JUDGES DENOUNCE THE ABSURDITY
The judges are all but unanimous in their denunciation of this system. The comment of a United States district judge in the Middle West represents the sentiments of most:
I do not think it tends to raise the standard of citizenship or to do anyone any good to have the requirements such that, if a petitioner has lived in the state for the full five-year period, he must prove that entire residence and his good character and reputation during that entire period by the two petitioning witnesses. The two petitioning witnesses should have known him for at least a year, and be able to make a showing for at least the last year of the period. I know of nothing so sacred about a state line that this great difference should be made between the petitioner who moves here from another state and the petitioner who moves here from a distant part of the same state.
A Michigan judge gives a striking example of the injustice of the discrimination:
The greatest copper mines in the world are in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The greatest automobile factories in the world are in the city of Detroit in the same state. These sturdy miners of Houghton and Keweenaw counties in the Upper Peninsula hear of the automobile industry in the city of Detroit, and after three or four years’ residence up there, move to Detroit and take up residence there. Under the present law, they must find two witnesses who have known them for the entire five years. You will recognize how difficult it will be for them to find two witnesses who knew them in the Upper Peninsula, moved to Detroit when they did, and have known them ever since. The copper mines of the Upper Peninsula are five or six hundred miles from Detroit. Can anyone suggest any good reasons why these petitioners in Detroit should not be permitted to prove their Detroit residence by two witnesses who sign their petitions, and their Upper Peninsula residence by depositions or other witnesses? Why punish so unnecessarily the man who continues to reside for the full five years in the same state, while we justly permit another man, who moves here from another state, perhaps a distance of fifty or a hundred miles, to make his proof as to that state by deposition?
Mind you, I would make them prove their residence in the particular city or county ... for the full period of their residence there, by the two witnesses who signed the petition; and, of course, I would require them to have resided in such municipality for at least a year.
Says one judge:
In the far West, where the distances are so great and the expense of travel such a hardship, the matter might readily be handled on a mileage basis, so that the petitioner would prove a year’s residence by the witnesses who attest his petition, and a previous residence within the same state more than, say fifty miles, from the place of holding court, by depositions.
Of 334 judges of naturalizing courts in all parts of the country who specifically addressed themselves to this question in reply to a questionnaire of the Americanization Study in the summer of 1919, only 34 were content with the present system; 289 specifically favored amendment of the law for the reasons, and to the effect, substantially as suggested above.