“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.