From its beginning, naturalization in the United States had been a largely informal, lightly regulated process; this system was upended by the Naturalization Act of 1906, eventuating in place the far more complicated naturalization procedures that have persisted to this day. Prior research argues that this new law achieved its desired goal of deterring citizenship acquisition among the least desired and least resourced immigrants. However, it also changed the value of citizenship wherein immigrants who may have been found citizenship least desirable decided to become a citizen more quickly given various alienage penalties. To understand how naturalization unfolded under these new conditions, this paper draws on a new hand-coded sample from a novel dataset of declaration of intent to naturalize forms and petition to naturalize forms to the 1920, 1930, and 1940 censuses. We then incorporate hand-coded information uniquely available in the naturalization documents, such as detailed place of birth, height, and complexion. We analyze the speed with which applicants for citizenship moved through the different steps of the naturalization process. Despite mixed results, we find more evidence in support of a defensive naturalization hypothesis, with immigrants with less desirable traits at the time naturalizing more quickly.
Waldinger et al. (Tue,) studied this question.
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