Americans by Choice

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:

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]

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.

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!

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

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.