For filing the declaration of intention the alien will have paid to the clerk a fee of one dollar; upon filing his final petition he has to pay another fee of four dollars. There are strict penal provisions in the law for the punishment of clerks who charge or collect any more. Under the law, one-half of each fee is retained by the clerk, ostensibly for the purpose of reimbursing him for such additional clerical assistance as the naturalization business may necessitate, but not always used for that purpose. This subject is discussed elsewhere.
The petitioner, with certain exceptions noted below, must sign his petition in his own handwriting. It is, however, usually permitted him to sign it by “his mark,” properly witnessed, and even this was not required of those who filed their declarations of intention before the passage of the Act; but lapse of time has made that no longer a practical exception. It has usually been held that a signature, even in another language, such as Arabic, is sufficient. There has often been controversy as to whether the extraordinary arrangement of marks constructed by the petitioner is in fact a signature, the author insisting that he has achieved one when it is utterly illegible to both judge and naturalization examiner. In this, as in a host of other details, the fate of the petitioner hangs upon the intelligence and humanity of the judge, who has to choose between a strict insistence upon the technicality and a more generous adjudication—in a case, for example, in which a poor old deaf woman homesteader might lose all she has in the world, simply because he cannot see an intelligible “signature” in the conglomeration of hieroglyphics which she intends to represent her name.
The law requires the petitioner to state the name, nativity, and residence of his wife, if any, and each of his minor children. The wife, if she herself can lawfully be naturalized, becomes ipso facto a citizen of this country by virtue of the naturalization of her husband. It is the practice of many naturalizing courts to decline to admit to citizenship men whose wives are still in the old country, seeing danger in conferring the status upon women who may never come to the United States, or who, coming, may turn out to be undesirable.
The petition must disavow belief in the so-called principles of anarchism; under the law no one can be naturalized who himself believes in or teaches or belongs to any organization or groups believing in or teaching “the duty, necessity, or propriety” of abolishing organized government, or “the lawful assaulting or killing of any officers, either of individuals or officers generally, of the government of the United States, or of any other organized government, because of his or their official character.” Some judges of naturalizing courts recognize little distinction between “anarchy” and “Socialism.” The United States Circuit Court of Appeals, however, was more discriminating, reversing the naturalizing court in the somewhat famous case of Leonard Olsen at Seattle, who was rejected, ostensibly, on the ground that he was not “attached to the principles of the Constitution,” but really because he avowed himself a Socialist. There had been a somewhat similar case in Texas, in 1891, but the Olsen decision settled the question of the lawfulness of Socialist views as affecting naturalization.[79]
Both the declaration of intention and the petition for naturalization are made out in duplicate; the original becomes a part of the record of the court in the clerk’s office; the duplicate is sent to the Naturalization Bureau at Washington.
NINETY DAYS’ INTERVAL BEFORE HEARING
Notice of each petition must be posted in a public and conspicuous place in the office of the clerk for at least ninety days before the hearing is had in open court. The Naturalization Bureau will have been informed directly by the clerk; the purpose of the posting is, of course, to give the public notice, so that anyone who desires to do so may appear with objections. In actual effect, the posting is without much value, because the public does not visit the clerk’s office except upon business of its own, and there is no other publication of the petition, save in such rare cases as local newspapers make it a matter of news. It may be injurious to the petitioner, because a good many hearings have been postponed simply because the clerk forgot to post the notice at all!
THE FINAL HEARING IN COURT
Petitions may be heard only upon stated days, fixed by rule of the court, so that the government and the public may attend the open hearings which are required by the law. This works smoothly and well enough in the great cities, where most naturalizations take place; but there are districts, in sparsely settled regions, where there is but one term of the court in a year; which, in practice, means that the judge cannot be sure of being at any given point on any days determinable in advance, except the opening day. In such cases a great many courts will have but one hearing period in a year—usually on the first, and perhaps the second, day of the term. Two hardships may arise from such a situation; the alien and his witnesses may be uncertain as to the length of time they must wait after a long journey to the county seat, and if the clerk is careless and fails to notify the petitioners that their cases are to be heard (a thing which happens all too often) the judge and examiner are on hand, but no one appears to be naturalized, and another year is lost before the cases can be disposed of. That this can be a matter of very serious import to the alien may be illustrated by the fact that a group of Poles were classed as “nonresident aliens,” and subjected to the very heavy income tax collected of such, simply because the clerk of the court in which their petitions for naturalization were pending failed to notify them of the hearing day.