Part 10

The law of 1906 limited the life of a declaration of intention to seven years. Prior to that there was no limit, and even after the passage of that Act it was held in practice that it did not apply to declarations made previously. But in 1913 the question was raised, in the United States Court in New York City, whether it was not the intent of Congress to apply the seven-year limitation to _all_ declarations. In 1914 the court ruled that it was. The effect of that decision was to invalidate all declarations made prior to September 27, 1906, notwithstanding the express provision in the law that “no alien who, in conformity with the law in force at the date of his declaration, has declared his intention to become a citizen of the United States, shall be required to renew such declaration.”

This decision was soon affirmed by the United States Circuit Court of Appeals; but even then it was not uniformly observed, until January, 1919, when the United States Supreme Court put an abrupt stop to the practice of accepting “old-law declarations” by affirming the decision of the District Court at New York.

The effect of this final ruling by the highest court in the land was tragic. Hundreds, if not thousands, of pending petitions, of aliens altogether fit from every other point of view, forthwith became invalid simply because based upon “old-law declarations” blighted by the newly applied seven-year restriction. In one session of the State Supreme Court in New York County a batch of more than seventy otherwise acceptable petitions was denied for this reason alone. The question of the effect of the decision upon certificates of naturalization granted theretofore between its date and September 27, 1913, was met by Congress in the Act of May 9, 1918, by the following provision:

Section 3. That all certificates of naturalization granted by courts of competent jurisdiction prior to December 31, 1918, upon petitions for naturalization filed prior to January 31, 1918, upon declaration of intention filed prior to September, 27, 1906, are hereby declared to be valid in so far as the declaration of intention is concerned, but shall not be by this Act further validated or legalized.

THE CERTIFICATE OF LAWFUL ENTRY

Assuming, now, that our alien is of the proper racial descent, the accepted age, and that his declaration of intention will pass muster; that he has lived in the United States for at least two years since the declaration was filed, and at least three years besides that--a total of not less than five years in all, including the final fifth year in the state--what must he do, and what may be done to him, when he comes up at last with his request for admission to Active Membership?

If he arrived in this country since June 29, 1906, he must produce a Certificate of Arrival. In theory, at least, all arriving aliens are registered at the port of entry by the Immigration Service of the Department of Labor. Under existing law they cannot get in at all if they are of certain excluded races and classes; if they are under contract to get a particular job; if they are insane or afflicted with certain diseases; if they are recognizable as anarchists, polygamists (or believers in either anarchy or polygamy), criminals, or, in the opinion of the immigration authorities, likely to become a public charge--a burden upon the community. They must, with certain exceptions for age and family relationship, be able to read and write in some language.

Aliens may properly enter the United States only through some officially designated port of entry, designated by the Commissioner of Immigration, if an alien enters elsewhere along our enormous border line he is deemed to be “unlawfully present,” is subject to deportation, and when he tries to become a citizen he must give a very good excuse for having “climbed up some other way.” A good many Canadians and Mexicans have found very embarrassing, eventually, the fact of their ignorance or evasion of this requirement.

The Act of Congress, approved June 29, 1906, went into effect in most respects on the 27th of September following, but this provision was to take effect immediately:

That it shall be the duty of the Bureau of Immigration to provide, for use at the various immigration stations throughout the United States, books of record, wherein the Commissioner of Immigration shall cause an entry to be made in the case of each alien arriving in the United States from and after the passage of this Act of the name, age, occupation, ... and the date of arrival of said alien, etc.

Unfortunately for the aliens subsequently embarrassed by the fact, the books for record of entries were not promptly installed, and in some instances since they were installed the immigration officials at the ports of entry have not always been scrupulous in the making of the required entries.

No certificate is given to the alien at the time of his arrival, even if he is properly registered; nothing of the sort is required of him anywhere; he does not have to show it when he makes his declaration of intention to become a citizen, nor at any other time or for any other purpose--until after he has been here at least five years and comes to the point of filing his petition for final naturalization. Then he must have it--unless he arrived before June 29th, 1906; in that event it is not required of him.

He is not to go for it to the Immigration Service. He must get it in the most roundabout fashion. He must address a written application, through the clerk of the court in which his petition for naturalization is to be filed, to the Commissioner of Naturalization, who in turn requests it of the Immigration Service. The Immigration Service, if it can find the original entry (and sometimes--quite frequently in fact--it cannot), sends the certificate to the Commissioner of Naturalization, who sends it to the clerk of the court, at the same time notifying the alien that now he may proceed to file his petition.

But what if the arrival entry cannot be found? What if the alien cannot remember the name of the vessel, or other important facts relating to his entry, and thus give the necessary clews for the search? What if it was his misfortune to arrive at a port after the law took effect and before the registry system was in operation? Both the Immigration and the Naturalization Service take a good deal of pains to care for such situations; but frequently without success. All this involves delay, not only vexatious and discouraging, but likely to prove fatal in the case of an alien whose declaration is at the edge of expiration. Not infrequently an application for certificate of arrival is bandied back and forth between the two Bureaus for months.

There was a case in 1919 in which the alien described himself as having arrived on a certain date and vessel at New York; the immigration records showed no such arrival, and, what was worse, no such vessel entering New York at that time. After long delay it turned out that the alien did arrive on that date and vessel, but at _Boston_, whence, upon admission, he came by a domestic coastwise vessel from Boston to New York. Many other cases are by no means so simple.

A petition accepted for filing without the requisite certificate of arrival is regarded as incomplete, and may not be completed subsequently by attachment of the certificate, but must be marked “spoiled”; the four dollars paid as fee may be returned to the petitioner by the clerk, or can be applied to the filing of a new and sufficient petition. It has been the practice of the Bureau of Naturalization, after it appears impossible to find record of the applicant’s admission to the country, to refer him to the nearest immigration inspector for what is known as a _nunc pro tunc_ inspection, for the purpose of satisfying the inspector that the alien should not be deported as “unlawfully present.” If the inspector is satisfied, he issues what is known as a “provisional certificate of arrival,” whose acceptance as sufficient for purposes of naturalization is subject to the discretion of the court. This would appear a reasonable way out; but in the case of petitioners living a very long distance from the office of an immigration inspector, it involves an extra, and perhaps prohibitively expensive, journey to the distant city for that purpose alone, and this difficulty has in fact been to some extent relieved by permission to handle such cases by correspondence and affidavits.

THE VEXATIOUS QUESTION OF NAMES

Another obstruction goes to the question of our treatment of the foreign-born laborer in industry--especially if he bear what we choose to regard as a “queer” name, difficult for us to spell or pronounce. The courts have, properly, no doubt, no patience with assumed names--particularly in a case where the alien cannot remember the name under which he entered the country. But it is a very common practice, in concerns employing a large number of immigrants, for the minor officials of the company, superintendents and foremen, to attach a name to a job, and insist upon calling the man who occupies it, “Mike Murphy,” or what not else, because that was the name of the first incumbent, and it is easier to pronounce than “Bahaoud,” “Behrensmayer,” or “Przybylski.” This, and the even more common practice of calling a man by a number, rather than a name, results in a vast deal of confusion, in a substantial discouragement of self-respect, and in the ultimate establishment of the neighborhood identity of a polysyllabic Greek or Armenian, perhaps, with a fine old Irish name. This will not do in the naturalization court. The petitioner must come in under at least the same name that he bore when he entered the country, and there must be no suspicion as to its not being his own.

But he does not have to keep that name. It is prescribed as lawful for the court in its discretion, “at the time and as a part of the naturalization of any aliens, ... upon the petition of such alien, to make a decree changing the name of said alien.” The fact of which the court must be convinced is that the petitioner is not attempting to conceal his real identity for the purpose of escaping payment of just debts or punishment for crime. Many aliens do thus change their names, and there have been cases in which the judge virtually compelled them to do so.

A naturalization judge said to the writer:

I have heard of a high-handed old judge, somewhere in the Northwest, who was in the habit of “suggesting” to every alien who came before him with a complicated mouthful of name that he change it to “Abraham Lincoln,” “Benjamin Franklin,” “George Washington,” or “Grover Cleveland.” No doubt you could find many a Pole or Swede naturalized as “Thomas Jefferson” or “Alexander Hamilton,” whose father, living in the same town, was known as “Konrad Kowalewski,” or “Ole Johanssen.”

Each nationality has in this country name-complications of this character peculiarly its own. The Swedes, for an example, have a habit of taking for their own surname the Christian name of a favorite aunt, uncle, or other relative, upon reaching the age of twenty-one years. Sven Svensen--which means “Sven, the son of Sven”--may undertake to compliment his uncle Olaf by calling himself Sven Olafsen. Suppose he came to this country under the name of Sven Svensen, before he was eighteen; but for several years before filing his declaration came to be known to everybody--including himself--as Sven Olafsen, and regarded his old name as a “childish thing” of no consequence to anybody. He applies as Sven Olafsen for his certificate of arrival, the immigration and naturalization bureaus have great difficulty in finding it, and when it does come along it is in the name of Sven Svensen. Often names are adopted in affectionate memory of the town from which the alien comes. Many Italians, for convenience, drop off a couple of syllables of awkwardly long names. Among the Greeks a typical case would be that of one, “Harris,” whose old-country name was Harralabopoulos.

Another kind of complication appears in the case of an alien whose true name was Isaac Brody; but he came on a steamship ticket issued to, and in the name of, his uncle, Isaac Boovris, and was recorded under that name by the immigration authorities. When he filed his declaration of intention he was advised to file under the name Boovris, to facilitate his certificate of arrival when that should be required. When he filed his final petition, after living and doing business for several years in this country under his true name of Brody, he asked to be naturalized under that name. The court refused, requiring him to file a new declaration as Isaac Brody and wait two years longer, calling attention to the penal statute which makes it an offense to apply for naturalization under an assumed or fictitious name; remarking that the court might have changed the name or amended the petition “if the error in the original declaration had been clerical, or had been innocent.”[77]

A Pennsylvania court said in the case of one Wicenty Pilipos, who after arrival informally changed his name to William Phillips:

We may concede that any person may change his name, and be naturalized under his new name; yet, if he does so, he must petition the court for that purpose, so that the record will show the whole transaction, and identify him as the person who has discarded his original name, under which he landed in this country. This is especially necessary to prevent any other person from perpetrating a fraud, by being naturalized under the discarded name.[78]

THE PETITION FOR NATURALIZATION

There are other technicalities with which the alien occasionally collides--such, for example, as the question of jurisdiction where there is a difference of definition in the term “judicial district,” or where boundaries may conflict between states, counties, or other distinct municipalities, with reference to the alien’s place of residence; or where the court to which he could naturally and conveniently repair by the shortest line of travel is in another jurisdiction, and he and his witnesses must journey perhaps even hundreds of miles to the court to which the letter of the law compels him to go. Such cases are numerous, but comparatively uncommon. Let us assume that he has reached the right court, has successfully unearthed, through the clerk, the Naturalization Bureau and the Immigration Service, his proper certificate of arrival, and has a valid declaration of intention. What next?

In large cities or other places reasonably convenient in respect of distance, the clerk is likely, as the Commissioner of Naturalization says in his report already quoted, to send the alien to the office of the Naturalization Service; there is filled out the “Facts Form,” as it is called, on which the final petition for naturalization is to be based. The petitioner is closely interrogated as to his general eligibility, and the principal business is under way. If the naturalization office is far distant, the petition is filled out by or in the presence of the clerk.

As required by the law quoted at the beginning of this chapter, the petition must set forth the full name, residence, occupation; date and place of birth; port of emigration; name of vessel, if any; port of arrival; date and court of declaration of intention; whether married, single, or widowed; wife’s name, nativity, and present residence; number, names, birthplaces, and residences of minor children; assurances that the applicant is not a practicing or believing anarchist or polygamist; intention to renounce former national allegiance and make permanent residence in the United States; attachment to the principles of the Constitution; ability to speak the English language; dates upon which began residence in the United States and in this state or territory; assertion that this is his first petition for citizenship, or, if a former petition was denied, the reasons for denial and the fact that these reasons have since been cured or removed.

In addition there must be the affidavit of two witnesses (each of whom must swear that he is himself a citizen of the United States), who must declare on his oath that he knows the petitioner to have been a resident of the United States at least since a certain specified date five years ago, and of the particular state at least since a certain specified date not less than a year ago; and that he personally knows the petitioner to be a person of good moral character, attached to the principles of the Constitution, well disposed toward the good order and happiness of the same, and generally qualified in every way to be admitted as a citizen of the United States.

To the petition _at the time of filing_ (that is rigidly required by the law and the decisions of many courts) must be physically attached the declaration of intention made at least two years before, and the certificate of arrival.

For filing the declaration of intention the alien will have paid to the clerk a fee of one dollar; upon filing his final petition he has to pay another fee of four dollars. There are strict penal provisions in the law for the punishment of clerks who charge or collect any more. Under the law, one-half of each fee is retained by the clerk, ostensibly for the purpose of reimbursing him for such additional clerical assistance as the naturalization business may necessitate, but not always used for that purpose. This subject is discussed elsewhere.

The petitioner, with certain exceptions noted below, must sign his petition in his own handwriting. It is, however, usually permitted him to sign it by “his mark,” properly witnessed, and even this was not required of those who filed their declarations of intention before the passage of the Act; but lapse of time has made that no longer a practical exception. It has usually been held that a signature, even in another language, such as Arabic, is sufficient. There has often been controversy as to whether the extraordinary arrangement of marks constructed by the petitioner is in fact a signature, the author insisting that he has achieved one when it is utterly illegible to both judge and naturalization examiner. In this, as in a host of other details, the fate of the petitioner hangs upon the intelligence and humanity of the judge, who has to choose between a strict insistence upon the technicality and a more generous adjudication--in a case, for example, in which a poor old deaf woman homesteader might lose all she has in the world, simply because he cannot see an intelligible “signature” in the conglomeration of hieroglyphics which she intends to represent her name.

The law requires the petitioner to state the name, nativity, and residence of his wife, if any, and each of his minor children. The wife, if she herself can lawfully be naturalized, becomes _ipso facto_ a citizen of this country by virtue of the naturalization of her husband. It is the practice of many naturalizing courts to decline to admit to citizenship men whose wives are still in the old country, seeing danger in conferring the status upon women who may never come to the United States, or who, coming, may turn out to be undesirable.

The petition must disavow belief in the so-called principles of anarchism; under the law no one can be naturalized who himself believes in or teaches or belongs to any organization or groups believing in or teaching “the duty, necessity, or propriety” of abolishing organized government, or “the lawful assaulting or killing of any officers, either of individuals or officers generally, of the government of the United States, or of any other organized government, because of his or their official character.” Some judges of naturalizing courts recognize little distinction between “anarchy” and “Socialism.” The United States Circuit Court of Appeals, however, was more discriminating, reversing the naturalizing court in the somewhat famous case of Leonard Olsen at Seattle, who was rejected, ostensibly, on the ground that he was not “attached to the principles of the Constitution,” but really because he avowed himself a Socialist. There had been a somewhat similar case in Texas, in 1891, but the Olsen decision settled the question of the lawfulness of Socialist views as affecting naturalization.[79]

Both the declaration of intention and the petition for naturalization are made out in duplicate; the original becomes a part of the record of the court in the clerk’s office; the duplicate is sent to the Naturalization Bureau at Washington.

NINETY DAYS’ INTERVAL BEFORE HEARING

Notice of each petition must be posted in a public and conspicuous place in the office of the clerk for at least ninety days before the hearing is had in open court. The Naturalization Bureau will have been informed directly by the clerk; the purpose of the posting is, of course, to give the public notice, so that anyone who desires to do so may appear with objections. In actual effect, the posting is without much value, because the public does not visit the clerk’s office except upon business of its own, and there is no other publication of the petition, save in such rare cases as local newspapers make it a matter of news. It may be injurious to the petitioner, because a good many hearings have been postponed simply because the clerk forgot to post the notice at all!

THE FINAL HEARING IN COURT

Petitions may be heard only upon stated days, fixed by rule of the court, so that the government and the public may attend the open hearings which are required by the law. This works smoothly and well enough in the great cities, where most naturalizations take place; but there are districts, in sparsely settled regions, where there is but one term of the court in a year; which, in practice, means that the judge cannot be sure of being at any given point on any days determinable in advance, except the opening day. In such cases a great many courts will have but one hearing period in a year--usually on the first, and perhaps the second, day of the term. Two hardships may arise from such a situation; the alien and his witnesses may be uncertain as to the length of time they must wait after a long journey to the county seat, and if the clerk is careless and fails to notify the petitioners that their cases are to be heard (a thing which happens all too often) the judge and examiner are on hand, but no one appears to be naturalized, and another year is lost before the cases can be disposed of. That this can be a matter of very serious import to the alien may be illustrated by the fact that a group of Poles were classed as “nonresident aliens,” and subjected to the very heavy income tax collected of such, simply because the clerk of the court in which their petitions for naturalization were pending failed to notify them of the hearing day.

MUST “SPEAK” THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE