DANGERS OF “DERIVATIVE CITIZENSHIP”
The subject of “derivative citizenship” is one that has been much and deservedly on the mind of the Naturalization Bureau, especially since the aspects of citizenship brought to the front by the war came into wider attention. In his report to the Commissioner of Naturalization for the year ending June 30, 1919, Raymond F. Crist, as Director of Citizenship, points out that on the whole the male applicants for citizenship
... are men who have had such opportunities to acquire knowledge of our language and of our institutions of government, and to adopt American customs, as their environments permitted. They have not been passing their lives within the four walls of their homes; they have had a much greater opportunity for contact with the American public than the foreign-born women. The husband may have gone to the public schools of his community and acquired a practical equipment not only of our language, but of such character as is attained through what is usually called a “common-school education.” Because he has acquired these qualifications for American citizenship he may be admitted. His admission to citizenship confers a like right upon his wife to exercise the franchise to-day in those states where suffrage is universal. To-morrow, when that right is acquired by all, the conferring of citizenship upon the wife will also enfranchise her.
The man has to pass an increasingly rigid examination; he is personally put through a severe inspection of his antecedents, his character, his personal opinions. His wife becomes a citizen without any examination whatever. The most meticulously particular court, the most painstaking naturalization examiner, cannot prevent her becoming a citizen and a voter without excluding the husband, who may, on his own account, be exceptionally desirable.
The Director of Citizenship goes on to say:
Generally the foreign-born women reside in an atmosphere and an environment wholly foreign. They have no opportunity, as a rule, to come into any sort of contact with American thought. They are as though they had never left their European homelands and were still in their native cities and towns. However much their condition of ignorance of our language, customs, or governmental institutions may be in evidence, they are, nevertheless, clothed with full American citizenship upon the naturalization of their husbands. There are approximately 2,000,000 women who will receive citizenship through the naturalization of their husbands within the next few years, and the addition of such a large number of citizens who know nothing whatsoever of their responsibilities presents a grave problem, and one which should be given the most attentive consideration by the legislative body. It would seem to be advisable to have some restrictive measure provided in the admission to citizenship that would condition the admission of a married man to the responsibilities of citizenship upon the qualifying of his wife.
The vital importance of this question of “derivative citizenship” is clear in the statistics gathered by the Americanization Study for the fiscal year 1913–14. Of the 26,284 naturalization petitions covered by that analysis, only 154, or .6 of 1 per cent, were those of women. But more than two-thirds (68.5 per cent) were married, from which it is evident that, in the large majority of these cases, foreign-born women were swept into citizenship by the naturalization of the husband. For less than one in ten of them were married to women born in the United States. And even these American-born women had lost their citizenship through marriage to aliens, regaining it only when their foreign-born husbands became citizens.