2, 1917, cleared up this situation, however, declaring permanently resident Porto Ricans to be citizens, unless they owed allegiance to a foreign country, or within six months after the passage of the Act specifically refused American citizenship. This Act created the judicial "district of Porto Rico," and definitely vested naturalization jurisdiction in the United States District Court for that district, declaring residence in Porto Rico to be tantamount, for naturalization purposes, to residence anywhere else in the United States.

The Act of May 9, 1918, which swept into eligibility for immediate citizenship upward of two hundred thousand aliens serving in the army, navy, marine corps, and merchant marine, definitely extended the privilege to several classes, including Filipinos and Porto Ricans, regardless of every consideration other than military service, and it has been interpreted in favor of even Chinese and Japanese in those branches of the national war employ.1

LIMITATIONS REGARDING AGE

The present law says clearly that an alien may not make a declaration of intention until he is eighteen years old. The old law contained a provision to the effect that anyone who arrived in the United States before the age of eighteen could, after he had been here the required five years, become naturalized by virtue of one proceeding, which was held to constitute both declaration and final petition. Otherwise, nothing was said in the old law regarding the age required for declaration; an alien must be twenty-one, however, in order to be naturalized. There was a good deal of uncertainty and confusion on this point, both the

1 See chapter ix, on Military Naturalization.

Naturalization Service and the courts taking varying and inconsistent positions from time to time and in various jurisdictions. This is of only academic interest now; but the situation is still somewhat dubious, because an alien can file his declaration at the age of eighteen, and in a strict construction of the law he can file his petition two years later at the age of twenty. Some courts have so construed it. It is generally customary, however, for the courts to insist upon the age of twenty-one before granting citizenship; although one should bear in mind that citizenship does not necessarily involve the suffrage, and all states of the United States require attainment of twenty-one years before the citizen can vote.

THE DECLARATION OF INTENTION

So far as anything in the law goes to prevent, the immigrant can make his way immediately from the vessel that brings him, after the immigration authorities have admitted him to these shores, or across the Canadian or the Mexican border, to the clerk's office in "any court having a clerk, a seal, and jurisdiction over actions at law or equity, or law and equity, without limit as to amount," and within an hour of arrival file his declaration of intention to become an American citizen. Of course, he doesn't do that—unless in very rare instances. The available statistics go to show that, in the average case, he waits nearly seven (6.8) years.1 But whenever he files it, it will be good (unless some blunder of the clerk, or some technical defect which the clerk overlooks, makes it invalid from the outset) for seven years. It cannot be made the basis of a petition for citizenship until two years after its

1 See p. 237, this volume.

date, and there must have been, before or after its date, at least three years' additional residence in the United States to make up the required five years, and the last year of the five must have been passed "continuously" within the state or territory in which the final petition is filed.

Mr. Alien would better be very careful that his declaration is properly made out, on the identical printed form furnished by the Bureau of Naturalization; he must file it in the office of the clerk, and not deliver it to him at his house or on the street corner. He may not hear anything about this at the time; but seven years afterward he may be brought up standing by the fact that it is invalid because of just such a defect. In the case in re Brefo (217 Fed., 131-134) it was held, in 1914, that a declaration otherwise correct, but in typewriting, not on "the form furnished for that purpose by the government," was a "legal nullity." Were such an enormity permitted, the court said, there would be "an end to uniformity"; government control and supervision could not exist! And in the case in re Langtry (31 Fed., 879), as long ago as 1887 the court declared that the clerk had no authority to take acknowledgment of declaration of intention at the home of an alien. Numerous other cases in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Florida, have settled the fact that the clerk's office, or open court, is the only place where a valid declaration can be filed.

If the clerk is without the proper blank forms, because he neglects to keep himself supplied, or because the Naturalization Bureau at Washington fails to heed his request for them, there is nothing for the would-be declarant to do but go home-perhaps many, or in some cases as much as two hundred and fifty miles and subsequently try again.

As has been said, he must be very particular about the words that he or anyone else writes on the blank when he does get it. If he files his declaration in a court which has much naturalization business, it is likely that the clerk or his deputy will see that it is letterperfect; but if it is his fortune to reside in a district where naturalizations are few, or where the clerk regards the whole transaction as a nuisance, he may be permitted to make a fatal mistake or omission and remain in blissful ignorance of that fact for anywhere from two to seven years-until he goes before the court with his final petition and finds that because his declaration was from the beginning technically defective he must file a new one and wait at least two years

more.

"DECLARATION INVALID"

This, in fact, has been a very common occurrence. During the period 1908-18, 8.5 per cent of all denials of naturalization petitions in the United States were on the ground of "declaration invalid"; that this percentage is made up of figures' tragically high in some districts may be recognized in the fact that in Nebraska it was 23.8, in Indiana 21.3, in Oregon 18.7, in Kansas 18.6, in Massachusetts 14.4, in Montana 13.2, in Iowa 12.5, in Arkansas and Idaho 11.3, in Washington 10.9, in Oklahoma 10.4. The petition of an Englishman applying for citizenship in Colorado was denied upon motion of the government's representative, because in his declaration seven years before he had renounced "King Albert," when, in fact, the name of the then potentate of Great Britain was "Albert Edward"! As the court in that case truly said:

1 Compiled from the reports of the Commissioner of Immigration. 2 District Court for Washington County, Colorado: In re William Wallace Mackey (1914). Unreported.

The act of renouncing the allegiance which one owes to a government or sovereign, and taking upon himself a new allegiance, is too solemn and important an act to be loosely performed, or to be surrounded by any uncertainty or doubt. No presumptions are indulged with respect to it. . . . The declaration of intention must in all material matters comply with the strict letter of the Act.

The court may not rectify nunc pro tunc, as in most other kinds of litigation, technical blunders made in good faith or inadvertently by the declarant, or even by the clerk of the court in which the declaration was filed. All the responsibility lies upon the alien.

In the unreported case of John Pollock, in the Philadelphia Court of Quarter Sessions, in 1915, the petitioner had honestly believed himself to have acquired German nationality from the flag of the German ship on which he was born, en route to the United States, of Russian parents coming here with intent to abandon their Russian nationality, and in his declaration had forsworn the German sovereignty; but the court held that the honesty of his mistake could not avail him― "Unfortunately it is impossible to amend his declaration; . . . the application must be denied." Through a misunderstanding of the intricacies of political geography in the then Austria-Hungary, a petitioner who actually was born under that sovereignty erroneously renounced the German Emperor. In that case, when, three years later, upon his final petition for naturalization, the court undertook to amend the declaration, its power to do this was denied upon the government's appeal.1

Five Austrians went in a body to the office of the clerk of the Court of Common Pleas in Hudson County, New Jersey, to file declarations of intention. Doubt

1 In re Friedl, 202 Fed., 300.