Americans by Choice

In this court there is a ceremony just such as Mr. Sturges recommends—a talk by some one selected by the presiding judge, on the history and meaning of the flag and government, and what it means to take on the new citizenship. Then there is offered, and of course taken by all the accepted petitioners, the following pledge, devised by the judge:

In many parts of the country it has become a custom to hold public ceremonies, at which the new citizens naturalized within the past year or other definite period are assembled with their families to hear addresses, join in patriotic singing, and otherwise celebrate their adoption into the new fellowship.

FUNCTION OF THE NATURALIZATION BUREAU

The Naturalization Bureau should be, as it is now, the watchdog of all this business, the investigating agency of the government. But its work should not be confined, as it is now to so great an extent, to picking flaws in papers, straining shrewd technical points of law and procedure, or trying to find something wrong with the two witnesses or the intellectual attainments of the petitioner. Being informed at least two years in advance that George Kristopoulos, whose address is registered with the court and in its own files, has declared his intention to apply for citizenship, it can ascertain affirmatively at all times what he is about, and present to the court at the time of the final application a complete record of his conduct, upon which the court can act intelligently. Its functions in this direction should be materially expanded.

The naturalization examiner should represent the court, in the relation of a master, taking the necessary testimony, examining depositions, and presenting to the court at last a record complete in writing, upon which, in the great majority of cases, the judicial order would be entered without further ado. This would seem to be indeed its logical function. The Bureau needs a real job; in fact, has a real job instead of its present largely self-assumed adventures in the field of public education, for which it is not properly equipped, which has bedeviled its legitimate work and demoralized its correspondence and its whole system of records, upon which the proper administration of the law so greatly depends.

Except as the carrying out of the existing procedure has unjustly or unreasonably affected the individual petitioner for citizenship, it has not been conceived as the purpose of this study to investigate the Naturalization Bureau as an exhibit of public administration. Neither the available time nor the space in this volume has permitted such a study as would have been adequate in scope or just to the Bureau. Generally speaking, the thing which has been impressed upon those who have carried on this branch of the Americanization Study has been the zeal and honesty and vigilance for the public welfare with which the Bureau has done its work ever since its establishment in its present functions by the Act of 1906.

No serious charge or insinuation of corruption or willful misconduct of any kind on the part of any member of that service has come to the attention of the Study, and it may be predicted without reservation that no such charge or insinuation would be sustained by the facts. For fifteen years and more the Bureau has “carried on,” under conditions of great difficulty, generally undermanned and insufficiently appropriated for—although its business has from the beginning not only been self-supporting, but brought into the treasury of the United States money ample to have paid for adequate personnel—except during the war, when the prevailing hysteria about immigrants and the ill-informed rage for all manner of things that might be called “Americanization” led to the hasty and extravagant subsidizing of anything that could be tagged with that word. The Bureau deserves great credit for what it has accomplished. More than that, it is in no captious spirit that any demurrer has been entered here to what it has gone out of its way to attempt.

The time is ripe now to review and construct to better purpose on the basis of this long and informing experience, for an overhauling of the whole process by which aliens are taken into our political system. The Naturalization Law of 1906 and the amendments thereto should be revised as a whole, and what has been learned should be built into a new Act, retaining the substance which experience has abundantly justified, and sloughing off the excrescences which have grown up and accumulated. This should be done on the basis of a thorough investigation under the authority of Congress, and in a wholly constructive spirit.

Such an investigation would disclose the utter insufficiency of the force now available at headquarters and in the field; the lack of precision in the scope and technic of the Bureau; the chaos existing in its records; the need of intelligent and consistent direction of the field force by a supervising chief examiner or similar officer; the waste of effort and money in directions having nothing substantial or logical to do with the main work of the Bureau; the need of one or more competent law officers to unify the policy of the service in its practice under the decisions of the courts; the crying need of a simplification of the standards and procedure of admission and of the practices of the clerks of courts in handling the papers and records upon whose sufficiency and accuracy hang the welfare of thousands of well-intending human beings who desire to join us and are needed in our citizenry. The whole subject has gone too long without due understanding by the public and its representatives in Congress.

Meanwhile our would-be citizens have been chased from pillar to post and back again, losing in hundreds of thousands of cases their affection and respect for the country to whose fellowship they asked only the privilege of contributing what they might with all good will.

APPENDIX