Referring to the work in regions apart from the great cities, the Commissioner said, in his report for 1912–13:
In a few of the districts there are what may be called sub-stations, where an examiner is located by his chief to attend to work in the vicinity of such sub-station, ... to reduce the travel expense and to bring the service in actual personal contact with the public and the courts as intimately as possible.
For the rest, and the far-outlying, sparsely-settled regions, where a person desiring citizenship must travel with his witnesses perhaps even hundreds of miles not once, but twice in any event, and in some cases several times, to and from the court having jurisdiction over the territory in which he lives, the situation is not so simple. To persons completing by the essential of American Citizenship their title to a homestead on the public lands—necessarily and characteristically in such sparsely settled regions—this item of travel, expense in both money and time for three persons, to say nothing of other hardships and exasperations involved in the meticulous technicalities of the law and practice, not infrequently is a raw tragedy. Neither provision by Congress nor administrative arrangement or concession in enforcement by the Naturalization Bureau or the courts has materially mitigated the hardships involved in such cases.
RESTRICTIONS OF RACE
Not every alien, whatever his character or good disposition toward the “good order and happiness” of the United States, or his willingness to “support and defend the Constitution and bear true faith and allegiance to the same,” can become a citizen of the United States. He, or she, must be either white, or black—or, in the case of the American Indian, red. And if black, he, or she, must be of African descent. A long series of decisions has been necessary to define exactly what races are excluded; with the result that it is now, for practical purposes, well established that naturalization cannot, under existing laws, be granted to Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, Burmese, or the black or brown natives of India.
It is not our province here to discuss the merits either of the racial limitation or of the somewhat vague definition that has been arrived at; it must suffice to outline the situation. The Naturalization Law of 1870 limited naturalization to “aliens being free white persons; and to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” This was enacted in the tense days of Reconstruction after the Civil War, and was a natural but wholly unnecessary fling at the South. All American negroes are citizens of the United States by virtue of their birth in this country, and those who come here from Africa are likely to be incapable of passing the naturalization tests. Congress never has enacted a clear definition of the term, “white person,” and endless confusion has existed. Hawaiians, Afghans, Chinese, Syrians, Turks, and Fiji Islanders, all have been admitted by some courts and excluded by others. The Commissioner of Naturalization at one time directed the field force to oppose vigorously the admission of any Asiatic. A non-Mongolian Turk, married to a white woman literally Caucasian, would be surprised to have his son excluded as not a white person; but such folk, and many others white by any common-sense definition, were excluded, the courts usually accepting as the judgment of experts the contention of the naturalization examiners; until finally the ruling was rescinded, and the matter has since then been left largely to the discretion of the courts, which have substantially settled the question so far as it may be settled in absence of a clear constitutional or legislative definition, such as exists specifically in the Act of 1882 excluding the Chinese by name. As the law and decisions stand now, the same definition which will admit an African deckhand or cook excludes a Japanese prince or a Hindu university graduate.[66]
As for the Filipinos, it was held, in 1915, by the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, that a Filipino is neither an alien nor an African, and that, therefore, he did not come within the provisions of the law limiting naturalization to white aliens, or black ones of African descent; that the Filipino then before the court could and would be naturalized under the section providing:
That all the applicable provisions of the naturalization laws of the United States shall apply to and be held to authorize the admission to citizenship of all persons not citizens who owe permanent allegiance to the United States, and who may become residents of any State or organized Territory of the United States.
In another case (not, however, involving clearly the question of racial color) a native of the Philippine Islands, of full Spanish paternity, but of half-breed blood on his mother’s side, was admitted by the same court.[67]