YearDeclarationsPetitionsCertificates
1907{2}73,72321,0947,953
1908{3}137,22944,02925,963
1909145,79443,16138,372
1910167,22655,03839,206
1911186,15773,64456,257
1912169,14295,62769,965
1913181,63295,18682,017
1914214,016123,855105,439
1915245,815106,31796,390
1916207,935108,00993,911
1917438,748132,32094,897
1918335,069110,416151,449
1919346,827107,559217,358
1920200,106166,925125,711
Total3,149,4191,283,1801,205,170

note 1: Annual Report of the Commissioner of Naturalization, 1919, p. 16.

note 2: Nine months only.

note 3: First full year of 12 months.

The annual reports of the Commissioner of Naturalization, like those of many other government bureaus, are written not so much to afford information to the public as to extol the work of the Bureau, pointing out the remarkable extent of the ground covered, the great number of letters written, and of cases handled by a force grievously and increasingly inadequate since the very beginning of the service, and so on. They are, however, most unsatisfactory as a source of sociological information; particularly barren are they of any hint of information regarding the various races whose representatives seek citizenship; their relative promptness in seeking and success in getting it; their respective standing as regards the various reasons for denial. They do show voluminously how many declarations and petitions are filed annually in each state and subdivision; increase or decrease in totals; how many clerks of courts are delinquent in sending in the government’s share of fees, and other more or less significant minutiæ of the routine work of the field and clerical force and the courts.

VAST ARREARAGES IN EXAMINATIONS

Moreover, for the past four or five years, the bulk of the Bureau’s reports has been increasingly augmented by large sections devoted entirely to its efforts in the field of education, and its relations, actual, attempted and imaginary, with the public-school authorities. The degree to which the Naturalization Bureau has neglected, perforce of circumstances, the study of the material under its nose is apparent in the fact that the Commissioner’s report for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1919, says, in so many words, not only that it no longer is preserving in its files any records of general correspondence, but that it has altogether ceased any pretense of examining naturalization papers!

To illustrate the expedients to which the Bureau has been compelled to resort, in order to relieve the files section, it has adopted the practice of returning, with its replies thereto, letters of general inquiry not referring to some specific naturalization case already a part of the Bureau file, thereby leaving no record of such correspondence.

It has virtually ceased to make an examination of certificates of naturalization to insure the discovery and correction of errors, and it has abandoned a personal card-index of naturalized aliens, etc., not as a matter of choice but of compulsion.[99]

The magnitude of the arrearage thus naïvely accounted for, and the bulk of the potential information involved, may be seen in the fact that on July 1, 1919, according to the Commissioner’s own figures,[100] there were unexamined in the Bureau at Washington more than one million (1,011,676) declarations of intention, 26,726 petitions for naturalization, and 721,742 certificates of naturalization. This was an increase in arrearage, for one year alone, of 382,963 (60 per cent) in declarations; of 73 per cent in petitions, and of nearly 25 per cent in certificates. At the very time when the excitement about vigilance in admitting new citizens was at its height, the Naturalization Bureau was diverting to other channels a vital energy which might have been devoted to that vigilance and to collating the elementary information already in its possession, for the benefit of lawmakers and others needing information in dealing intelligently with this subject.