The Sovereign Citizen. Patrick Weil
Читать онлайн книгу.
periods of residence only were attempting to make declarations of intention.”6 Under the plan adopted by the Bureau, applications from aliens arriving after June 30, 1924, were compared with the immigration visas in the Bureau’s custody in order to defeat “attempts to become citizens by those who entered the United States in defiance of the provisions of the quota and visa restrictions of the immigration law.”7
Illegal naturalization also involved individuals who feigned inclusion in two categories of foreigners whose naturalization had been statutorily facilitated since World War I. On May 9, 1918, Congress had passed an act providing for the immediate naturalization of alien soldiers in the U.S. military, permitting them to become citizens without the typically required certificate of arrival. The same act provided that any alien who had been a member of the armed forces for three or more years could file a petition for naturalization without proof that they had met the five-year residency requirement, and that any applicant who had served during World War I was exempt from the requirement to file a declaration of intention.8 Between May 9, 1918, and June 1, 1919, a total of 128,000 foreign soldiers were naturalized under these provisions.9
In the San Francisco naturalization district, fraudulent naturalizations of “draft evaders, slackers posing as honorably discharged soldiers and sailors,” and “men claiming merchant service through forged seamen’s discharges” were cancelled in 1924.10 Over the course of 1929, proceedings for the violation of naturalization laws on similar grounds were also initiated in Pittsburgh, New York City, and Boston.11 In the middle of 1930, it was discovered that a New York City-based group was providing fraudulent naturalization documents, taking advantage of the exemptions conferred on veterans, to immigrants who had arrived after the end of World War I. Individuals typically paid between $500 and $800 for their fraudulent naturalizations. Confessions were obtained from four individuals who secured their naturalization by falsely alleging World War I service. Up to twelve other individuals were involved in the fraud.12
Third, the number of denaturalizations rose rapidly in the late 1930s and early 1940s to levels unseen in American history. Naturalizations also unexpectedly rose during this period, reaching a peak in 1940.13 This rise came despite the fact that immigration declined from 6.3 million individuals in the years between 1910 and 1919 to 4.3 million in the 1920s, dropping below 700,000 over the course of the 1930s.14 The 1936 Annual Report of the Department of Labor observed that “normally it might be expected that a decline in immigration would be followed by a corresponding decline in naturalization, but this has not been true in the past 4 years. Immigrants admitted between 1933 and 1936, inclusive, numbered 123,823 and during the same period 475,767 declarations of intention were filed. It is evident that the majority of aliens who are now seeking naturalization are not recent immigrants but have been in the country for some time”15 The era of “hostile legislation” was among the reasons invoked for this rush of hitherto indifferent aliens.
But, in actuality, the increase after 1934 in the number of aliens going through the naturalization process was primarily the product of the dramatic rise of unemployment caused by the Great Depression. The resulting response by President Roosevelt creating social programs reserved exclusively for citizens generated a strong incentive for aliens to seek naturalization. Aliens were commonly barred from employment on public works, private employers preferred hiring citizens, and only citizens could qualify for old-age pensions and other benefits under social security laws. These considerations impelled the alien to seek naturalization and the citizens to prove her citizenship. Both trends provoked a denaturalization surge.16
Two primary social benefits seem to have been particularly important to immigrants: old-age assistance and public employment programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In a 1932 article, “Is Citizenship a Fair Requirement in Old Age Assistance Acts?” sociologist Dallas Hirst points out: “All but one of the eighteen states which have passed old age assistance acts requires that the recipients of such aid be citizens. . . . In other words, one old person out of every five is ineligible for state old age assistance because he or she has failed to become a citizen.”17
The federal Social Security Act, passed in 1935, established certain basic federal contours for state old-age assistance programs, among them the proviso that state plans could not include “any citizenship requirement which excludes any citizen of the United States.”18 But the phrasing left it up to each state to decide what, if any, coverage to provide to noncitizens. In April 1936, thirty-eight of the forty-eight states, plus the District of Columbia, had state old-age assistance laws in place. Of these thirty-nine jurisdictions, twenty-eight required U.S. citizenship as a prerequisite to receiving old-age aid.19
Consequently, the new Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), reuniting in 1933 the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization into a single agency, began uncovering numerous cases of immigrants who were naturalized illegally before 1906 and requested old age benefits. Under the Justice Department’s original 1909 Circular interpreting and applying the Naturalization Act, the citizenship—and social security benefits—of these individuals would be protected.20
However, for the large number of immigrants fraudulently naturalized after 1906, the INS tightened the noose. On November 17, 1938, it instituted denaturalization proceedings against five immigrants, all of whom were naturalized in 1936 or 1937 by a court that had not possessed jurisdiction since February 3, 1912.21
During this time of economic crisis, various regulations restricted legal employment to American citizens. A 1933 study by social scientist Harold Fields found that, starting in 1928, “the majority of jobs in basic industries and also membership in the majority of the largest unions were reserved to American citizens.” In fact, Fields listed “eighteen professions, eleven types of public employment, forty-three kinds of occupational licenses, and ten miscellaneous categories of activity which required either first papers or full citizenship according to the statutes of various states and the District of Columbia.”22 Historian Mary Anne Thatcher writes that, by 1941, “eight or nine of every ten jobs in the United States were denied to aliens by statute or local ordinance, by the regulations of licensing boards, or by the prejudices of private employers.”23 Employment was becoming ever more tied to citizenship.
When the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was created, administrator Harry Hopkins was hard-pressed to answer congressional requests to provide data on how many aliens were receiving public services. He responded only that, “Many of the initial office forms designed for the WPA provided no place for giving information on race, religion, citizenship, or politics.”24 Despite the resolve of Hopkins and Roosevelt, Congress passed in 1936 the first restrictions on employment by the WPA, prohibiting the agency from “knowingly” hiring aliens who were in the United States illegally, though also directing that “prompt” employment was not to be infringed upon by any new controls.25
By 1939, the WPA had banned noncitizen employment entirely.26 Applicants for jobs and recipients of agency services were often asked to fill out informational forms about their citizenship. These forms would eventually reveal a certain number of illegal or fraudulent naturalizations that had not been cancelled due to the protections afforded by the 1909 Circular. Many of the fraudulent naturalizations uncovered were performed for the parents of Depression-era aid recipients. The citizenship they received when they were minors could be one day at risk.27 In order to avoid a situation that could lead to a sudden loss of social benefits and jobs or to deportation, these citizens were often advised to seek their own denaturalization, so that they could reapply and regularize their citizenship status.
These requirements encouraged foreign immigrants to naturalize. And this pressure for naturalization also, inevitably, increased naturalization fraud. An investigation that began in December 1933 uncovered evidence of systematic fraud in naturalization cases in the New York district, perpetrated since 1924 “by racketeers acting in collusion with employees of this Service having access to official records.” Fifty-six investigators were assigned to examine 4 million arrival records and 150,000 naturalization petitions, files, and court records in New York and Brooklyn over a nine-year period. Evidence of fraud, such as altered boat manifests