Part 16

========================= 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