alien the fear of having registration foisted upon him. As a matter of fact, in no country of the world has registration been imposed upon one class of residents only. In Russia and Germany all residents, native as well as foreign born, were obliged to register.

Additional discrimination is also shown in the pending deportation bill, which the House of Representatives passed last spring, but which was killed in the Senate, and which, it is stated, will come up again for consideration by Congress next fall. If legislation of this nature continues to be passed, we are developing a policy tending to establish two classes in this country—a majority and a minority group. The effect upon men and women in this country who thus find themselves involuntarily in a minority group is self-evident. The greater the rift between the majority group that claims superiority and the minorities who feel themselves handicapped, the more will the minorities tend to draw back within themselves to develop their own institutions, produce their own racial culture, express their own individuality.

For social agencies this period of resticted immigration should be utilized as a period of stock-taking. A re-evaluation of their work will enable many organizations to develop newer and better methods of social technique in deal=ing with foreign-born clients. They will be able to determine upon a program of social service for the future which will cover many of the gaps existing in the past, due to lack of time and pressure of more emergent duties.

Aside from the actual increase in international cases, and in cases of prospective immigrants requiring advice and assistance, the change in international and racial groups brought about by the re-shifting of immigration from Southern European stock to Western and Northern European peoples will require a change in the personnel of social workers engaged by these agencies. Indeed, several organizations have already added German or Swedish workers to their staffs for the care of new clients.

Greater emphasis will have to be stressed by social agencies upon the stimulation of naturalization activities. Again we must refer to the vicious circle. The absence of family life which is so conspicuous among Southern and Southeastern Europeans is, as has been frequently stated, the influence which undoubtedly most successfully retards assimilation. Children in a family are great Americanizing factors.

Vocational guidance for adult foreign-born-especially those who have arrived here since 1920, is another factor that makes for better assimilation and for a more rapid adjustment to the life here. The immigration figures show that 36 per cent of those who entered during the first eight months of the administration of the law of 1924 were either professional or skilled workers, as against a percentage of 21.6 representing the same group who entered in the entire year of 1914. Utilizing the past experience and training of these workers reacts in favor of the nation as well as of the individual, and this is a function well within the province of social agencies.

The intensive development of adult immigrant education in every part of the country is another task to which social agencies must devote themselves in the future. Social legislation, particularly in the field of mothers' pensions, unemployment and sick insurance, old-age pensions, industrial welfare, etc., will be another function upon which social agencies can and should concentrate their efforts in the future. Available statistics show that it is not the recent immigrant who is in need of relief and who is crowding our almshouses and public institutions. It is the broken-down, foreign-born individual who, through our social and industrial maladjustments, has disintegrated. Of the foreign-born population accepting alms, reports show that more than half have resided in this country over twenty years.

It is difficult to predict what the final effect of the visa and quota laws upon the foreign-born population here will be. A better standard of living as a result of higher wages because no additional cheap labor is flooding the market is one of the advantages which it is hoped we shall realize. On the other hand, the substitution of Mexicans and Negroes in industries which were filled formerly by European labor will add new complications to those already existing. With the gradual entrance into community life of foreign-born men and women, more cooperation between groups should be expected. Should, however, the racial antagonism which at present is existing in this country continue in the future, a defense reaction will be set up by the socially handicapped groups consisting of the organization of an intensive racial and group culture of their own. Just as after the Civil War, when the Know-Nothing movement was at its height, the Germans organized Turnvereins, culture clubs, and other activities in order to maintain their own self-respect, so now we may expect a similar development unless the present attitude toward the foreigner is changed.

The attempt to put religion into the public schools will cause those groups to whom this idea is unwelcome to establish religious educational activities for their own groups.

International agreements on marriage and divorce laws, international treaties regarding citizenship and naturalization, will be subjects for discussion and for governmental action in the future.

In all these tendencies which are to be expected as a result of our new immigration policy the duty and function of social agencies is clear. As neutral bodies, extra-national, one might say, eager for the greatest, most glorious development of the splendid potentialities of our country, conscious, too, of the knowledge that only in a united nation can we hope for the truest fulfilment of these potentialities, social agencies must act as the harmonizing influence between the two groups in this country. Social agencies must act as a clearing bureau for racial understanding and interpretation, seeking, through the teaching of mutual sympathy and understanding, to unite majority and minority groups into a unified (not uniform) whole that there may be a return to the principles of American democracy with its keynote of toleration and respect for all mankind.

PROBLEMS OF NATURALIZATION

THE PRESENT NATURALIZATION LAW AT WORK

George A. Green, Director, Citizens' Bureau, Cleveland

Perhaps no subject over which the federal government might be said to exercise exclusive bureaucratic control furnishes a wider range of differences for the play of individual opinion, both expert and lay, than that of citizenship as at present acquired through the process of naturalization. Limitless examples taken from the administration of what is supposed to be a uniform naturalization law would seem to indicate that the goal of idealism in uniformity is yet far from attainment, there being neither uniform judges, uniform examiners, nor uniform clerks. And yet, after all, laws exist only in the incarnation of the living court, and the validity of democratic institutions ever rest back upon human nature as epitomized in the individual.

The past year or two might be designated in the annals of naturalization procedure as the era of conflicting judicial interpretations of what Congress has not said, and enlightening rulings, coming with Gatling-gun rapidity, from the Department of Labor on what its views were as to what Congress should have said before it ever went into the business of enacting deportation and quota immigration laws. There exists at this hour, not only generally throughout the country, but even within the confines of a single political division, an unfortunate state of affairs with respect to various conflicting court holdings upon the question of the admissibility to citizenship of aliens who claimed exemption from military service during the war. If a candidate happens to file in one court, he is admitted; had he filed in another, equally available and under an identical set of circumstances, he would have been denied. Several petitioners in a particular city, for instance, are being consistently denied in its federal court because of the drastic draft ruling obtaining therein, all of whom would be admitted had they filed in the state court, a tribunal exercising equal and concurrent jurisdiction within the same municipality.

In some jurisdictions the world-war terminated on November 11, 1918; in others it was by judicial decree prolonged to July 2, 1921. In an Oregon court hostilities ceased immediately after the registering alien had returned and filed his draft questionnaire, some months before the armistice. In some sections of California, so far as an alien petitioner is concerned, the conflict is still on in all its fury. This inability to arrive at a definite date for the termination of the war has not resulted from the only subtlety to bother naturalizing judges, for they are still very much confused in their efforts to construe such technical naturalization terms as "white person," "continuous residence," and "attachment to the Constitution." But if the judiciary has failed to come to a common understanding in one direction, it has made notable progress in another, for it is now practically conceded that if it was assumed that a claim of exemption from military service by an alien was, in and of itself, such a breach of one's

attachment to the principles of the Constitution as to deny him citizenship, then there should be a locus poenitentia whence such attachment might again be presumed to begin, since Congress had not by legislation, as in the case of neutrals, forever debarred from citizenship any particular class of aliens. This day of repentance has been fixed by many courts as being identical with the time the world-war actually ended. The most startling, and apparently most novel, method of determining the date was announced in the United States District Court of the Southern Division of California, known among students as the Bledsoe decision. This court held that a claim of exemption from the draft for non-citizenship conclusively showed a disloyal attitude, and that such attitude was presumed to continue indefinitely thereafter until a new declaration of intention was executed. It may be observed that since this decision goes beyond all others yet reported in its extreme presumptions against the petitioner, and since it is being still followed in some jurisdictions, although it has been in substance repudiated by the Circuit Court of Appeals of the United States of the Ninth District, it might not here be amiss to accord it brief consideration.

In the first place, a superior court has held that there is no ground for holding that a claim of exemption from military service because of alienage absolutely proved that the applicant's declaration of intention was made mala fide, or that he was not attached to the principles of the Constitution. One could not, therefore, accept without qualification the major premise of the Bledsoe decision, not only in view of its practical reversal by a higher court, but because of the fact that disloyalty to a yet unadopted country could ill be presumed from the friendly acts of the resident subjects of another nation. An alien enemy, who had not expressed an intention to become a citizen of the United States during the war, owed total allegiance to his native government, and not to the United States. His claiming exemption was not only an unquestioned right of privilege, but the very form of the questionnaire suggested to him an affirmative answer. Particularly unhappy was the plight of the German, Austrian, Bulgarian, or Turk who, upon capture while fighting against his own kin, could expect naught other than the dismal certainty of execution as a traitor. His only vestige of protection could lie in American citizenship, which was utterly impossible at the time.

This brief in behalf of the alien enemy should mean no disparagement to the claims of an alien friend; so far as he, too, is concerned, the world holocaust should be considered a thing of the past. Although the cause of the Italian, Roumanian, or Russian was our cause, yet were he a slacker, he was no more contemptibly so than that natural-born citizen who was likewise seized with an attack of chilblains in his pedal extremities when the draft came on. The President has long since pardoned political prisoners of war, believing that justice would best be served by forgetting the differences and animosities of a past hysteria. If criminals, duly convicted by court action for offenses against the

government, have been pardoned by executive clemency, how much more should the alien of co-belligerent nations be accorded an equal degree of mercy in a judicial proceeding, especially where he has been convicted of no crime, but may have committed an indiscretion seven years in the past-a rather long time to be harking back for evidence in support of the legendary presumptions against him.

Of late there has been a great deal of broadcasting from Washington throughout the naturalization atmosphere of the country. To some it might have sounded like music, but to others it was spattering static, disturbing whatever of peaceful procedure that has been hitherto commonly enjoyed by all. Promulgation of recent rulings, countenanced only by bureaucratic authority, and quite apparently out of harmony with the naturalization act itself, has introduced sweeping changes into a procedure rigidly fixed by known law. Should we hastily acclaim them as inspired by beneficent and humane motives, we would first do well to ponder, lest we be criticized for doing violence to the truth. If there were not available the published words of the Commissioner of Naturalization himself, we might with reluctance venture upon the dangers of a post hoc, propter hoc style of reasoning, and ascribe the acts of his department to a desire, by collateral and illegal methods, to enforce a set of immigration laws recently enacted. We quote from page 11 of the Commissioner's annual report.

At the present time an alien may declare his intention to become a citizen immediately upon landing in the United States, regardless of lawful entry therein. No alien who entered the United States unlawfully should be allowed to declare his intention, particularly if he entered since May 1, 1917, the date of the immigration act of February 5, 1917, became operative. Discretion should be given to the commissioner of naturalization to issue a certificate of arrival for purposes of declaration and also for petitioning, in cases of entry prior to June 3, 1921, where wilful unlawful entry is not proved, upon satisfactory proof of continuous residence.

Yet, in the face of the solemn truth recited in the first sentence of this quotation, the Commissioner seemingly assumed the discretion he craved in the last, and accordingly, in August, issued instructions to clerks of courts throughout the country to demand henceforth of applicants, before the issuance of a first paper, a certificate of arrival. Since the subject of this ruling is a first paper which, under the law, is issued by the clerk, and not a second, which can be granted only by the judge in open court, it has been almost universally followed as a matter of course. Only where an applicant has, perchance, questioned its legality, has it been formally brought to the attention of the court itself. So far as known, the order has been declared unreasonable and unfair by every court where its legality has been questioned. Opinions to this effect have been published by the supreme court of Oneida County, New York, the federal court at Detroit, Michigan, the common pleas court at Cleveland, Ohio, and the federal court of San Francisco, California.

What has already been said about the pre-emption of legislative authority by the Bureau in its efforts to enforce the immigration law through the naturalization act might be applied with equal propriety to two other very recent rul