Americans by Choice

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:

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:

Referring particularly to applicants, he said, also:

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

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”:

An Iowa judge says:

A Pennsylvania judge thinks little of educational requirements; that they would exclude many desirable applicants.

A judge in Nebraska, who handles some 200 cases a year, declares:

A California judge avers:

A judge in central New York, who has large experience with naturalization, says:

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:

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

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 bill would have authorized the Director of Citizenship, therein provided for at a salary of $5,000 a year,

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:

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:

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:

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:

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: