we had had in the past, but that I was utterly opposed to a new policy of persecuting or prosecuting aliens just because of alienage.” With all of this Roosevelt agreed, and, his complaints satisfied, Jackson accepted the responsibility of transferring the INS to the Department of Justice.38
This departmental transfer was the last major step toward the federalization of naturalization authority. As a consequence, “the Government need for denaturalization as a remedy for naturalization abuses” decreased “with the increasing supervision of the Department of Justice over naturalization process.”39
The power exercised by the Naturalization Service was also reinforced by the war. Beginning around 1940, naturalization applications poured in: aliens submitted to registration by the Alien Registration Act wanted to express their loyalty and secure their status as citizens40 while an increasing number of companies—particularly in war industries—were reluctant to hire noncitizens. Because, at the time, it employed only 147 naturalization examiners, the INS faced an increasingly long backlog of petitions; in 1941, an applicant was typically required to wait between fourteen and eighteen months before she could become naturalized. Realizing the severity of the problem, Congress increased the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s funding, allowing it to raise the total number of examiners to approximately 400 by 1944.41 The INS assigned these additional examiners “to districts where the demand for naturalization was unusually heavy and arrearages unusually formidable,” including areas such as New York, Newark, Buffalo, Boston and Cleveland.42 With the additional cooperation of the courts, the number of civilian naturalizations rose from 185,000 in 1939 to 393,000 in 1944.
Congress also authorized for the first time in U.S. history, a designated representative of the INS Commissioner to “combine the powers of naturalization examiner and of a naturalization judge” and confer, on foreign soil, American citizenship to noncitizens serving with armed forces abroad.43 Finally in August 1943, in order to “produce uniformity and improvement”44 in the naturalization process, the Immigration and Naturalization Service instituted a centralized review of examiners’ recommendations.45 Under this new system, petitions recommended either for denial or for approval with facts presented to the court, or regarding which the field officer was in doubt as to the proper recommendations, were submitted to the central office for review.46
Additional statutory authority for the INS review process was introduced by the Internal Security Act, passed on September 23, 1950.47 Already, the large-scale administrative review of the naturalization examiners’ work had fulfilled an important purpose: “in achieving uniformity in recommendations and decisions.”48 The 1950 Act relabeled the initial hearing conducted by a naturalization examiner as a “preliminary examination,” and made preliminary examination records admissible as evidence at subsequent final judicial hearings. Naturalization examiners were granted the authority to subpoena a naturalization application and to compel by subpoena the production of relevant evidence.
In the mid-1950s, the INS initiated a program to reduce the number of courts exercising naturalization jurisdiction and to encourage the filing of naturalization petitions in larger courts. In 1955, a total of 950 courts exercised naturalization jurisdiction. This number dropped to 752 in 1958, to 622 in 1964, and to 450 in 1977.
Thirteen years later, naturalization—a responsibility of the judiciary since America’s founding—became a wholly administrative procedure after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990.49 In removing naturalization authority from the judiciary, Congress castigated some courts for tolerating delays of up to two years in processing applications.50 Courts, exclusively those in the federal system, retained only the authority to formally administer the citizenship oath.51 Because of these changes, the age when thousands of courts performed the work of minting America’s citizens was confined to the memory of a small cadre of experts and scholars.
The denaturalization provision of the 1906 Act was originally and primarily conceived as a means of redressing naturalization fraud and illegality committed prior to or during the naturalization process itself—before the moment an alien obtained American citizenship. But, in practice, the Wickersham 1909 Circular limited the cancellation of certificates of citizenship that had been fraudulently or illegally procured to those instances where revoking naturalization would substantially better the country’s citizenry.
Yet even at the height of naturalization corruption in the 1930s, cases where individuals obtained citizenship through fraud or illegal behavior committed before or during the naturalization process constituted a minority of the cancellations of naturalization certificates.52 The bulk of denaturalizations after 1909 resulted not from an intent to clean up the naturalization process or to make naturalization procedures more administrative in nature. Rather, these naturalizations occurred out of a desire to expel from the body politic “un-American” citizens: most of them not for fraud or illegality committed before they were naturalized, but because of who they were or what they had done after they obtained American citizenship.
The goal of “bettering the citizenry,” along with the vesting of denaturalization authority in federal hands, paved the way for interpreting the 1906 denaturalization provision in a new direction. Denaturalization became a means for cleansing the American body politic of those naturalized citizens who behaved in ways considered un-American, due to their attachment to a “foreign” morality or to their race, land of origin, or political ideas—sometimes before their naturalization, but, most often, developed afterward.
“Former” Americans of this sort were never encouraged to reapply after they were stripped of their citizenship. To the contrary, expelled from American citizenry, they would become foreigners again or, worse, stateless. They were often deported from the United States or, if already abroad, forbidden to reenter.
PART II
A Conditional Citizenship
John Raker (Democrat, California). If a man appears before a court with his witnesses and soft pedals himself through, and he is an anarchist at the time, and within five years after he has received his papers he commences to practice anarchy, there is no provision whereby you can take his naturalizations papers from him.
Mr. Crist. There are judicial decisions by which that has been done, in construing the present law.
[Raker:] Do they go so far?
[Crist:] Yes, sir. There have been several cases, and the Wurstenbarth case is an outstanding case.
[Raker:] If all the proceedings are in good shape, but within two, three four or five years he begins to practice sabotage, becomes an anarchist or I.W.W., and it can be established that at the time he was naturalized he held those views, can you cancel his certificate of naturalization?
[Crist:] I think so.
Albert Johnson (Republican, Washington) Chairman. We intend to provide a means for reopening such a case.
—House of Representatives, Hearings Before the
Committee on Immigration and Naturalization,
October 19, 1921
CHAPTER 4
The First Political Denaturalization: Emma Goldman
In the evolution of its
