In re Sadar Bhagwab Singh

• Decision Date: 11 December 1917
• Parties: In re SADAR BHAGWAB SINGH.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Eastern District of Pennsylvania

246 F. 496

In re SADAR BHAGWAB SINGH.

United States District Court, E.D. Pennsylvania.

December 11, 1917

Robert S. Shaw, of Philadelphia, Pa., for the motion.

Thomas B. Shoemaker, Chief Examiner for Philadelphia, Pa., opposed.

DICKINSON District Judge.

If the answer to the question before us was to be found in the results of the researches of the ethnologists, the conclusions so forcibly and clearly stated in the able argument of counsel for this applicant might well be accepted. The legal question, however, which is the one really involved, is a narrower and more simple one, although perhaps not less difficult to answer.

We restate, for the purpose of giving the statement its utmost emphasis, that the applicant has been accorded a most sympathetic hearing, in which the representatives of the Bureau of Naturalization have shared, and that the objection raised neither expresses nor implies a denial of the merits of the individual applicant, or of the race to which he belongs. The real question is whether the court has the legal power to admit the applicant to citizenship, and this depends upon the answer to the other question of whether Congress has as yet made any provision for the naturalization of men of his race. If it has not, the reason for the omission is obvious. It is because so few of his race have come to the United States that the question of their admission to citizenship has not become enough of a practical question to be dealt with by legislation.

As has before been remarked, admission to citizenship is a privilege granted, and is neither a right to be demanded nor one to be accorded on the personal or racial merits of the applicant but, if a right, is one, the title to which is to be traced through some act of Congress. When, however, the conditions of the grant of the privilege are met, the privilege ripens into a right of the individual applicant, which cannot be arbitrarily denied.

This leads us by a short and direct path to the acts of Congress on the subject, but a few general observations may aid us to a clearer view of what is to be there found. It is doubtless true that the naturalization problem has grown in complexity and now presents features which were probably not in contemplation when the first laws on the subject were passed. This fact may demand more or less urgently a modification of the meaning of our laws. Such a demand, if it exists, should not blind us, however, to the line which separates interpretation from legislation. At the same time, the difficulties attending such legislation and the wisdom of avoiding the agitations which would accompany any attempt at legislation warned Congress of the danger of casting its meaning in too rigid a mold, and invites the courts to look for a warrant to give to the language employed by Congress the quality of elasticity. This warrant is found in the fact that Congress at intervals, as great as that between 1790 and 1875, employed the same words to express their meaning although the meaning of the phrase employed had, in the common speech of the people, undergone a change in the meanwhile. There is at once found in our naturalization laws the thought of a double duty imposed upon the courts. They are commanded to reject some applicants and to admit others. In the performance of this duty they are to apply two tests. The one may be called the individual, the other the class test. The former is in principle of easy application, and in the present case presents no difficulties. The difficulty in the use of the latter test is not so much in its application as in being sure we are applying the right test. It is clear Congress had in mind to designate by the phrase 'free white person' a more or less definite class, and to deny citizenship to all others. The only real problem is to recognize the class, the members of which may be naturalized.

It may be helpful for the interpreter to put himself in the place of Congress for the purpose of forecasting what Congress might have done in order to get a clearer understanding of what it did. Congress might have chosen (and the strict letter of its language suggests this) what has been called the complexion or color test. The utter impracticability of applying such a test and the possible consequences led to its rejection. Assuming the intention to have been to limit the privilege to those who were like unto themselves in blood, previous social and political environment, laws, usages, customs, and traditions, what has been called the geographical test (for which the representatives of the Bureau of Naturalization contend) might have been inserted in the law. The absence of appropriate words expressive of this intention and the thought that Congress had a vision of what the United States has since become, the melting pot of almost all the nations of the earth, forbids us to take any such meaning from the law. The like absence of philological and ethnological terms compels us to find that such a test was rejected.

By a process of elimination we are thus brought or driven to the only remaining test, which is this: Our people, when the first naturalization act was passed, had a really definite idea of those to whom the privilege of citizenship was to be extended. The difficulty was, not in getting into accord upon the thought, but the difficulty was in finding a word or phrase which would express it. Resort was had, as the only recourse, to the common speech of the people, which provided a phrase ready at hand, which expressed the thought meant to be conveyed. The phrase was 'white person.' Its meaning was wholly conventional, and the convention evidenced by the meaning which the common man extracted from it. It made no pretense to be a term of science, and was not chosen with a view to scientific definiteness or accuracy of expression. It was at all events the nearest approach to definiteness of expression among all the words which were at the command of the lawmaker. Precision would not be demanded until the expression came to be applied...