Americans by Choice

by John Palmer Gavit

SHOULD DECLARATION BE ABOLISHED?

Some belated survival of Commissioner Campbell’s earlier belief, as a member of the Naturalization Commission of 1905, that the declaration of intention should be abolished as superfluous and as a prolific source of errors, appears in his concluding paragraph under this head, wherein, after alluding to the increasingly urgent appeals for more clerical assistance, which had characterized virtually every one of his reports since the establishment of the Naturalization Service, he adds:

If the object to be obtained does not justify the additional expenditure that it involves, then the declaration, as a matter of common justice to applicants for citizenship, if not for the practical reasons stated ... in the Report of the Commission of Naturalization to the President, dated November 8, 1905, should be stricken from the law. It may be suggested that the effect of such action upon the exercise by alien declarants of the elective franchise in certain states would be merely to cut off future supplies of such voters.

It is indeed true that many careful, experienced, and judicious students of the naturalization problem have on many grounds favored the abandonment of the declaration of intention. The arguments in this behalf are plausible while there are states in which aliens holding “first papers” (declarations of intention) are entitled to vote. As for the others, the reasons to the contrary seem to the present writer to outweigh them. Regardless of the suffrage, in many states the declaration entitles the holder to certain property rights; many employers, and even municipalities, require at least the declaration before they will permit employment. The best reason of all, regarded by a majority of the naturalizing judges as of vital importance, is that the declaration, and the interval of at least two years which must elapse before the declarant can file his final appeal for admission to citizenship, afford a period of probation, not only of substantial psychological value as affecting the alien himself, but giving the government opportunity to observe the conduct of the individual and to investigate his antecedents, and the person’s neighbors and the public generally due notice that he is an aspirant for active membership in the community.

On more than one occasion Mr. Campbell, who more than perhaps anyone else might be regarded as an expert on the subject of naturalization, favored the abolition of the declaration of intention. As late as 1910, testifying before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization of the House of Representatives, he said:

I think I am on record as advocating the abolition of the declaration of intention, anyhow.

That this is no longer his view, or that of the Bureau, appears somewhat emphatically in the following excerpt of the annual report bearing his signature, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1917:[75]

Many theorists in the United States, when there was no Federal supervision of the naturalization law, conceived the idea that the declaration of intention was a purely superfluous act; that the certificate of the declaration of intention was a superfluous document. Many of them still retain that idea, having made no advance in their studies, or being unacquainted with the experience of the Federal administrative force. There is nothing that has arisen in the experience of the Bureau of Naturalization, in the ten years of Federal supervision, that justifies this idea that the declaration of intention should be abolished.

The Americanization work of the Bureau, based as it is upon the declaration of intention, is the only point of contact the Federal Government has with the individual alien from the time he lands upon our soil. The use of the declaration of intention by the Bureau in sending the names to the public schools and bringing the aliens of every community into close relationship with them has forever settled the question of the value of the declaration of intention.

This is only a new use to which this “first paper” (an instrument which is peculiarly an American institution)[76] has been put. If this were the only use to be made of it, it would justify its continued existence. As it is, it is used and interwoven into the administrative fabric of the Government in its contact with aliens throughout the United States. It is a means of identification by which the alien makes known his right to take up Government land; by which he may secure employment in municipalities and in State improvement work; by which membership in many organizations may alone be secured. It is the indication of the announced purpose of the alien to forswear his allegiance to his sovereign and to choose the Constitution of the United States as his new allegiance. It is woven throughout the warp and woof of our national laws and our social and economic organizations.