Integrating Immigrants: Morality and Loyalty in US Naturalization Practice

Susan M Gordon

doi:10.1080/13621020701476236

Abstract

The issues of how to integrate immigrants and ensure the integrity of citizenship have become passionate topics of public discourse and policy debate in recent years in a number of immigrant receiving countries. Behind these debates are often unarticulated questions about how to ensure loyalty to the state and to particular conceptions of national identity among prospective citizens. These issues have been explicitly debated in the United States since the enactment of the first naturalization law in 1790, which requires that immigrants who wish to become citizens demonstrate their good moral character and attachment to the country. This article explores the ways that these morality and loyalty requirements have historically been applied and institutionalized in US naturalization practice, particularly through government sponsored immigrant education programs. It does so first through a discussion of the interpretation of these laws, and then through a case study of the original 1914 Bureau of Naturalization initiative that resulted in the incorporation of these laws into naturalization testing and citizenship education for immigrants. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of this history for current debates in both the United States and elsewhere on immigrant integration.

Highlights

These issues have been explicitly debated in the United States since the enactment of the first naturalization law in 1790, which require that immigrants who wish to become citizens demonstrate their good moral character and attachment to the country
Most familiar are the immigration restrictions enacted at the turn of the last century excluding people characterized as “idiots,” convicts, or polygamists, the racial exclusions and nationality quotas that were based in part on the assumed moral qualities of different national groups, and the exclusion of suspected political subversives
What do these requirements for good moral character and attachment mean in the context of defining who can become an American today? Are they benign, if slightly anachronistic holdovers from an earlier period, or do they have some more substantive role in defining American citizenship or national identity?

Summary

Introduction

These issues have been explicitly debated in the United States since the enactment of the first naturalization law in 1790, which require that immigrants who wish to become citizens demonstrate their good moral character and attachment to the country. The program that Crist and Campbell constructed can be best understood within the framework of three important influences: the established body of citizenship law and naturalization practice outlined above, the Americanization movement of the early twentieth century, and the institutional settings of the Bureau of Naturalization and its non-governmental partners.

Results

Conclusion