of more intelligence.
He holds that the principal difficulty with which desirable
immigrants have to contend, in seeking naturalization, is the fact
that “too much technical information is demanded by the young men who
represent the Bureau of Naturalization.”
Over against such expressions as these place the opinions of one
of the Ohio judges, who, after the fashion of the Know-Nothings
of the ’40’s, would require twenty-one years’ residence before
naturalization and “add to, rather than diminish, the present
requirements,” admitting “only heads of families, with children”;
or those of the Arkansas judge who avowedly “construes everything
against the applicant,” and would admit a German under no conditions
until after _fifty_ years of residence. Such a diversity indicates
the sort of difficulty confronting the alien in court, and the
need of some unity of standards to be created by law, and a great
simplification of the tests and examinations.
A letter was addressed to a number of experienced judges, known for
their wisdom and humanity, asking for a tentative set of questions
designed to disclose the knowledge thought to be essential to embody
“attachment to the principles of the Constitution.” Replies were
few, but they evidenced the difficulty of expressing in words such
an “attachment.” Many of the judges frankly confessed both their
inability to produce any such exhibit, and their conviction that
the intellectual display was of least importance in the test of the
applicant.
THE CRAZE FOR “AMERICANIZING”--SOMEBODY ELSE!
When the Great War burst upon the world, with its various kinds of
hysteria, many Americans suddenly awakened to a passion for what has
come to be called “Americanization.” Every sort of foreign-born,
foreign-speaking--or even foreign-looking--person was seized upon as
a subject or victim of this vague and little-ordered movement, with
results as various as the degree of intelligence involved on the
part of the Americanizers and the kinds of treatment inflicted; but
to a great extent mischievous and tending to arouse hostility rather
than “Americanism”--whatever the much-abused term might mean--in the
breasts of the bewildered immigrant. Some of the effort, to be sure,
was intelligent, considerate, and constructive.
It is to the credit of Richard K. Campbell, Commissioner of
Naturalization, and Raymond F. Crist, his alert and enterprising
deputy, that they were prompt in seeing the bearing of the
Americanization movement upon their work. It is very easy now to
criticize, from various points of view, the energy and enthusiasm
with which the Bureau of Naturalization entered upon and increasingly
absorbed itself in this activity, and to fan flames of jealousy
between it and other organizations, governmental and what not, which
have worked in this field. The fact is that, with all credit to
others to which they may be entitled, the Bureau of Naturalization
early saw, not only the essentials of this question, but that it
was at bottom a question of education, and set itself to the task of
inspiring the public-school authorities to adapt themselves to the
situation, and of placing at their disposal, at least theoretically,
the unique material embodied in the archives of the Bureau. It is
regrettable, though hardly surprising, that, in doing so, it allowed
itself to become both swamped in the magnitude of the job, and
obsessed by a sense of proprietary precedence in the field; reaching
out beyond rhyme or reason for sweeping powers and responsibility
which it is ill-adapted to exercise, and, in that reaching out,
neglecting to carry on the important functions normally attaching to
its own business, and indispensable to the intelligent carrying out
even of its own ambitions.
With its report for the year closing June 30, 1915, begins the
recounting of activities of the Bureau in the new field. In so many
words it is there recognized as a new activity--“a broadening of
policy,” with a suggestion of justification, not to say apology, in
the allusion to the Act of March 4, 1913, confirming the Bureau in
charge of “all matters concerning the naturalization of aliens.”
As early as the latter part of 1913, the Bureau was discussing
methods of encouraging classes in citizenship, and “the elimination
of the known evils attending some of the private organizations
seeking, under the guise of instruction, to exploit the ignorance of
candidates for citizenship as an easy means for the acquisition of a
lucrative income” was referred to as one of the reforms that would
follow a co-operative activity between the public schools, the public
generally, and the Bureau of Naturalization.
It was seen that the influence of the Bureau for the betterment of
citizenship could be extended to every hamlet in the United States
through the expansion and extension of the naturalization laws. This
plan proposed the organization of the public schools, with the
Bureau of Naturalization, into an active unit for the development of
American ideals of citizenship in the student body; the assembling
together, on stated occasions, in the different metropolitan
and other centers, of naturalized citizens and candidates for
citizenship; the conduct of patriotic exercises, including addresses,
the singing of national anthems, and a conferring of citizenship.[88]
But it was not until the period covered by the 1915 report that
the Bureau began to be greatly engrossed with this policy. In
that report, which directed attention to the growing interest of
naturalizing judges and others in the mental training of aliens for
citizenship, and their co-operation with the Bureau “in arousing the
interest of the public,” and thus operating upon the local school
authorities to establish courses of training in English and in civics
for alien residents who purpose to become citizens, the Commissioner
himself utters a caution about the scope of business:
It has been pointed out to the state authorities that the
government cannot undertake, even if it were one of its appropriate
functions, to institute and operate training schools in good
citizenship; that the making of a citizen of the United States is
also the making of a citizen of the state in which the petitioner
resides; and the results of such action are more immediate and more
frequent in their effects upon state than upon Federal interests.
At that time the work of the Bureau force consisted chiefly of
sending to the school authorities lists of aliens residing in their
respective districts who had filed declarations of intention and
petitions for naturalization, with intent that they should secure the
attendance of such aliens upon public-school courses of training in
good citizenship. The Commissioner pointed out that
The extent and character of this course of mental training must
depend upon the enlightenment of the school authorities which
experience alone can give.[89]
From this time on, however, the Commissioner’s reports are
characterized by an increasing emphasis upon the educational aspect
of the Bureau’s work, the things to which it had formerly devoted
itself diminishing in emphasis; while, at the same time, both in
the reports and in activities not therein disclosed, the Bureau
was seeking wide extension of its scope and powers, although its
normal work was suffering from the shorthandedness of which it had
complained ever since the Bureau was established.
EXTRA RESPONSIBILITIES SELF-SOUGHT
It has been the habit of the responsible heads of the Bureau
of Naturalization, in reply to any suggestion that the Bureau
was “overextending” itself in the assumption of educational
functions, or that there was confusion and conflict between the
activities of the Bureau and those, for example, of the Bureau of
Education in the Department of the Interior, to revert, as in the
Commissioner’s report for 1916, to the fact that the law imposed
upon the Naturalization Bureau “charge of all matters concerning the
naturalization of aliens”; to declare that it is “only complying
with the law,” or “endeavoring, under great difficulties, to perform
the duties laid upon us by Congress.” This is plausible enough on
its face; but the fact is that, generally speaking, no duties have
been laid by Congress upon the Bureau from the beginning save those
which it has urgently sought; virtually all legislation affecting
it--especially that legislation relating to “Americanization”--has
been drawn by the Bureau and actively lobbied for in Congress by
representatives of the Bureau. More than that, the Bureau has been
exceedingly and notoriously aggressive in seeking widely extended
scope and powers.
One of the most striking examples of this appeared in the so-called
“King bill,” of the Second Session (1918) of the Sixty-fifth
Congress, introduced by Senator King of Utah, with the purpose of
establishing in the Department of Labor “a Bureau of Citizenship and
Americanization, for the Americanization of Naturalized Citizens,”
etc.:
The province and authority of this Bureau [says one print of this
bill] shall be the Americanization of persons seeking American
citizenship by naturalization, _and of native and naturalized
citizens_, for the purpose of arousing a higher regard for the
privileges and responsibilities of American citizenship _in the
minds of all citizens and permanent residents of the United
States_, and the administration of the naturalization laws _and
Americanization work throughout the United States_.
The bill would have authorized the Director of Citizenship, therein
provided for at a salary of $5,000 a year,
to make diligent investigation into the conditions and
environment of permanent residents and citizens; to ascertain their
sentiments of loyalty to the United States, their progress in the
knowledge of American institutions, and the use of the English
language; their relations of a social and commercial nature with
their neighbors and fellow citizens, and to promote the betterment
of that loyalty, knowledge, use, and relationship, and afford them
such advice as may be of benefit to them and tend to increase
their regard for our institutions of government, and to do such
other things as may be prudent and wise in laying a foundation
for a strong sense of loyalty and dedication to our institutions
of government on the part of all permanent residents, candidates
for naturalization, and citizens; and to show their progress in
the adoption of the language and customs of the United States in
reports from time to time upon the work of the Bureau to Congress
and the Secretary of Labor, together with recommendations to
Congress for _further legislative measures to enlarge the province
and effectiveness of said Bureau for the Americanization of such
citizens and permanent residents_, and to insure their attachment
to the institutions of the United States.
The bill was not so much to create a new bureau, as to transmute
the Bureau of Naturalization; the Commissioner of Naturalization
was to become a subordinate of the Director of Citizenship, the
entire personnel, machinery, and functions of the present Bureau
of Naturalization being absorbed in the Bureau of Citizenship and
Americanization.
That the scope of this revolutionary creation, with its extension
of jurisdiction over _all_ citizens, their social and commercial
relations with each other, and their personal loyalty, was no
inadvertence of exuberant language, is clear to an examination of
an earlier version of the measure, which specifically confined the
supervision and missionary _espionage_ to “naturalized” citizens,
“including the attitude of such citizens whose native tongue is
foreign ... and their relations of a social and commercial nature
with their neighbors and fellow citizens who are natives of this
country or who have become thoroughly Americanized.” But even so
early the scheme was designed “to the end that there shall be a
thorough assimilation of all who permanently reside within the
jurisdiction of the United States.”[90]
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this proposal is that it has
the specific approval of the then Secretary of Labor, Mr. William
B. Wilson, in a letter dated September 12, 1918, to Senator King, in
which, over his official signature, it is declared that “the measure
has been carefully considered,” and that the Department approves
“the main objects of the proposed legislation.” That letter refers
directly to the first draft of the bill, last quoted above.[91]
However that be, and whatever might have been the views of the
Secretary of Labor upon further consideration of the proposed
legislation, the ambitious scheme died aborning. But it had a
resurrection in another form, equally abortive, though still
exhibiting the appetite of the Bureau for enlarged responsibility. At
the instance of the Bureau there was inserted in one of the tentative
drafts of the Sundry Civil Appropriation bill before Congress in the
spring and summer of 1919[92] the following provision for an enormous
addition to the jurisdiction, duties, and responsibilities of the
Bureau of Naturalization:
... The authority to promote instruction in citizenship and
English, now being exercised under the supervision of the Director
of Citizenship, is hereby extended to include soldiers and sailors
_and all persons of the age of eighteen years and upward, and those
in penal institutions_.... In discharging this responsibility, the
Director of Citizenship shall disseminate information regarding
the institutions of the United States government in such manner
as will best stimulate loyalty in those institutions, and secure
the aid of civic, educational, community, religious, racial, and
other organizations, and shall compile statistical information as
to aliens in their relations to citizenship, and for expenses
incidental thereto, including the rental or purchase of motion
pictures and the transfer of any motion-picture negatives from
branches of the government organized especially for war activities,
remaining in the possession of the government, and such transfer
to be without charge upon any appropriation. Credit for such
transfers shall be given on the records of the Treasury Department
in the final accounting by such specially organized branches of the
government.
A fairly large order! This adventure, like the previous one, failed
of consummation; but, nevertheless, there was (until a very recent
time when the illegality of the whole business was brought to
attention) a Director of Citizenship, even though Congress had given
him neither status nor powers, and he was in being only by a vigorous
stretching of legislation intended, if one may judge by what it says,
for quite another purpose.
Section 11 of the law of May 9, 1918, devoted entirely to the subject
of naturalization of alien enemies, contains a provision:
... that the President of the United States may, in his discretion,
upon investigation and report by the Department of Justice,
fully establishing the loyalty of an alien not included in the
foregoing exemption [relative to the apprehension of alien
enemies], except such alien enemy from the classification of alien
enemy, and thereupon he shall have the privilege of applying for
naturalization; and for the purpose of carrying into effect the
provisions of this section, including personal services in the
District of Columbia, the sum of $400,000 is hereby appropriated,
to be available until June thirtieth, nineteen hundred and
nineteen, including travel expenses for members of the Bureau of
Naturalization and its field service only, etc.
Out of this emergency appropriation, made under stress of war
conditions, for the declared purpose of dealing with enemy aliens,
the Bureau provided for a large extension of its work, and for
much-needed augmentation of its efficiency in the field, and for
establishing the extra-legal position of Director of Citizenship,
with more or less obvious functions. This would explain the somewhat
cryptic allusion in the proposed amendment to the Sundry Civil
Appropriation bill quoted above, to the “authority _now being
exercised by_” rather than imposed by law upon “the Director of
Citizenship,” etc.
But just because it was an emergency appropriation, the new Congress
showed no disposition to renew it, and in its absence the whole
extra-legal structure under the direction of the Director of
Citizenship was imperiled, and in order to save it from complete
destruction very serious economies became necessary. The bearing
of so large a windfall upon the general work of the Bureau may be
inferred from this list of the appropriations for the Naturalization
Service in each fiscal year since, and including, that ending June
30, 1908, during which the service was established:
TABLE V
APPROPRIATIONS FOR THE NATURALIZATION SERVICE FOR EACH FISCAL YEAR
FROM 1908-1919
=========================
1908{1} $193,000
1909{1} 150,000
1910 150,000
1911 152,861
1912 175,000
1913 200,000
1914 225,000
1915 250,000
1916 275,000
1917 275,000
1918 305,000
1919 675,000
=========================
[note 1: The field force was under Department of Justice during
1908 and 1909.]
A further instance of the desire for additional powers, which
characterizes the “personal equation” of the Naturalization Bureau,
appears in a bill which was before Congress in the winter of
1919-20,[93] introduced by Representative Johnson of the state of
Washington, which would have provided, among other things:
Sec. 4. That the promotion of the public schools in the training
and instruction of candidates for citizenship, now being carried
on by the Division of Citizenship Training of the Bureau of
Naturalization, is hereby extended to include all persons of the
age of eighteen years and upward, who shall attend classes of
instruction conducted or maintained by any civic, educational,
community, religious, racial, or other organization, under the
supervision of the public-school authorities, and the provisions
of the ninth subdivision of Section 4 of said Act are hereby made
applicable to this added authority. In discharging this additional
authority the Director of Citizenship is also authorized to
disseminate information regarding the institutions of the United
States government in such manner as will best stimulate loyalty to
those institutions, making use of the means heretofore provided,
and through the use of motion pictures. The motion pictures and
motion-picture negatives in the possession of the various branches
of the government shall also be available for these purposes. In
this work the aid of civic, educational, community, religious,
racial, and other organizations may be secured by the Division
of Citizenship Training, in which statistical information shall
be compiled as to aliens in their relation to citizenship. The
foregoing shall apply to the residents of the Panama Canal Zone.
ENORMOUS ARREARAGE IN BUREAU’S WORK
From the very beginning of the activities of the Bureau, it has
complained of its inability properly to perform its functions
because of lack of clerical force; at the same time pointing out very
appropriately that it was a good deal better than self-sustaining
from the financial point of view.
Commissioner Campbell, in his annual report to the Secretary of
Labor, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1911, said:
At all times the clerical force has been insufficient, even
with the aid of temporary assignments from other offices of the
Department, to keep up with current work. This has resulted in
large undisposed accumulations of official papers; mortifying
delays in making responses to letters from private individuals and
public officials, the continuous exaction of labor from the clerks
for long periods after the conclusion of the ordinary official
hours, on holidays, and even on Sundays; and, consequently,
impaired the accuracy and quality of the work actually accomplished.
The report for 1913 declares that such increase of personnel as
had been allowed had “not been sufficient to accomplish anything
in the way of bringing up the arrearages which have been steadily
accumulating ever since the service was organized in 1907.” These
arrearages were described as consisting of “unindexed and unexamined
certificates of naturalization and declarations of intention,” and
this condition prevailed, notwithstanding an average daily overtime
estimate in hours, as equivalent to full time, of more than two
persons (2.36). The report for 1914 acknowledged an increase of
nine clerks, but stated that “the arrearages of work continued to
increase.” So it goes on, the following report (1915) disclosing
an arrearage of 346,762 declarations of intention and 395,719
certificates of naturalization unindexed, and thousands more of
each unexamined. In the following year’s report is acknowledged
the “elimination of the practice heretofore pursued of indexing
separately the declarations, petitions, and certificates,” it having
been found impossible, even with four more clerks, “to reduce
the work that has fallen into arrears.” Yet in that same year’s
report begin the ecstatic descriptions of a very wide expansion of
activities in the field of education.
The seriousness of this curtailment of records at Washington--all
but fatal to the individual alien who wants to prove something about
his naturalization case by reference to such records--took on a
public aspect with the operation of the Selective Service Act (the
so-called “draft law”) when aliens, desiring exemption as such, began
to assert to the local exemption boards that they never had declared
intention to become American citizens. “The assistance of the Bureau
is constantly invoked by the draft boards throughout the country for
official report on the claims to exemption from military service
by aliens who profess to have made no declaration of intention to
become citizens,” says the opening page of the Commissioner’s report
of July 1, 1918, notwithstanding the more ingenuous--not to say
more truthful--confession of a year before that “_The unavoidable
abandonment of indexing declarations has made it impracticable to
furnish information sought in regard to aliens claiming exemption
from military service._”[94]
At the date of that report, there were, unexamined, in the Washington
office 247,373 declarations and 480,553 certificates; one year
later--owing, perhaps, largely to the vast and sudden addition of
alien soldiers naturalized, and the business incidental thereto, if
not quite as much to the absorption of the Bureau in its increasingly
ambitious educational campaign--the arrearages had passed the
half-million mark, with 628,713 declarations and 578,944 certificates
of naturalization unexamined.
Not even by means of a complete, current, and up-to-date index of
declarations could the Naturalization Bureau have proved whether or
not any given alien ever had filed a declaration whose existence
would indubitably entitle the United States to his military service,
unless it included the absolutely impossible feature of a reference
to every old, as well as new-law declaration. But such an index as
might have been kept of declarations under the “new law” would have
helped enormously. As it was the field force did its best, and ran
down many cases through the records in the district offices and local
courts.
THE ALIENS SUPPORT THE BUREAU
In point of fact, the Bureau of Naturalization is, as the
Commissioner more than once has pointed out, completely
self-supporting. Bare good faith to the petitioner for naturalization
would seem to demand that the money he pays in in fees should be used
by the government to afford adequate service in his behalf. In every
year, except 1918-19, since the present system was established, the
receipts from naturalization fees have, by a wide margin, exceeded
the amount appropriated for the Naturalization Service; the amount
representing that margin has simply gone into the general receipts
of the United States, subject to appropriation by Congress. Those
receipts, and the margin referred to, which might well have been
devoted to improving the Naturalization Service, have been, according
to the Commissioner’s reports, as follows:
TABLE VI
RECEIPTS FROM NATURALIZATION FEES AND DISBURSEMENTS FROM VARIOUS
APPROPRIATIONS FOR THE ENFORCEMENT OF THE NATURALIZATION LAW FOR
RENTS, SUPPLIES, AND MISCELLANEOUS EXPENSES, FISCAL YEARS 1907 TO
1920{1}
===================================================================
| | | DIFFERENCE IN
YEAR | NATURALIZATION | COST OF | FEES RECEIVED
| FEES | ADMINISTRATION | OVER COST OF
| | | ADMINISTRATION
------+------------------+-----------------------+-----------------
1907 | $65,129.00 | $29,243.18 | $35,885.82
1908 | 166,873.90 | 232,728.05{2} | -65,854.15
1909 | 172,202.13 | 194,428.45{2} | -22,226.32
1910 | 221,766.38 | 176,415.98 | 45,350.40
1911 | 290,551.52 | 222,831.15 | 67,720.37
1912 | 338,315.33 | 257,678.99 | 80,636.34
1913 | 350,716.60 | 290,026.20 | 60,690.40
1914 | 450,228.55 | 331,517.26 | 118,711.29
1915 | 441,764.49 | 363,593.11 | 78,171.38
1916 | 410,272.55 | 389,075.90 | 21,196.65
1917 | 635,927.52 | 393,240.15 | 242,687.37
1918 | 507,932.50 | 416,486.84 | 91,445.66
1919 | 597,087.97 | 812,056.38 | -214,968.41
1920 | 664,539.20 | 753,383.83 | -88,844.63
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Total $842,495.68
Less deficits 391,893.51
-----------
Excess of fees received over cost of administration $450,602.17
===================================================================
[note 1: Department of Labor, _Annual Reports for 1920_, p. 799,
Table 24.]
[note 2: Included in these expenditures are appropriations to the
Department of Justice for maintenance of field force prior to the
transfer to the Department of Commerce and Labor--_to wit_, fiscal
year 1908, $193,000; fiscal year 1909, $150,000.]
The Commissioner puts his finger on the ethical point involved, when
he says, as for example in his report for the fiscal year 1918-19:[95]
It is interesting and highly suggestive to note from the next
table that, notwithstanding the “hard-luck story” told in this
report as to arrearages of work and the delays and the omissions
of first one and then another important feature of that work, the
beneficiaries of such work--those who have paid their money for
prompt and efficient service--have annually for years past paid
into the Federal Treasury more than was used for the purpose for
which it was paid.
The aggregate of such surplus items, which cannot be regarded as
other than a trust fund in essence, and even deducting the amount
expended for military naturalizations amounts to $539,446.80. It
would easily have been much more if the clerks had been furnished
to serve the aliens who desired to become citizens. The burst of
public sympathy for, and interest in, the young alien who entered
our service to make the “supreme sacrifice” for democracy which
found expression in a special appropriation of $400,000 to pay
the cost of making these young heroes citizens in law, as they
already are in heart, over a period of 13½ months, did not, in
fact, cost the people of this country as a whole anything. As
long as over half a million dollars of the fund contributed by
the newly made citizens from civil life remain unexpended for the
purposes for which it was paid, it would appear to the ordinary
observer that they, and not the general body of American citizens,
gave the $400,000 to pay for the cost of giving free of charge the
well-deserved “priceless heritage of American citizenship” to the
young alien soldiers who fought for liberty and this country.
The government of the United States is making money out of the
business of admitting aliens to citizenship, and is not keeping
fairly or efficiently its end of the transaction. In the period since
the enactment of the Naturalization Law, as Commissioner Campbell
has said, aliens in pursuit of citizenship--even though thousands of
them did not get it!--have paid fees to an amount exceeding by more
than half a million dollars the total cost of the Naturalization
Bureau--a margin itself larger by more than $200,000 than the total
appropriation for the Bureau in any year save one.[96]
This money, if devoted to the purposes to which morally it belonged,
would have been ample to supply the supervisory and clerical force
in the Bureau necessary to make prompt and effective examination of
declarations, petitions, and certificates, and to maintain a proper
and complete system of records, and of indices by which those records
could be made available for reference by the alien, the government,
and the public. _Provided_ always that the Bureau did not permit
itself to be diverted and swamped by extraneous and self-assumed
functions in the field of public education which it is not adapted,
either by the logic of good administrative organization or by the
nature and aptitudes of its personnel, to perform. It has never been
within arm’s length of keeping up with the business committed to
it by law, and by the nature of its function; nevertheless, during
the past decade at least, it has taken on voluntarily and, with
increasing exuberance of ambition, sought additional legislation to
authorize activities and functions of an extraordinarily inclusive
and far-reaching character in the domain of education--apparently
even of native-born persons--beyond any possibility of effective
accomplishment without very great increase of expenditure for
personnel and material change in the “personal equation” of the
present force.
It is no doubt agreeable to compile and publish statistics purporting
to show the degree of “co-operation” between the public-school
authorities and the Naturalization Bureau; imposing totals can
be presented if every slightest indication of general interest in
the education of the foreign born is classified and heralded as
“co-operation” and no allowance whatever is ever made for failures
or defections.[97] All this might be tolerated or condoned; but
it becomes a rather ghastly spectacle when its most conspicuous
consequence is the neglect of legitimate business of the highest
importance to the aliens who pay for but do not get it, and to the
people of the United States.
The Naturalization Bureau, in the fundamental nature of its function,
has in all conscience enough to do! A “man’s-size job” is to be found
in the scrutiny of the petitioner for citizenship, from the day when
he files his declaration of intention to that when he receives,
or is refused for good reason, his certificate of naturalization.
The natural business of the Bureau is to be the disinterested but
vigilant informant of the court as to the facts regarding the
applicant; the watchdog of the standards by which aspirants for our
active membership are judged--also the keeper of records minutely
accurate and in cross-referenced detail up to the minute.
FITNESS OF CANDIDATES
There is great need of a better method for ascertaining the fitness
of candidates for citizenship than obtains at present. Various
suggestions have been made to improve the practice. One is the
creation of a system of “traveling commissioners,” appointed perhaps
by the courts, who would hold sessions at convenient times and
places. Another is that the function of naturalization should be
removed from the judicial to the administrative sphere, so that
examinations and admissions should both be under the control of the
Naturalization Bureau or some other administrative branch of the
Executive.
There is much to be said in support, especially, of the latter
suggestion. But there seems a weight of reason in favor of
maintaining the peculiarly American practice of lodging this solemn
function in what is, on the whole, our most impressive organ of
government--the court. As a rule, the courts are performing the
function with increasing sense of the importance and dignity of
the proceeding. It would be simple, and require little either of
new legislation or additional personnel or duties, to make the
Naturalization Examiner now in being and on duty, already equipped
with honesty and zeal, something in the nature of a Master,
representing the court in the taking of testimony, and reporting
thereto his findings and recommendations. Thereupon the judge could
pursue such further inquiry as he thought proper, accept or reject
the findings, and enter his order accordingly.
In the great preponderance of practice this is what actually happens
now. The proceeding should be the subject of sufficient stenographic
record, to be attached to the papers on file in the court and in the
Naturalization Bureau at Washington, and the index, certainly at
Washington, should be so minutely exact, prompt, and accessible, that
the record of every case, from declaration to final adjudication,
would be available like any other public record upon a moment’s
notice.
Further than that: Every alien who lands upon our shores should
receive at the time his suitably detailed and descriptive certificate
of lawful entry, with finger prints, if you please, duplicating a
permanent record in the office of the Immigration Service; this
certificate, and the record underlying it in case of its loss, should
be the prerequisite to the declarations and all other proceedings
leading to his permanent admission to citizenship. It would obviate
an infinite deal of the confusion which now too often surrounds his
later adventures in this direction; it would be his protection and
the protection of the nation. All matters concerning him now are at
the mercy of practices hardly deserving the name of system.
“PERSONAL EQUATION” OF THE PUBLIC
In consideration of all this business of naturalization, and the
various projects for improving its conditions, it must be remembered
that it is only within very recent years--virtually only since the
beginning of the World War with its suddenly aroused or anyway
suddenly accentuated excitements of interracial friction here in
America, and of ebullitions of loyalty to the various fatherlands
engaged in that struggle, on the part of foreign-born residents
here--that the people of the United States, of this generation
at least, have taken any interest in the behavior, affairs, and
assimilation of the alien. It is two-thirds of a century, more or
less, since the subsidence of the last important uproar on the
subject. A few social-settlement workers and missionaries in the
great cities, a few writers on sociological subjects, here and
there some more than ordinarily facile and entertaining writer
in English among the foreign born themselves, have tried to draw
public attention to the seriousness and magnitude of the problem
growing within our national life. These have pleaded for a better
understanding of the people of other races coming in vast floods to
make their homes with us, and for better conditions to govern their
assimilation.
But Americans generally pursued their self-absorbed, happy-go-lucky
way, giving little attention to these Jeremiahs and Cassandras;
pooh-poohed at the warnings, or vaguely hoped that all would come
out right in time. Meanwhile, most of them followed the usual human
course of shrinking from all avoidable human contact with these
outlandish folk of language and customs different from their own;
rather glad, on the whole, that they herded, as people in strange
climes will, in congested “Little Italys,” “Little Hungarys,”
“Deutschlands,” and “Ghettoes”--and in “slums” in general. They
surrendered to foreign colonies not only abandoned farm-lands,
but even large portions of great cities and great states; vaguely
grumbling when they perceived that great political power went with
that growth of foreign-speaking population. As a whole, they washed
their hands of the whole matter, or at most viewed the encroachment
with more or less solicitous disdain.
Meanwhile, most of those who have recognized the existence of a
menacing problem have acquired, generally on the foundation of
the subtle race-prejudice to which most of us are subject, a vast
deal of misinformation on the subject--some of it in the form of
widely accepted misinterpretations of official and quasi-official
“statistics.”
VII
SOME STATISTICS CONCERNING IMMIGRANTS, “NEW” AND “OLD”
We are talking and behaving now about the immigration of the past
few years--allowing for the vastly greater bulk of it and the
intensified peril involved in its bulk--just as we talked and behaved
about the Irish immigration that began in the early ’30’s and the
German immigration that began to bulk large in the early ’40’s.
Comparatively small as was the size of that joint inflow, it made the
problem that awakened the Know-Nothing and Native-American movement
of the mid-century, and eventually culminated in the naturalization
legislation now in force. Each phase of immigration has been “the new
immigration” at its time; each has been viewed with alarm; each has
been described as certain to deteriorate the physical quality of our
people and destroy the standards of living and of citizenship.
The Scandinavians, who began to come in considerable numbers in 1879;
the Italians, whose immigration became impressive in the late ’80’s;
the Russians and Austrians, whose surge became formidable about
1890; the Greeks, never very numerous, but swelling in numbers from
2,339 in 1898 to 36,580 in 1907, their highest tide--each in turn
passed or are passing now through the same stages; of comparatively
good-natured welcome at the outset, when they were few, and viewed
with curiosity; of increasing resentment, as they became noticeable
in competition for jobs; at last of angry and vociferous denunciation
as a “peril”; then subsiding into acceptance and assimilation into
the body social. “Paddy the clodhopper,” butt of the comedian and the
newspaper jokesmith, came over from Ireland as green as shamrock,
worked at unskilled labor with pick and shovel on railroads and
elsewhere, was herded and bribed into citizenship and politics, got
on the police force and into the contracting business, increased
in prosperity, bought real estate, and has sent down through the
years and into the fabric of our population a posterity whose
substantial contribution to our life no one now questions. He did not
have to learn the language, and that fact greatly facilitated his
assimilation. Fritz and Gretchen--we called them “Dutchmen” then--had
to climb over the language barrier, but they did it, and their
progress has followed the same general course. So did Ole and Chris
and Sven and Hilda from Scandinavia, and Salvatore, then the “Dago.”
Salvatore already owns apartment houses. Russian and Austrian, Greek,
Rumanian, Portuguese, and so on, the latest comers, are in the midst
of the same process.
The vast numbers, especially of the Russian Jews and
Austro-Hungarians, herded in masses in certain of our great cities,
have given us a kind of social indigestion; it must be cured, if at
all, by a slow process of absorption, and we have not yet learned
just what to do about it. Certainly unintelligent excitement, to
say nothing of unlawful violence and mob persecution, and the
exaggeration both of the degree and of the nature of the ailment,
offer small promise of betterment. Nature, the normal processes of
population movements and racial assimilation, work calmly on while
we shout and worry. And candid study of the process is reassuring.
Conditions have been confused, resentments aroused, and progress
retarded by the various kinds of hysteria excited by the World
War--but then, there was similar hysteria in the old Know-Nothing
days, and we lived through it; it seems rather silly now. We shall
live through this.
PAUCITY OF DEPENDABLE INFORMATION
Meanwhile we may try to know and understand the facts. This is not
so easy as might be supposed, for the facts are hard to get. The
student of the naturalization and political assimilation of the
foreign-born citizen finds himself seriously embarrassed by the
paucity of definite information on the subject in any of its aspects.
To be sure, there is a considerable, though somewhat fragmentary,
literature about it, and generalizations of a sweeping and rather
dogmatic character have gained wide currency--impressions and
prejudices, which it will no doubt be difficult to dislodge, even
though such information as may be available, critically examined,
entirely fails to support them. In hardly any other field may one
find a better illustration of the mischief that may be wrought by
inadequate or misinterpreted statistics, creating legends which
cannot endure the test of candid, to say nothing of scientific,
examination.
This is not to say that there is no material on the subject. There
is always the census; there are the reports of the Immigration
Commission of 1907; there are the reports of the Commissioner of
Naturalization. There are numerous books, essays and pamphlets, by
men and women who, to a greater or lesser extent, have come to be
regarded as experts on the subject of immigration. But, as we shall
see, these are almost all entitled to substantial discount, or at
least discriminating study, with results conducive to a better
understanding, to a readjustment of some ideas which, although
mistaken, have come to be regarded as fundamental.
In the files of the Naturalization Bureau at Washington is a vast
mass of original data which would be of priceless value in the
study of the way in which those who would be “Americans by Choice”
make their initial efforts in that direction; showing under oath
their individual age, birthplace and race, date of arrival in this
country, date of declaration of intention to become a citizen,
marital and occupational status, details of the disposal of the
petition for citizenship, and other facts constituting information
ample for intelligent interpretation of aspects and relationships
now little understood, not understood at all, or, more commonly,
altogether misunderstood. These data are contained in the copies
of the declarations of intention, petitions for naturalization and
certificates of naturalization, issued since the institution of the
Naturalization Service under the Act of 1906. The magnitude of this
statistical treasure may be judged from Table VII.
Each one of these nearly three million declarations of intention, and
more than a million petitions--not to speak of the final certificates
of citizenship--contains what amounts almost to a cross-section of
the life history of an immigrant. Upon each petition is indorsed
the record of the court’s action, acceptance or denial, and the
reasons for denial are, if possible, more important than the fact of
acceptance for the purposes of study of the immigration question in
its political aspect.
Owing in part to the chronic insufficiency of the staff in the
Naturalization Bureau--not only preventing any proper statistical
record or analysis of this material, but of late years compelling a
lamentable curtailment and even the abandonment of such indexing as
is obviously indispensable to the most routine official supervision
and understanding;--in part to the absorption of the Bureau in
its elaborate educational propaganda, and in part to a lack of
appreciation of the value of this material by the officials there
in charge, the leaders in Congress and the public in general, it
has remained in an undigested and now probably indigestible mass
in the files of the Bureau. For nearly fifteen years it has been
accumulating. To collate and analyze it would be a prodigious job.
Yet, as appears from the results of a very modest venture in this
direction on the part of the Americanization Study, some of them
presented in this volume,[98] it would be immensely worth while.
And, what is more important, it probably would go far to modify, if
not to revolutionize, many prevailing ideas and afford a new and
sounder foundation and point of departure for theory and for guidance
of practice as regards the assimilation of the immigrant into the
American body politic.
TABLE VII
NUMBER OF DECLARATIONS OF INTENTION AND PETITIONS FOR
NATURALIZATION FILED, AND CERTIFICATES OF NATURALIZATION ISSUED BY
THE BUREAU OF NATURALIZATION, 1907-20{1}
=========================================================
YEAR | DECLARATIONS | PETITIONS | CERTIFICATES
-----------+---------------+---------------+-------------
1907{2} | 73,723 | 21,094 | 7,953
1908{3} | 137,229 | 44,029 | 25,963
1909 | 145,794 | 43,161 | 38,372
1910 | 167,226 | 55,038 | 39,206
1911 | 186,157 | 73,644 | 56,257
1912 | 169,142 | 95,627 | 69,965
1913 | 181,632 | 95,186 | 82,017
1914 | 214,016 | 123,855 | 105,439
1915 | 245,815 | 106,317 | 96,390
1916 | 207,935 | 108,009 | 93,911
1917 | 438,748 | 132,320 | 94,897
1918 | 335,069 | 110,416 | 151,449
1919 | 346,827 | 107,559 | 217,358
1920 | 200,106 | 166,925 | 125,711
-----------+---------------+---------------+-------------
Total | 3,149,419 | 1,283,180 | 1,205,170
=========================================================
[note 1: _Annual Report of the Commissioner of Naturalization_,
1919, p. 16.]
[note 2: Nine months only.]
[note 3: First full year of 12 months.]
The annual reports of the Commissioner of Naturalization, like
those of many other government bureaus, are written not so much to
afford information to the public as to extol the work of the Bureau,
pointing out the remarkable extent of the ground covered, the great
number of letters written, and of cases handled by a force grievously
and increasingly inadequate since the very beginning of the service,
and so on. They are, however, most unsatisfactory as a source of
sociological information; particularly barren are they of any hint of
information regarding the various races whose representatives seek
citizenship; their relative promptness in seeking and success in
getting it; their respective standing as regards the various reasons
for denial. They do show voluminously how many declarations and
petitions are filed annually in each state and subdivision; increase
or decrease in totals; how many clerks of courts are delinquent in
sending in the government’s share of fees, and other more or less
significant _minutiæ_ of the routine work of the field and clerical
force and the courts.
VAST ARREARAGES IN EXAMINATIONS
Moreover, for the past four or five years, the bulk of the Bureau’s
reports has been increasingly augmented by large sections devoted
entirely to its efforts in the field of education, and its relations,
actual, attempted and imaginary, with the public-school authorities.
The degree to which the Naturalization Bureau has neglected, perforce
of circumstances, the study of the material under its nose is
apparent in the fact that the Commissioner’s report for the fiscal
year ending June 30, 1919, says, in so many words, not only that
it no longer is preserving in its files any records of general
correspondence, but that it has altogether ceased any pretense of
examining naturalization papers!
To illustrate the expedients to which the Bureau has been compelled
to resort, in order to relieve the files section, it has adopted
the practice of returning, with its replies thereto, letters of
general inquiry not referring to some specific naturalization case
already a part of the Bureau file, thereby leaving no record of
such correspondence.
It has virtually ceased to make an examination of certificates of
naturalization to insure the discovery and correction of errors,
and it has abandoned a personal card-index of naturalized aliens,
etc., not as a matter of choice but of compulsion.[99]
The magnitude of the arrearage thus naïvely accounted for, and the
bulk of the potential information involved, may be seen in the
fact that on July 1, 1919, according to the Commissioner’s own
figures,[100] there were unexamined in the Bureau at Washington
_more than one million (1,011,676) declarations of intention,
26,726 petitions for naturalization, and 721,742 certificates of
naturalization_. This was an increase in arrearage, for one year
alone, of 382,963 (60 per cent) in declarations; of 73 per cent in
petitions, and of nearly 25 per cent in certificates. At the very
time when the excitement about vigilance in admitting new citizens
was at its height, the Naturalization Bureau was diverting to
other channels a vital energy which might have been devoted to that
vigilance and to collating the elementary information already in
its possession, for the benefit of lawmakers and others needing
information in dealing intelligently with this subject.
REPORT OF THE IMMIGRATION COMMISSION OF 1907
In point of fact, the only substantial body of statistical
information about the naturalization of the foreign-born voter which
hitherto has been even ostensibly sufficient for the student as a
basis for any racial comparisons, is that gathered by the United
States Immigration Commission of 1907. That body, created by an Act
of Congress approved February 7, 1907, of which Senator William P.
Dillingham of Vermont was chairman, consisted of three Senators,
three members of the House of Representatives, and three other
persons appointed by the President of the United States, and was
directed by the statute to “make full inquiries, examination, and
investigation, by sub-committee or otherwise, into the subject of
immigration, ...” and to report such conclusions and recommendations
as in its judgment might seem proper.
The information gathered by this Commission is very voluminous, and
has been of great value to sociologists and others concerned with
various aspects of the subject. Indeed, its report has come to be
called “the bible of the immigration question.” Nearly all the modern
writings on the subject have been based upon it in at least a general
way, and their color taken largely from its conclusions and its point
of view.
LEGEND OF “THE NEW IMMIGRATION”
To this report is attributable almost entirely the familiar
conventional generalization that there is a marked distinction
in what might be called _quality of assimilability_, between the
immigration of former years and that of the three decades preceding
the Great War; between the so-called “old immigration” and the
“newer.” This distinction is drawn in the report and, in most of
the writings of individuals, based upon it, between the group of
races from northern and western Europe--the English-speaking races,
the Scandinavians, Germans, Dutch, Belgians, French, and so on, and
those from southern and eastern and southeastern Europe, Russia,
Austria-Hungary, the Balkan States, Italy, Greece, Turkey-in-Europe,
Asia Minor, etc.
This _quality of assimilability_ was regarded by the Commission
as inferable to a large extent from the degree to which the
representatives of these racial groups concerning whom it got
information of various kinds were naturalized or had exhibited
interest in naturalization at least to the extent of declaring
intention to become citizens. It was assumed in a general way that
a racial group showing a high proportion of persons who had become
citizens, or taken steps thereto, might fairly be regarded as more
adaptable to American life, customs and ideals than one in which
relatively few naturalized citizens were found. With this assumption
as a starting point, it seemed reasonably obvious that inasmuch as
the “older” race showed the higher percentage of naturalized persons,
the inference of a difference in essential civic quality followed as
a matter of course.
Inasmuch also as this inference coincided with the general public
impression and prejudice to precisely the same effect, it occurred
to nobody to dispute or seriously to question its validity.
Anybody could tell you offhand that the Englishman, Frenchman,
German or Swede was more available for citizenship and more easily
assimilated than the Syrian, Croatian or Sicilian. It was a matter
of common knowledge! And the Immigration Commission gave you the
statistics--as if you needed any! For example, here is a table that
shows the per cents naturalized for the “old” and “new” races who had
been in the United States ten years or more. As is to be expected the
“old” races show the highest per cents on both counts.
The Commission recognized a general “tendency on the part of
wage-earners of foreign birth to acquire citizenship,” and that
this tendency “increased according to length of residence in this
country.” But it construed its statistics as showing that while
“more than three-fourths of the Bohemians and Moravians, Danish,
German, Irish, Norwegian, Scotch, Swedish, and Welsh races who
had been in the United States ten years or longer had been fully
naturalized,” there was a “lack of political or civic interest” (only
37.7 per cent) “on the part of the southern and eastern European
wage-earners” with a similar residence of ten years or longer, and
proceeded to assert that these did not possess that “tendency to
acquire citizenship which increases according to length of residence
in this country.” This assertion was supposed to be supported by the
facts given in the above table regarding the races from southern and
eastern Europe showing low percentages of individuals who had come
to this country when twenty-one years of age or older, who had lived
here ten years or over, and were naturalized.
The Commission regarded the table from which these facts were derived
as highly significant in its implied indication of the “civic
interest” exhibited and capable of being exhibited by the various
racial groups.
DISPARITY IN NUMBERS AMONG RACIAL GROUPS
It should be remarked at once that inferences from these figures and
others presented by the Immigration Commission require considerable
discount and discrimination by reason of the fact--to which Miss
Grace Abbott already has called attention[101]--that
... the numbers in the different races from whom information
was secured by the Commission varied so greatly as to make
it impossible to accept these conclusions as indicating the
assimilability of the various national groups. For example,
according to the percentages the Armenians appear to be more eager
to become citizens than the North Italians or the Poles; but the
comparison was made on the basis of information from 171 Armenians,
4,069 North Italians, and 10,923 Poles.
TABLE VIII
PER CENT THAT FULLY NATURALIZED MALE EMPLOYEES ARE OF TOTAL MALE
EMPLOYEES WHO WERE TWENTY-ONE YEARS OF AGE OR OVER AT TIME OF
COMING, AND WHO HAVE BEEN IN THE UNITED STATES TEN YEARS OR OVER,
COMPARED WITH THE PER CENT THAT MALE EMPLOYEES IN THE UNITED STATES
TEN YEARS OR OVER ARE OF THOSE HERE FIVE YEARS AND OVER, BY RACE.{1}
=============================================================
| IN UNITED STATES TEN YEARS
| OR OVER
+----------------+----------------
| | PER CENT OF
RACE | PER CENT FULLY | THOSE IN UNITED
| NATURALIZED | STATES FIVE
| | YEARS OR OVER
---------------------------+----------------+----------------
Old | 74.0 | 80.5
Swedish | 87.6 | 79.0
German | 81.5 | 82.6
Irish | 80.0 | 83.8
Bohemian and Moravian{2} | 79.7 | 56.0
Norwegian | 77.5 | 69.2
Danish | 77.3 | 77.3
Scotch | 76.9 | 80.7
Welsh | 76.4 | 94.6
English | 67.0 | 78.0
French | 64.8 | 57.1
Dutch | 64.7 | 76.8
Canadian, Other | 49.6 | 81.0
Canadian, French | 27.7 | 77.9
| |
New | 37.7 | 38.9
Finnish | 65.7 | 38.5
Hebrew, Other | 54.2 | 56.3
Italian, North | 49.3 | 38.0
Hebrew, Russian | 48.3 | 37.1
Lithuanian | 41.1 | 39.2
Polish | 39.8 | 44.0
Italian, South | 34.0 | 34.8
Russian | 33.6 | 36.8
Magyar | 26.9 | 31.4
Croatian | 26.8 | 23.5
Slovak | 25.3 | 42.8
=============================================================
[note 1: Compiled by the Americanization Study from _Report of the
Immigration Commission_, vol. i, p. 488, Table 100.]
[note 2: The Bohemians and Moravians are classified by the
Immigration Commission with the “new” races.]
This same factor of disparity in numbers operates, when a comparison
of degree of assimilability is attempted, between the old and new
races, with respect to residence in the United States from 5 to 9
years. The Immigration Commission gives the per cent naturalized
for each race of individuals here five years. It might be expected
that for this period of years conclusions could be drawn about the
assimilability of the two groups of races. But here again almost six
times as many individuals are classed in the new races as in the old
and any general inference would be founded on insecure ground because
of this disparity in numbers of cases. They, therefore, base their
conclusions on the group here 10 years and over.
THE FACTOR OF LENGTH OF RESIDENCE
As we shall see also from the statistics gathered and analyzed for
this volume,[102] the factor of residence “ten years or over,” with
all its implications, is exceedingly important--is, in fact, the
major factor in the whole situation. The indictment against the “new”
immigration hangs upon it, and falls down when the term “ten years or
longer” is analyzed, even in the light of the statistics presented
by the Immigration Commission itself in support of the indictment.
Indeed, the Commission was not entirely without compunctions on this
point, and presented a table exhibiting the probability that, of the
male employees from whom it derived its information, those of the
“older” races had been in the United States _considerably_ longer
than ten years, while those of the “newer” races had been here only
_slightly_ longer than ten years. But it did not emphasize the point,
and at a superficial glance this might seem a quibble; but it is of
importance scarcely to be overestimated.
TABLE IX
PER CENT OF FOREIGN-BORN MALE EMPLOYEES REPORTING CITIZENSHIP WHO
HAVE BEEN IN THE UNITED STATES EACH SPECIFIED PERIOD OF YEARS, BY
RACE{1}
======================================================================
| | IN THE UNITED STATES
| NUMBER +---------------+--------------
|REPORTING | 5 to 9 | 10 Years
RACE | COMPLETE | Years | and Over
| DATA +--------+------+--------+-----
| | Number | Per | Number | Per
| | | Cent | | Cent
----------------------------+----------+--------+------+--------+-----
Recent Races: | | | | |
Total | 43,833 | 26,747 | 61.0 | 17,086 | 38.9
Per cent of total | | | | |
reporting complete data | 64.9 | .... | 85.3 | .... | 47.3
| | | | |
Old Races: | | | | |
Total | 23,662 | 4,620 | 19.5 | 19,042 | 80.5
Per cent of total | | | | |
reporting complete data | 35.1 | .... | 14.7 | .... | 52.7
======================================================================
[note 1: Compiled by the Americanization Study from _Report of
Commission of Immigration Abstracts_, vol. i, p. 485.]
The Commission remarks, indeed, that “on account of the difference in
the length of time the various races have been coming to the United
States, a comparison of the older with the more recent immigrants
is hardly fair.”[103] But it does fail to appreciate the vital
significance of the point. And it apparently did not take adequate
notice of the further fact, shown in Table IX, that of those of
the “older” races who had been here over five years and reported
information in regard to citizenship, _80.5 per cent had been in
the United States over ten years, while only 38.9 per cent of the
“newer” races had been here so long_. That is, only 19.5 per cent of
the “older” races, as compared with 61.1 per cent of the “newer,”
had been in the country between five and nine years. This means,
of course, that the immigrants of the “older” races had had on the
average a much longer time than those of the “newer” to acquire
“civic interest” and seek naturalization. The “over” added to five
years means for the “recent” races between five and nine years in
most cases, while for the “older” races it usually means more than
ten. It would appear that every year of residence _added to ten_
increases the probability of efforts toward citizenship.
While the races from southern and southeastern Europe show rates of
naturalization ranging from 65.7 to 25.3 per cent with an average of
37.7, they also show a proportion residing in the country ten years
or longer ranging down from 56.3 to 23.5 per cent with an average of
38.9.[104] Contrast this, if you will, with rates of naturalization
among the northern, “older” races, of from 87.6 to 27.7 per cent with
an average of 74.0, but along with that observe that the proportion
of those “older,” and supposedly more assimilable, races residing in
the country ten years or over ranges from 57.1 to 94.6 per cent with
an average of 80.5!
From this point of view, the following table of the Commission
becomes highly significant:{1}
TABLE X
PRESENT POLITICAL CONDITION OF FOREIGN-BORN MALE EMPLOYEES WHO
HAVE BEEN IN THE UNITED STATES FIVE YEARS OR OVER, AND WHO WERE
TWENTY-ONE YEARS OF AGE AT TIME OF COMING, BY RACE
=======================================================================
“OLD” RACES || “NEW” RACES
---------------------+-------------++--------------------+-------------
| Per Cent || | Per Cent
| Naturalized || | Naturalized
Race | and Holding || Race | and Holding
| First Papers|| | First Papers
---------------------+-------------++--------------------+-------------
Swedish | 92.3 || Hebrew (other than |
Swiss | 92.1 || Russian) | 61.6
Welsh | 87.0 || Finnish | 61.2
Danish | 86.8 || Hebrew, Russian | 57.2
German | 85.7 || Austrian (race not |
Norwegian | 85.6 || specified) | 53.1
Irish | 82.6 || Armenian | 49.2
English | 80.6 || Italian, North | 45.8
Dutch | 79.9 || Bulgarian | 36.8
Scotch | 79.1 || Slovenian | 35.8
Belgian (race not | || Polish | 33.1
specified) | 76.5 || Lithuanian | 32.5
Bohemian and | || Italian, South | 30.1
Moravian{2} | 76.2 || Russian | 28.0
French | 66.5 || Magyar | 26.8
Canadian (other than | || Slovak | 22.8
French) | 56.7 || Croatian | 22.5
Canadian, French | 31.5 || Rumanian | 21.9
Mexican | 10.0 || Syrian | 20.7
| || Greek | 20.2
| || Ruthenian | 19.8
| || Spanish | 13.6
| || Serbian | 12.8
| || Cuban | 12.1
| || Portuguese | 5.5
=======================================================================
[note 1: _Abstracts_, vol. i, pp. 485, 486.]
[note 2: Classed as “Recent” by Immigration Commission.]
Prof. Edward A. Ross, who, of all the students of this question, is
one of the most uncompromising in generalizing from the reports of
the Immigration Commission to the disadvantage of the “newer” races,
deduced that “with the change in nationalities came a great change
in the civic attitude of the immigrants.”[105] He made little or
no allowance for the fact that the “civic attitude” of the “newer”
immigrants naturally would not have had time to develop as in the
case of those who had been here longer; he made even less for any
changes in industrial and social life in this country which might
help to account for this alleged change in attitude, by intensifying
the hardships of the only kind of employment “newer” immigrants
could get, by low wages due to an overstocked labor market, or by
the increased herding of foreign born in city slums, which last,
of itself, might tend to retard the process of adjustment and
assimilation. Prof. John B. Clark saw something of this, when he
remarked that “there is far more likeness between different branches
of the European family than there is between the economic conditions
into which immigrants came in the third quarter of the last century
and those into which they come to-day. Then they could have farms for
the asking, while now most of them go into mills, mines, shops, and
railroad plants, or become employees or tenants on farms owned by
others.”[106]
Prof. John R. Commons, discussing the differences in the proportions
naturalized among the various racial groups, calls attention to
the fact that “it is not so much a difference in willingness as a
difference in opportunity.... In course of time these differences
will diminish, and the Italian and the Slav will approach the
Irishman and the German in their share of American suffrage.”[107]
The war has created an entirely new situation with regard to both
immigration and naturalization; it is entirely impossible to forecast
the effects, either of the chaotic conditions in Europe or of the
reconstruction period in America, upon the influx of foreign born
into America, upon the duration of their stay here, or upon the
attitude toward citizenship of those already here and entitled to
citizenship by length of residence. The wholesale naturalization of
immigrants in the national army during the war, regardless of length
of residence or any of the other requirements ordinarily so rigidly,
so meticulously enforced, has swept into citizenship so large a
proportion of human material available and hitherto constituting the
bulk of the “naturalization problem” that the old generalizations
have become both useless and misleading. It will be long before such
immigrants as are now coming, or may come during the next five years,
can be the subject of intelligible statistics--especially since
nobody is collecting or collating any statistics worthy of the name.
Even the statistics afforded by the census have been the subject of
uncritical use on which pessimistic generalizations have been based.
The Thirteenth Census (1910) showed for the decade since that of 1900
a decrease of 12.4 per cent in the proportion of foreign-born white
males twenty-one years of age and over naturalized. Referring to this
decrease, Professor Ross predicted[108] that, “as things are going,
we may expect a great increase in the number of the unenfranchised.”
Of course he could not have foreseen the war and its profound effects
upon the whole question; but he might have observed in the same
census the fact that there had been a precisely identical (12.4 per
cent) decrease in the number of foreign-born whites who had been in
the country nine years or more--even if his prejudice on the subject
of the “new immigration” prevented his recognizing in this remarkable
coincidence a striking evidence of the direct relation between length
of residence and naturalization.
THE FACTOR OF LANGUAGE
It would be plausible to expect that language would be a factor in
governing the degree to which this racial group or that would seek
naturalization. Those whose mother tongue is English, one might
naturally suppose, would find it easier to acquire the necessary
information, and would the sooner be absorbed into the life and
atmosphere of the country, the sooner aspire to full citizenship.
The facts do not support this idea at all. And a very slight
consideration of the conditions discloses the reasons. In the
first place, no knowledge of English whatever is required for
the declaration of intention; and only the statistics of full
naturalization are of value in this matter. Both the statistics of
the Immigration Commission, and especially those compiled by the
Americanization Study, make it clear that, on the average, more than
ten years’ residence in this country precedes final naturalization.
It is a rare case in which during that ten years the petitioner has
not acquired a speaking knowledge of English sufficient for all his
practical purposes.
The statistics of the Immigration Commission themselves show
how little the original knowledge of English has to do with
the matter.[109] For the persons from whom the Commission got
information, who had been in this country ten years or over (racial
groups represented by 100 individuals or more), the percentages of
those fully naturalized exhibit the fact that the Swedish and German
show a higher rate than the Irish; the Bohemian, Moravian, Norwegian
and Danish outrank the Scotch, Welsh, and English. Even for those
who have been in the country only five to nine years the Swedes show
the highest percentage.[110] That length of residence, rather than
native language, is the dominant factor in determining interest in
citizenship, stands forth in Table VIII, which gives percentages by
race of those in the United States ten years or longer, and of such
of these as have been fully naturalized.
LENGTH OF RESIDENCE AND EARNING POWER
The fallacious nature of the assumption that there is an essential
difference between the so-called “older” and “newer” races as such
in respect of interest in citizenship is further disclosed by the
statistics of the Immigration Commission on the subject of the wages
of foreign-born laborers. The Commission found that the members of
the “older” races in the households covered by its inquiry were
earning more than those of the “newer” races, and occupied, generally
speaking, higher positions. This, of course, was to be expected; but
little stress was laid by the Commission upon the relation between
these facts and the relative rates of naturalization, although it
is a conspicuous relationship. Like most of the statistics compiled
by the Commission in this particular field, the comparison may be
criticized on the ground that the numbers upon which percentages are
based and compared are small, and differ widely among the racial
groups. Nevertheless, despite this discrepancy, the probability
stands forth that, in addition to length of residence, the economic
status--the individual and family income--is a most important
factor in determining the interest of the foreign born in acquiring
citizenship.
From the following table it is clear that the “older” races show a
higher average rate of income in all the occupations listed than the
“newer.”[111]
TABLE XI
AVERAGE AMOUNT OF WEEKLY EARNINGS OF MALE EMPLOYEES EIGHTEEN YEARS
OF AGE AND OVER, BY RACE AND SPECIFIED INDUSTRIES{1}
(Part One)
=========================================================
| | Average | Agricultural |
| Reporting | Earnings | Implements | Cotton
Race | Complete | per | and | Goods{2}
| Data | Day | Vehicles{2} |
--------+-----------+----------+--------------+----------
“Old” | 17,433 | 2.34 | 13.03 | 11.14
“New” | 65,485 | 1.99 | 11.58 | 8.77
=========================================================
(Part Two)
==================================================
| Woolen | Slaughtering |
| and | and | Coal
Race | Worsted | Meat | Mining
| Goods{2} | Packing{3} | Bituminous{3}
--------+----------+--------------+---------------
“Old” | 11.69 | 2.27 | 2.33
“New” | 8.64 | 1.83 | 2.09
==================================================
[note 1: See Appendix for complete table. This table does not take
account of lost time.]
[note 2: Weekly wage.]
[note 3: Daily wage.]
When the expense of becoming a citizen is taken into consideration,
the bearing of income on acquiring citizenship is important. Add to
that the obvious fact that wages and general economic and social
status tend to improve in the individual case with length of
residence, and the situation becomes not only clear but just what
common sense would suggest as probable. It ought not to require
elaborate argument to substantiate the assertion that the immigrant
in his early years in America is too busy getting a job and an
economic footing, acquiring a working knowledge of the language,
overcoming the general prejudice against him as a foreigner, and so
on, to pay much attention to the question of becoming a citizen;
besides which he must, in any event, live here five years before he
can do anything effective in the matter.
VOTING ON “FIRST PAPERS”
The present state of public opinion in the United States on the
subject of the foreign born is very different from what it was in
the earlier years of our development; this is largely, though not
entirely, due to the emotions and disclosures connected with the war.
When we were opening up the vast domain west of the Alleghanies, and
there was great need of human labor to clear forests, break virgin
land, and help in the beginnings of our industries, the immigrant
was a welcome helper, and every inducement was offered to entice him
to come and settle on even terms with the native born. One of these
inducements was citizenship, for all intents and purposes, on very
easy terms.
Prior to 1910 there were ten states in which aliens were permitted
to vote on their mere declaration of intention to become
citizens--subject, however, to the same conditions of length of
residence in state, county, and election district as citizens.
These were Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri,
Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, and Texas.[112]
That this easy acquisition of the suffrage would act as a deterrent
to the completion of citizenship was to be expected, and that it
has indeed so acted appears in a comparison of the proportions of
foreign-born males of voting age holding “first papers” only, in
the alien-suffrage states, with those in states requiring full
citizenship as a prerequisite to voting.
TABLE XII
PER CENT OF FOREIGN BORN OF VOTING AGE HAVING FIRST PAPERS, AND
ALSO THE PER CENT IN STATES PERMITTING ALIENS TO VOTE ON FIRST
PAPERS, COMPARED WITH CERTAIN STATES NOT PERMITTING ALIENS TO VOTE
ON FIRST PAPERS, FOR 1900 AND 1910{1}
=======================================================================
| | | | PER CENT
| NUMBER OF | | | HAVING
| FOREIGN BORN |PER CENT| PER CENT | FIRST
| OF VOTING AGE |INCREASE|NATURALIZED| PAPERS
| | | | ONLY
STATE |---------------------+--------/-----------/----------
| 1900 | 1910 |1900 to| 1900| 1910| 1900| 1910
| | | 1910 | | | |
-----------------+----------+----------+-------+-----+-----+-----+-----
United States | 4,904,270| 6,646,817| 35.5 | 58.0| 45.6| 8.4| 8.6
Alien-suffrage | | | | | | |
states (total) | 716,975| 857,681| 19.6 | 59.4| 52.3| 12.3| 9.7
Nonalien-suffrage| | | | | | |
states (total) | 1,275,162| 1,645,291| 29.0 | 67.8| 53.0| 6.5| 7.4
=======================================================================
[note 1: _United States Census_, 1910, vol. i, p. 1071.]
In 1900 the ratio of those holding declarations only was about 12 to
6 in favor Of the alien-suffrage states. By 1910 this difference had
diminished to about 12 to 9. If aliens of any race were interested in
voting as soon as they had a chance, this interest certainly would
have manifested itself in the states permitting them to vote on the
“first papers” which they could get, if they chose, an hour after
landing.
WHAT BECOMES OF THE DECLARATIONS?
To what extent does the declarant follow up his declaration of
intention to apply for citizenship? The reports of the Commissioner
of Naturalization give each year, by states, the number of
declarations of intention (“first papers”) and the number of
petitions for final naturalization. The most striking fact apparent
in these statistics is that the number of declarations is far in
excess of the number of petitions--to say nothing of what may happen
to the latter by way of denials when they reach the naturalizing
judge.
Now, it must be remembered that these totals are not directly
comparable. In no event can the final petition follow the declaration
by less than two years, and the law now permits a lapse of seven
years before the declaration must expire. If the number of
declarations and petitions were fairly uniform from year to year, or
bore any constant relation to each other, something might be inferred
from a comparison of totals for a seven-year period. Since, however,
the number of petitions, as well as the number of declarations,
increased rapidly from 1908 to 1918, no sound conclusion can be
reached without taking such variations into account.
For example, none of the 136,698 declarations of intention filed in
1908 could become the basis for petitions until 1910, and all would
be valid until 1915. In 1910 the number of petitions filed was only
56,038, and seven years later it was 123,855. There is no way of
knowing how the petitions which actually consummated the declarations
filed in 1908 were distributed among the years 1910-14; but it would
seem to be sufficiently dependable to take the average of those
years, which would be 88,670. Instead, therefore, of comparing the
43,864 petitions of 1908 with the 136,698 declarations of that year,
it is proper to compare the 136,698 with the average of 88,670 which
gives a ratio of 64.9.
The ratio of about 65 petitions to each 100 declarations is in fact
corroborated by other calculations, as will appear below. Take, for
instance, the figures[113] for the period of five years 1908-12,
inclusive:
TABLE XIII
NUMBER OF DECLARATIONS FILED EACH YEAR, 1908-12, WITH AVERAGE
NUMBER AND RATIO OF PETITIONS CONSUMMATING IN FIVE-YEAR PERIOD
ENDING EACH YEAR
===========================================================
| | AVERAGE |
| NUMBER OF | NUMBER OF |
YEAR IN WHICH | DECLARATIONS | PETITIONS IN | RATIO OF
DECLARATIONS | FILED IN | FIVE-YEAR | PETITIONS TO
WERE FILED | EACH YEAR | PERIOD ENDING | DECLARATIONS
| | EACH YEAR |
--------------+--------------+---------------+-------------
1908 | 136,698 | 88,670 | 64.9
1909 | 143,212 | 98,926 | 69.1
1910 | 167,226 | 105,799 | 63.3
1911 | 186,157 | 113,137 | 60.8
1912 | 169,142 | 116,183 | 68.7
| | |
Average | 160,487 | 104,543 | 65.1
===========================================================
Take it another way, remembering that each declaration of intention
has a valid lifetime of seven years--five after the two which must
elapse before it can be made the basis of a final petition. Assuming
that the petitions consummating the declarations of any given year
are distributed approximately evenly over the five-year period
during which they are valid for that purpose, then one-twenty-fifth
of the declarations of 1908-18 covered by Table XIII eventuated in
petitions in 1910, two-twenty-fifths in 1911, and so on, reaching
five-twenty-fifths in 1914, and falling again to one-twenty-fifth in
1918. The following diagrammatic table, tracing out on this basis
the probable distribution of the declarations consummated by the
petitions filed from 1908 to 1918, inclusive, shows graphically
the weight which should be given to the petitions of each year,
in calculating the ratio of declarations to petitions. It fully
substantiates the showing of Table XIII, and justifies the assertion
that 35 out of every 100 declarants fail to file petitions within the
period now fixed by the law.
TABLE XIV
SHOWING NUMBER OF DECLARATIONS FILED IN EACH YEAR DURING THE PERIOD
1908-1912, AND THE NUMBER OF FINAL PETITIONS FOR NATURALIZATION
ASSUMED TO HAVE BEEN BASED UPON THOSE DECLARATIONS IN EACH YEAR
DURING WHICH, RESPECTIVELY, THE DECLARATIONS WERE VALID
======================================================================
DECLARATIONS PETITIONS
----------------------------------------------------------------------
NUMBER | DATE DATE | WT. | ASSUMED
| | | NUMBER
--------+--------------------------------------------+-----+----------
| 1910 | 1 | 55,038
| 1911 | 2 | 147,288
136,698 | 1908 1912 | 3 | 286,881
143,212 | 1909 1913 | 4 | 380,744
167,226 | 1910 1914 | 5 | 619,275
186,157 | 1911 1915 | 4 | 425,268
169,142 | 1912 1916 | 3 | 324,027
| 1917 | 2 | 264,640
| 1918 | 1 | 110,416
| | +----------
TOTAL 802,435 | 25 | 2,613,577
AVERAGE 160,487 | | 104,543
PERCENTAGE 160,487 into 104,543 | | 65.1
======================================================================
The chances of error in this calculation lie in the facts (1) that
until September, 1913, declarations made under the law as it existed
prior to 1906 (the so-called “old-law declarations”) were held to be
valid, no matter how old their date; (2) that the decision of the
United States District Court,[114] applying the seven-year limit to
all outstanding declarations, undoubtedly hastened many petitions in
1913-14, and (3) that the effects of the war in Europe probably were
in some cases to expedite and in others to delay or to prevent the
filing of petitions. Undoubtedly some of the petitions of 1910, 1911,
1912, and 1913 are attributable to declarations more than seven years
old, and some which in normal conditions would have been filed during
the period 1914-18 were not filed.
It may be assumed, however, that these factors to a great extent
offset each other, and that in any case their effect is negligible.
And if it should appear that a substantial number of “old-law
declarations,” originating prior to 1908, were accepted up to 1918 by
those courts which did not promptly accept the seven-year decision,
it would mean only that the percentage of 65.1 is too high; that
_more_ than 35 declarations out of 100 do not eventuate in petitions.
Right here it must be emphasized that the figure 65.1 applies not to
naturalization, but to petitions for naturalization, which is a very
different thing indeed. We shall elsewhere learn[115] that 11.5 per
cent of all petitions are denied--more than half of the denials being
for reasons of a technical character.
The average of 35.1 of “sterile” declarations is that for the United
States as a whole; but the figure is by no means constant or uniform.
In some states the proportion of petitions to declarations is very
much lower than that; in some it is very much higher.
In Indiana, for example, the figures show a fruition in petitions
of only 26.4, or a little more than 1 in 4, while in Wisconsin the
petitions exceed the declarations by 15.7 per cent. As the above
table shows, in four states the proportion of petitions exceeded 80
per cent, while 14 scaled down from 80 to 70 per cent. Twenty-six
states show percentages below the 65.1 of the United States as a
whole.
TABLE XV
SHOWING RATIO OF DECLARATIONS OF INTENTION TO PETITIONS FOR
NATURALIZATION, BY STATES, BASED ON YEARLY AVERAGE NUMBER OF
DECLARATIONS, 1908 TO 1912, AND YEARLY AVERAGE (WEIGHTED){1}
=====================================================
STATE | RATIO || STATE | RATIO
---------------------+-------++---------------+------
United States | 65.1 || Illinois | 64.4
Wisconsin | 115.7 || Colorado | 64.3
Arizona | 94.2 || Nebraska | 64.0
North Carolina | 93.1 || New York | 64.0
Mississippi | 86.7 || North Dakota | 63.7
Ohio | 78.8 || Oregon | 63.7
Kentucky | 77.5 || Kansas | 62.9
New Jersey | 76.5 || Tennessee | 62.8
Maine | 76.1 || Minnesota | 62.7
Vermont | 75.6 || Iowa | 60.9
South Carolina | 75.3 || Texas | 59.5
Georgia | 74.3 || Delaware | 58.4
Montana | 73.9 || Oklahoma | 58.3
Alabama | 73.0 || Louisiana | 56.4
Maryland | 72.2 || West Virginia | 55.6
Arkansas | 72.0 || Massachusetts | 53.7
Michigan | 71.9 || Alaska | 53.0
California | 71.2 || Florida | 52.5
Pennsylvania | 70.9 || Nevada | 52.4
Connecticut | 69.6 || Utah | 50.5
Rhode Island | 69.6 || Washington | 50.3
Virginia | 69.3 || Idaho | 48.6
Wyoming | 68.1 || Missouri | 45.2
New Mexico | 67.0 || South Dakota | 44.1
District of Columbia | 66.8 || Hawaii | 39.9
New Hampshire | 66.5 || Indiana | 26.4
=====================================================
[note 1: The averages are weighted as per the table above, p. 221.]
The most important question raised by the results of this calculation
is whether it is reasonable to expect that more than one out
of every three declarations of intention should thus fail of
fruition--that thirty-five out of every hundred aliens who declare
their intention to apply for citizenship should fail to do so. The
answer to this question, and the reasons for the failure, are not
discoverable in the figures themselves, nor in any documents to be
found anywhere. The reasons are human reasons, hidden in the bosoms
and written in the personal experience, of men and women who started
out after the privileges of American citizenship, and changed their
minds.
We have some illuminating data, first-hand, from some twenty-six
thousand aliens who did follow up their declarations, and afford
in the process a good deal of extraordinarily interesting and
enlightening information, the study of which is set forth in the
succeeding chapter of this volume.
VIII
LATER STATISTICS--IN WHICH SOME TWENTY-SIX THOUSAND PETITIONERS SPEAK
FOR THEMSELVES
When, early in the progress of the Americanization Study, it became
apparent that almost no adequate statistical data were available in
regard to naturalized citizens, or the really significant aspects
of the naturalization process, it was decided to tap the mine of
information existing in the original documents lying neglected in
the files of the Naturalization Bureau at Washington, and to collate
and analyze the significant facts for the latest year of reasonably
normal conditions antedating the war. Obviously, that latest year
would be that between July 1, 1913, and June 30, 1914.
The consent of the Bureau was readily obtained, with the offer of
all possible co-operation. It should be stated once for all, indeed,
that at every stage of the Study the Naturalization Bureau, in both
its headquarters and field service, has withheld nothing in the way
of information and assistance--save only to the extent to which
practically all of its official correspondence is characteristically
tardy by reason of the short-handed and overworked condition of its
clerical force.
It was discovered immediately, however, that the conditions of the
files at Washington were such as to prohibit the segregation of the
documents for any single year without an inordinate, and in the
circumstances impracticable, expenditure of labor and time. The only
recourse, then, was to the local courts, where are kept on file, in
more available shape and in chronological order, duplicates of the
petitions for naturalization and record of the court’s action upon
each. But, since this required the examination of the documents in
the country-wide offices of the clerks of the courts themselves, it
was impracticable to make the inspection complete, as would have been
the case had the documents been suitably arranged and available all
in one place.
MORE THAN A FIFTH OF ALL PETITIONERS
Twenty-eight courts, with a total of 26,284 naturalization petitions
filed during the fiscal year 1913-14, were visited during 1919,
with the cordial co-operation of the clerks in charge. And inasmuch
as this total number of petitions examined constituted more than
one in five (21.2 per cent) of the whole number of petitions for
naturalization (123,855) filed in that fiscal year in the whole
United States, it would seem to represent a large enough number and a
sufficient variety of local, racial, and other conditions to warrant
a fair degree of confidence in the representative character of the
results.
FROM TWENTY-EIGHT REPRESENTATIVE COURTS
The courts studied included two Federal and three state courts in New
York City, having the great bulk of naturalization business; a number
of courts in industrial districts, and some smaller ones taking in
the business from outlying rural regions. Following is a list of the
courts from which the information was derived:
State court, Auburn, Maine
State court, Worcester, Massachusetts
State court, Bridgeport, Connecticut
State court, Middletown, Connecticut
State court, Norwich, Connecticut
Federal courts, New York City
State courts, New York City
State court, White Plains, New York
State court, Mineola, Long Island, New York
State court, Troy, New York
State court, Ithaca, New York
State court, Rochester, New York
State court, Elmira, New York
State court, Paterson, New Jersey
State court, New Brunswick, New Jersey
State court, Easton, Pennsylvania
Federal court, Cleveland, Ohio
State court, Cleveland, Ohio
State court, Akron, Ohio
Federal court, Cincinnati, Ohio
State court, Galesburg, Illinois
State court, Iowa City, Iowa
State court, Portland, Oregon
Federal court, Seattle, Washington
State court, Seattle, Washington
And it is apparent that the courts from which the data were derived
are widely scattered through the East, Middle West, and Far West,
and are of a varied character as regards nature of racial and
other characteristics which might affect the human factors in the
matter. It is to be regretted that there are none from the South and
Southwest; but there seems no reason to suppose that they would show
materially different results.
IN A REASONABLY NORMAL YEAR
Doubtless any particular year selected for the study would present
certain special conditions calling for discount of the results. This
is true of the year 1913-14. That year chanced to mark the end of
the validity of the “old-law declarations”;--that is to say that
in that year the seven-year limit upon the life of a declaration of
intention to become a citizen, established for the first time by the
Naturalization Act of 1906, was declared by the United States Court,
1914,[116] to apply to declarations made prior to the enactment of
that statute. Undoubtedly anticipation of this tended on the whole to
increase, perhaps materially, the number of petitions consummating
those old declarations. On the other hand, there were doubtless many
declarants of long ago who were discouraged by the decision from
filing petitions at all. We shall observe later the extent to which
that decision has been a factor in the rejection of the petitions of
a large number of persons otherwise presumably eligible--excluded for
that reason alone.
Obviously it was desirable to select a year as recent as possible and
at the same time to avoid any period affected by the complications
introduced by the existence of the war in Europe. It is felt that the
year 1913-14 is sufficiently typical for all practical purposes, and
that the applicants for citizenship analyzed herein are sufficiently
representative generally of the foreign born who seek to join
us; whatever may be said of the great number who were swept into
citizenship helter-skelter during and since the war by naturalization
of soldiers and sailors on the sole ground of military service.[117]
THE RACIAL GROUPS ARE TYPICAL
Some of the important conclusions supported by these statistics
naturally raise the question whether the petitions studied are,
in respect of country of origin, really typical of the whole
foreign-born population of the country. This question seems to be
disposed of by a compilation showing the racial distribution of the
petitioners studied, compared with the racial distribution of _all_
unnaturalized foreign-born white aliens 21 years of age or older in
the country as a whole, and in the nine large cities covered by this
investigation.
TABLE XVI
COMPARISON BY RACES OF (1) A NATURALIZATION PETITIONERS STUDIED,
(2) UNNATURALIZED MALES TWENTY-ONE YEARS OR OVER IN NINE CITIES{1}
WHERE PETITIONS WERE FILED, AND IN THE COUNTRY AS A WHOLE, IN
1910{2}
========================================================================
| | UNNATURALIZED{3}| UNNATURALIZED
| | FOREIGN-BORN | FOREIGN-BORN
| | WHITE MALES | WHITE MALES
COUNTRY | PETITIONERS | TWENTY-ONE | TWENTY-ONE
OF BIRTH | STUDIED | YEARS OF AGE | YEARS OF AGE
| 1913-14 | AND OVER IN | AND OVER IN
| | NINE CITIES, | THE UNITED STATES
| | IN 1910 | IN 1910
-----------------+--------+-------+---------+-------+-----------+-------
| Number | Per | Number | Per | Number | Per
| | Cent | | Cent | | Cent
-----------------+--------+-------+---------+-------+-----------+-------
All countries | 26,284 | 100.0 | 437,517 | 100.0 | 2,837,307 | 100.0
Russia | 7,864 | 29.9 | 107,393 | 24.5 | 481,532 | 17.0
Austria | 3,875 | 14.7 | 59,252 | 13.5 | 407,977 | 14.4
Italy | 3,591 | 13.7 | 98,595 | 22.5 | 523,964 | 18.5
Hungary | 2,443 | 9.3 | 31,194 | 7.1 | 200,274 | 7.1
Germany | 2,305 | 8.8 | 35,425 | 8.1 | 219,133 | 7.7
Ireland | 1,773 | 6.7 | 16,453 | 3.8 | 116,613 | 4.1
England | 831 | 3.2 | 14,807 | 3.4 | 112,317 | 4.0
Sweden | 616 | 2.3 | 8,675 | 2.0 | 92,289 | 3.3
Rumania | 569 | 2.2 | 5,778 | 1.3 | 17,498 | 0.6
Norway | 389 | 1.5 | 4,084 | 0.9 | 66,802 | 2.4
Canada | 385 | 1.5 | 9,229 | 2.1 | 176,868 | 6.2
Scotland | 288 | 1.1 | 5,299 | 1.2 | 38,940 | 1.4
Denmark | 200 | 0.8 | 1,881 | 0.4 | 27,045 | 1.0
Switzerland | 197 | 0.8 | 4,039 | 0.9 | 16,942 | 1.6
Finland | 144 | 0.6 | 2,395 | 0.5 | 43,737 | 1.5
Turkey in Asia | 142 | 0.5 | 1,883 | 0.4 | 22,776 | 0.8
Holland | 139 | 0.5 | 930 | 0.2 | 18,116 | 0.6
Turkey in Europe | 92 | 0.3 | 1,650 | 0.4 | 19,546 | 0.7
Greece | 90 | 0.3 | 5,393 | 1.2 | 62,758 | 2.2
France | 86 | 0.3 | 4,116 | 0.9 | 21,457 | 0.8
Wales | 32 | 0.1 | 294 | 0.1 | 6,424 | 0.2
Spain | 23 | 0.1 | 932 | 0.2 | 10,037 | 0.4
Portugal | 8 | .... | 92 | .... | 19,557 | 0.7
No information | 23 | .... | .... | .... | .... | ....
Other | 179 | 0.8 | 17,728 | 4.1 | 114,705 | 4.0
========================================================================
[note 1: Cleveland, New York (Boroughs of Manhattan, Bronx, and
Queens); Bridgeport, Connecticut; Cincinnati; Paterson, New Jersey;
Portland, Oregon; Rochester, New York; Seattle, Washington;
Worcester, Massachusetts.]
[note 2: _United States Census_, 1910, vol. 1, chap. xi.]
[note 3: Includes aliens and those holding first papers.]
Considerable variations will be observed between the racial
distribution of petitioners studied and that of the unnaturalized
but potentially naturalizable males in the whole country in 1910.
For instance, while 18.5 per cent of the unnaturalized persons in
the United States were born in Italy, only 13.7 per cent of the
petitioners studied were Italians; on the other hand, while 29.9 per
cent of the petitioners studied were from Russia, only 17 per cent of
the unnaturalized males in the United States in 1910 were Russians.
These discrepancies do not prove, however, that even in such
cases the groups of petitioners studied are not representative of
the foreign-born population, because racial distribution varies
considerably from state to state. Fortunately, moreover, it is
possible to compile from the census figures to show by country of
origin the distribution of unnaturalized white males in the cities
covered by the study, and these figures, also included in the last
column of the table, show conclusively that the racial distribution
in those cities is fairly typical. The percentages do not exactly
agree, nor is that to be expected. In the first place, there is a
difference of three years between the times represented respectively
in the two sets of figures--years during which there was a heavy
immigration. The figures given for the unnaturalized are not
complete, inasmuch as for those cities the citizenship status of 9.8
per cent of the foreign-born males 21 years of age and over was not
reported by the 1910 census. Furthermore, the petitions studied were
not all from these nine cities, although nearly nine out of ten (86.8
per cent) of them were. On the whole, the nativity distribution in
those nine cities of the petitioners studied coincides remarkably
with that of the unnaturalized but naturalizable males.
RELATIVE “CIVIC AND POLITICAL INTEREST”
In Table X, page 211, the relative numbers and percentages are
arranged in the _order of magnitude_, and this arrangement is
illuminating in its display of what the Immigration Commission and
the writers who have taken their cue therefrom have interpreted as
“civic and political interest” exhibited in relative desire for
citizenship. With the exception of Italy the races from the sources
of largest recent immigration show a higher proportion naturalized
than the proportion they represented in the population. It can fairly
be said that the desire to become citizens is as evident among these
immigrants of the new races as among those of the earlier, entirely
leaving out of consideration the length of residence which operates
in favor of the older immigrants.
HOW DID THESE PETITIONERS FARE?
How did these applicants for citizenship fare? However much they
may have desired citizenship, these of the “new immigration” and
the “old”--did they get it? Did they pass the examinations? And as
regards the reasons for denial of those who were rejected, how did
the “recent” races account for themselves in respect of those matters
which really go to the questions of moral and intellectual fitness?
Well, to begin with, the percentage of all denials (3,033) among
these more than 26,000 petitioners was 11.5--almost exactly that
(11.2) of the whole United States during the entire period of
eleven years, 1908-18, as shown by the reports of the Commissioner
of Naturalization. Here appears a compilation analyzing _all_ the
denials during the period 1908-18.
TABLE XVII
COMPARISON OF CAUSES OF DENIAL FOR THE YEARS 1908-18 AND 1913-19
FROM COMMISSIONER OF NATURALIZATION REPORTS, AND DENIALS OF 26,284
PETITIONERS STUDIED
======================================================================
| DENIALS
+---------------------------------+--------------
| Naturalization Reports | Cases Studied
+----------------+----------------+ 1913-14
CAUSES | 1908-18 | 1913-14 |
+---------+------+---------+------+--------+-----
| Number | Per | Number | Per | Number | Per
| | Cent | | Cent | | Cent
---------------------+---------+------+---------+------+--------+-----
Want of prosecution | 33,493 | 31.2 | 3,856 | 29.4 | 689 | 22.7
Incompetent Witnesses| 28,262 | 26.3 | 3,982 | 30.2 | 422 | 13.9
Declaration invalid | 9,187 | 8.5 | 1,148 | 8.7 | 1,296 | 42.7
Ignorance | 11,109 | 10.3 | 1,147 | 8.7 | 220 | 7.2
Miscellaneous | 6,098 | 5.7 | 553 | 4.2 | 147 | 4.8
Immoral character | 4,269 | 4.0 | 588 | 4.5 | 59 | 1.9
Insufficient | | | | | |
residence | 3,625 | 3.3 | 389 | 3.0 | 68 | 2.2
Petitioner’s motion | 2,824 | 2.6 | 381 | 2.9 | 51 | 1.7
No jurisdiction | 2,934 | 2.7 | 291 | 2.2 | 12 | 0.4
Deceased | 1,123 | 1.0 | 174 | 1.3 | 11 | 0.4
Unable to produce | | | | | |
witnesses or | | | | | |
deposition | 1,090 | 1.0 | 196 | 1.5 | 12 | 0.4
Already a citizen | 1,200 | 1.1 | 150 | 1.1 | 9 | 0.3
No certificate of | | | | | |
arrival | 1,197 | 1.1 | 179 | 1.4 | 14 | 0.5
Premature petition | 979 | 0.9 | 96 | 0.7 | 17 | 0.2
Section 2169 (not a | | | | | |
white person) | 84 | 0.1 | 3 | .... | .... | ....
No information | .... | .... | .... | .... | 16 | 0.5
---------------------+---------+------+---------+------+--------+-----
Total | 107,474 |100.0 | 13,133 |100.0 | 3,033 |100.0
Certificates granted | 848,777 | .... | 105,439 | .... | .... | ....
Cases disposed of | 956,251 | .... | 118,572 | .... | 26,284 | ....
Per cent denied | .... | 11.2 | .... | 11.1 | .... | 11.5
======================================================================
A study of the figures covering the reasons for denial of the 3,033
among the petitions of 1913-14 here analyzed illuminated special
aspects of this matter, showing, as it does, how large a proportion
of the denials are for reasons of a purely technical character, or
because the petitioners abandoned their pursuit of citizenship after
filing the final petition.
The following table lists the races represented by forty or
more petitions, _in the order of percentage of denials_, and
shows the percentages attributable to the six principal reasons,
respectively: “want of prosecution,” “incompetent witnesses,”
“declaration invalid,” “ignorance,” “immoral character,” and “old-law
declaration--held to be invalid.”
TABLE XVIII
RACIAL DISTRIBUTION OF 26,284 PETITIONERS DENIED, 1913-14, AND THE
PER CENT OF THE DENIALS FOR THE SIX PRINCIPAL CAUSES
(Part One)
===========================================
COUNTRY | NUMBER | DENIALS |
OF | OF +--------+------+
BIRTH | PETITIONS | Number | Per |
| | | Cent |
--------------+-----------+--------+------+
All countries | 26,284 | 3,033 | 11.5 |
| | | |
Greece | 90 | 27 | 30.0 |
France | 86 | 19 | 22.1 |
Italy | 3,591 | 646 | 18.0 |
Turkey in | | | |
Europe | 92 | 15 | 16.3 |
Holland | 139 | 21 | 15.1 |
Scotland | 288 | 42 | 14.6 |
Denmark | 200 | 29 | 14.5 |
England | 831 | 120 | 14.4 |
Sweden | 616 | 80 | 13.0 |
Germany | 2,305 | 296 | 12.8 |
Switzerland | 197 | 25 | 12.7 |
Turkey in | | | |
Asia | 142 | 18 | 12.7 |
Norway | 389 | 48 | 12.3 |
Belgium | 41 | 5 | 12.2 |
Canada | 385 | 43 | 11.2 |
Hungary | 2,443 | 249 | 10.2 |
Finland | 144 | 14 | 9.7 |
Rumania | 569 | 54 | 9.5 |
Russia | 7,864 | 744 | 9.5 |
Ireland | 1,773 | 166 | 9.4 |
Austria | 3,875 | 347 | 9.0 |
Other | 201 | 27 | .... |
No information| 23 | .... | .... |
===========================================