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:
TABLE VI
Receipts from Naturalization Fees and Disbursements from Various Appropriations for the Enforcement of the Naturalization Law for Rents, Supplies, and Miscellaneous Expenses, Fiscal Years 1907 to 1920{1}
| Year | Naturalization Fees | Cost of Administration | Difference in Fees Received Over Cost of Administration |
| 1907 | $65,129.00 | $29,243.18 | $35,885.82 |
| 1908 | 166,873.90 | 232,728.05{2} | -65,854.15 |
| 1909 | 172,202.13 | 194,428.45{2} | -22,226.32 |
| 1910 | 221,766.38 | 176,415.98 | 45,350.40 |
| 1911 | 290,551.52 | 222,831.15 | 67,720.37 |
| 1912 | 338,315.33 | 257,678.99 | 80,636.34 |
| 1913 | 350,716.60 | 290,026.20 | 60,690.40 |
| 1914 | 450,228.55 | 331,517.26 | 118,711.29 |
| 1915 | 441,764.49 | 363,593.11 | 78,171.38 |
| 1916 | 410,272.55 | 389,075.90 | 21,196.65 |
| 1917 | 635,927.52 | 393,240.15 | 242,687.37 |
| 1918 | 507,932.50 | 416,486.84 | 91,445.66 |
| 1919 | 597,087.97 | 812,056.38 | -214,968.41 |
| 1920 | 664,539.20 | 753,383.83 | -88,844.63 |
| Total | $842,495.68 | ||
| Less deficits | 391,893.51 | ||
| ————— | |||
| Excess of fees received over cost of administration | $450,602.17 | ||
note 1: Department of Labor, Annual Reports for 1920, p. 799, Table 24.
note 2: Included in these expenditures are appropriations to the Department of Justice for maintenance of field force prior to the transfer to the Department of Commerce and Labor—to wit, fiscal year 1908, $193,000; fiscal year 1909, $150,000.
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]
It is interesting and highly suggestive to note from the next table that, notwithstanding the “hard-luck story” told in this report as to arrearages of work and the delays and the omissions of first one and then another important feature of that work, the beneficiaries of such work—those who have paid their money for prompt and efficient service—have annually for years past paid into the Federal Treasury more than was used for the purpose for which it was paid.
The aggregate of such surplus items, which cannot be regarded as other than a trust fund in essence, and even deducting the amount expended for military naturalizations amounts to $539,446.80. It would easily have been much more if the clerks had been furnished to serve the aliens who desired to become citizens. The burst of public sympathy for, and interest in, the young alien who entered our service to make the “supreme sacrifice” for democracy which found expression in a special appropriation of $400,000 to pay the cost of making these young heroes citizens in law, as they already are in heart, over a period of 13½ months, did not, in fact, cost the people of this country as a whole anything. As long as over half a million dollars of the fund contributed by the newly made citizens from civil life remain unexpended for the purposes for which it was paid, it would appear to the ordinary observer that they, and not the general body of American citizens, gave the $400,000 to pay for the cost of giving free of charge the well-deserved “priceless heritage of American citizenship” to the young alien soldiers who fought for liberty and this country.
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.