Straight America, a call to national service

by Frances Kellor

“In the American factory this sympathy and patriotism of each set of foreign-born workmen for their native land causes friction among the men. We find that in many instances men of one nationality object to working under a foreman or higher official of another nationality. We have had letters from the men along that line objecting to employment under a boss who is undesirable because of a different nationality.

“So we are going to make the ‘bosses’ in this factory Americans. Be they of whatever nationality when they come in as laborers, they must be American citizens, loyal to America and American ideals and all they stand for, before they can hope for positions of responsibility and trust. We determined to make the prerequisite of success in this institution American patriotism and American nationalism.

“We will employ foreign-born men, but it shall be understood that their only hope for advancement and preferment lies in their speedy adoption of American citizenship and the forswearing of allegiance to other lands. And we feel that if throughout this nation commercial and industrial success depended on a prerequisite of American loyalty and patriotism, the country would be better off, its factories would have far more efficiency and the workmen would be better satisfied and happier, with old-country feuds and bickerings forgotten and superseded by a thorough Americanism.”

As an educational measure supplying the stimulus to citizenship work this is valuable. Should it be adopted, however, as a widespread industrial policy it will lead to two complications—international, as being unduly discriminating, and hardships to the alien, due to lack of advance knowledge and opportunity to adjust himself. It may further cheapen citizenship by putting it on a commercial basis. The way out is to notify each alien before admission that every alien over school age and under 45 will be required to learn English within five years, subject to deportation for non-compliance, if facilities are furnished him. We shall then see every industry interested in keeping a good labor supply, making every effort to comply with the law, and we will have a national policy based on law instead of isolated action by miscellaneous industries, never uniform and varying widely in purpose and methods.

We have heard much about “dual citizenship” since the European war began. This is not a new question. Over and over again it has come up for adjudication before the Department of State. There are two important aspects of the subject. The first concerns the question of the citizenship of children born in the United States of foreign-born parents; the second concerns the status of naturalized American citizens.

In the first case the difficulty arises from what appears to be an inevitable conflict of laws. There are two theories for determining the nationality, or rather the citizenship, of any given individual. The first of these laws is what is called the jus soli, or the law of the land. According to this a person takes the nationality of the land in which he is born. This is the American conception running through our general theory of citizenship.

The other is called jus sanguinis, or the law of blood. This is the law that is followed in ordinary European civil law codes. According to this law, a person’s nationality or citizenship depends on the citizenship of his parents. The United States has adopted this rule in the case of children born abroad of parents that are American citizens. Each law has its advantages. It is certainly better to consider that the child of an American business man residing in China at the time the child is born is an American citizen than it would be to consider that the child was a subject of the Chinese Empire. This law of blood, like many other rules of the civil law, goes back to such a fundamental human instinct that any other way of dealing with this situation than the one it suggests would seem wrong to us. The law of the land, on the other hand, has very distinct advantages as well, which can also be illustrated from our American situation. A Russian man and woman, let us say, succeed in escaping persecution at home and come to this country to live. We prefer to think that their children, born on American soil and brought up under American institutions, are Americans, and we have made this the cardinal principle of American citizenship. It would be too late now to attempt to alter this law, even if we wished to do so, because it is firmly rooted both in statute law and in our fundamental conception of the meaning of America.

And yet we find it convenient and right to use the opposed law of nationality, the law of blood, in such a case as a child born in China of American parents. If we find it necessary to adopt into our own statutes a provision so contrary to our general citizenship law as this law of blood, we cannot consistently object when another country adopts it as its principle of citizenship. The difficulty has been met hitherto by allowing the child to choose which nationality it wishes to keep when it becomes twenty-one, or attains its majority, and by holding it subject until that time to the law of whichever country it happens to be in. This at least is the way the situation works out, although there has never been any international ruling on the subject. If the child were in France, the French authorities applied the French law; if it were in America, the American authorities applied the American law, and when the child became of age, it made its election, and thereafter was held to be a citizen of whichever country it elected. It was considered to be so clear a fact that this election was something that the child alone could do, that the fact that the father took the child from one country to another was held over and over again not to affect the child’s right to chose for itself when it became of age. Theoretically we hold that there can be no dual citizenship of the naturalized citizen or of the child born in America if he elects American citizenship. The records are not altogether clear if we stand ready to enforce this. There are two recent cases on this point. In June, 1915, a young man named Ugo da Prato, who was born in Boston in 1895 and had gone to Italy in 1912 to study architecture, was held by the Italian government as liable to military duty because his father, Antonio da Prato, had been a native of Italy. He had emigrated to America and had been naturalized in Boston in 1892. Under our American law, the son Ugo, born on American soil, was an American. The Italian law, however, holds that Italian subjects who have acquired citizenship in other countries are not exempted from the obligations of military service, nor from the penalties imposed on those who bear arms against their country. Italy subsequently released Ugo da Prato.

A similar situation arose in the case of one de Long, of Louisiana, who was born in America of a French father who had never been naturalized. Upon his inquiry to the State Department as to what his status would be in France if he were to return there during the war, the State Department advised him that while he was by the law of America an American citizen, by the law of France he was a French citizen, and they declined to encourage him to test the matter by returning to France while the war was in progress.

The real question at issue, of course, is whether or not a nation has the right to regard its control over its subject as a thing of which it can refuse to divest itself. The Ottoman law is that no transfer of allegiance to which the consent of the Ottoman government has not been previously obtained is binding. The French law is similar; the French government rarely consents to permit a Frenchman of military age to throw off his allegiance. Under certain conditions, however, permission may be obtained. The Greek government generally refuses to recognize a change of nationality made without consent. Neither does the Persian government, nor the Russian government. Under Russian law, a Russian subject who becomes a citizen of another country without the consent of the Russian government is deemed to have committed an offense for which he is liable to arrest and punishment if he returns without having previously obtained permission of the Russian government.