Non-resident

“ To prevent any misapplication of the views expressed in this opinion, it is proper to observe that we do not mean to assert, by any thing we have said, that a State may not authorize proceedings to determine the status of one of its citizens towards a non-resident, which would be binding within the State, though made without service of process or personal notice to the non-resident. ”

“ Such grants to non-resident aliens were inhibited by positive statutory provisions, and for the obvious reason that the object of the colonization laws was to induce a settlement of the country by the introduction of persons who would cultivate the lands and become permanent residents ”

“ An alien friend who is domiciled, that is to say, who is a permanent resident, can be compelled to serve, for otherwise he would receive the benefits of the government without sharing the burdens. An alien’s declaration of intention to become a citizen, though it does not make him a citizen, is conclusive evidence that he is properly to be considered a permanent resident. ”

“ The Department of State and Alien Poor, of the State Board of Charities, has the supervision of the State poor, and of alien and Indian dependents. It also has the power to transfer aliens, or non-residents, who have become public charges, to their home county or State, or, in co-operation with the United States Immigration authorities, to return them to their home countries. ”

“ We have long held that a resident alien is a 'person' within the meaning of the Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendments. He therefore may not be deprived either by the National Government or by any state of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. ”

“ But still we are brought back to the question, may not a State bestow upon a resident alien the right to vote, within its limits, as a personal privilege, without conferring upon him the other privileges of citizenship, or ever intending to render it obligatory upon the other States to receive him as a citizen? ”

“ That every foreigner who can prove satisfactorily that he has been resident in the country for five years, and that he desires to make it his permanent place of residence, that he is prepared to take the oath to obey the laws, to undertake all the obligations of citizenship, and to defend the independence of the country, should be allowed to become a citizen on taking that oath. This should be confined to persons possessing a certain amount of property, or a certain amount of yearly wages, and who have good characters. ”

“ Remember that to reside in another state as an alien did not, in default of special treaty or act of legislative grace, give the resident any claim to civic rights in his place of residence, while misfortune might at any time reduce him to slavery in a foreign land. ”

“ Communities often are agitated and divided on questions of local policy; but no second case will be found in which a people, after settling such questions among themselves according to recognized rules, were confronted with warfare, bitter and persistent, such as this city is now called [Pg 309] to meet, and at the hands of a combination wholly of non-residents, without the slightest proper voice in their domestic concerns. ”

“ This enlightened concept of what constitutes a meaningful interruption of the continuous residence which must support a petition for naturalization, reflecting as it does a congressional judgment that an alien's status is not necessarily to be endangered by his absence from the country, strengthens the foundation underlying a belief that the exceptions to § 101 (a) (13) should be read to protect resident aliens who are only briefly absent from the country. ”

“ A second answer to this strange and latitudinous notion is that it so far stultifies the sages by whom the Constitution was framed as to impute to them ignorance of the material distinction existing between citizenship and mere residence or domicil, and of the well known facts that a person confessedly an alien may be permitted to reside in a country in which he can possess no civil or political rights, or of which he is neither a citizen nor subject, and that, for certain purposes, a man may have a domicil in different countries, in no one of which he is an actual personal resident. ”

“ It provides that no state shall 'deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.' The words 'any person' have sufficient scope to include resident aliens, whether eligible for citizenship or not. ”

“ There are, of course, valid policy reasons for saying that an alien wishing to retain his classification as a permanent resident of this country imperils his status by interrupting his residence too frequently or for an overly long period of time, but we discern no rational policy supporting application of a re-entry limitation in all cases in which a resident alien crosses an international border for a short visit. ”

“ The immediate and practical aim in view was that foreigners and Catholics should be excluded from all national, state, county, and municipal offices; that strenuous efforts should be made to change the naturalization 124laws, so that the immigrant could not become a citizen until a resident of twenty-one years in this country. My husband at once perceived the pernicious tendency of the movement, which was sweeping the Northern states with resistless force. Secret lodges were formed everywhere, secret ceremonies inaugurated—grip, passwords, and signs. ”

“ While a resident alien who leaves the country for any period, however brief, does make a new entry on his return, he is then subject nevertheless to all current exclusionary laws, one of which, at present, excludes from admission any alien who has ever been a member of the Communist Party. ”

“ The stranger coming hither with intent to remain, establishing his residence in our midst, contributing to the general welfare, and by his voluntary act declaring his purpose to assume the responsibilities of citizenship, thereby gains an inchoate status which legislation may properly define. The laws of certain States and Territories admit a domiciled alien to the local franchise, conferring on him the rights of citizenship to a degree which places him in the anomalous position of being a citizen of a State and yet not of the United States within the purview of Federal and international law. ”

“ In effect every state possessed the power of naturalizing aliens in every other state; a power as mischievous in its nature, as it was indiscreet in its actual exercise. In one state, residence for a short time might, and did confer the rights of citizenship. In others, qualifications of greater importance were required. An alien, therefore, incapacitated for the possession of certain rights by the laws of the latter, might, by a previous residence and naturalization in the former, elude at pleasure all their salutary regulations for self-protection. ”

“ Considering the ordinary chances of human life, a denial of citizenship under a residence of fourteen years is a denial to a great proportion of those who ask it, and controls a policy pursued from their first settlement by many of these States, and still believed of consequence to their prosperity; and shall we refuse to the unhappy fugitives from distress that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land? Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe? ”

“ Is it not within the power of a State to grant to an alien, residing within its limits, all the rights and privileges enjoyed by its native-born or naturalized citizens, so far as such rights and privileges are under control of the State?—that is, to naturalize an alien to the extent of its own exclusive jurisdiction, even to the extent of voting for United [Pg 198] States officials, thus practically making him a member of the political community in the United States. ”

“ He may come without name, fame, or property, and he is received with open arms. After a brief residence, he is entitled to full citizenship, and is then a part of the government, enjoying all the rights and privileges of the native born. ”

“ Special legislation should deal with the aliens who do not come here to be made citizens. But the alien who comes here intending to become a citizen should be helped in every way to advance himself, should be removed from every possible disadvantage, and in return should be required under penalty of being sent back to the country from which he came, to prove that he is in good faith fitting himself to be an American citizen. ”

“ We offer an asylum to every man of foreign birth who chooses to come here and settle upon our soil; we make of him, after a few years' residence only, a citizen endowed with all the rights that any of us have, except perhaps the single one of being elected to the Presidency of the United States. There is no other privilege that a native, no matter what he has done for the country, has that the adopted citizen of five years' standing has not got. [Applause.] ”

“ If, however, they or any of them prefer to go abroad for residence in a foreign country, all such shall be at liberty to do so without obligating themselves by an oath of allegiance, taking with them their families and property, with privileges of preparation for such departure. ”

“ The present state of things is, indeed, a compromise between two fundamentally different ideas as to the constitution of a political society. Citizenship and its remaining privileges are the outcome of the primitive conception of the state as a personal and permanent union of determinate individuals, for whose exclusive benefit the laws and government of the state exist. Residence, regarded as a title of membership and protection, is the product of the more modern conception of the state, as consisting merely of the inhabitants for the time being of a certain territory. ”

“ And these privileges they would enjoy whether they were citizens of any State or not. Inhabitants of Federal territories and new citizens, made such by annexation of territory or naturalization, though without any status as citizens of a State, could, nevertheless, as citizens of the United States, lay claim to every one of the privileges and immunities which have been enumerated; and among these none is more essential and fundamental than the right to follow such profession or employment as each one may choose, subject only to uniform regulations equally applicable to all. ”

“ In this study of naturalization and political life of the foreign-born citizen it is with this second concept that we have most to do.
ESSENTIALS OF CITIZENSHIP: ANCIENT—AND AMERICAN What, then, are the essentials of that citizenship to which an alien aspires and addresses himself when he seeks to become an active member in the American community whose members are something more than mere chattels of the sovereign?
“There is nothing that more characterizes a complete citizen,” says Aristotle, “than having a share in the judicial and executive part of the government.... ”

“ For the rest, and the far-outlying, sparsely-settled regions, where a person desiring citizenship must travel with his witnesses perhaps even hundreds of miles not once, but twice in any event, and in some cases several times, to and from the court having jurisdiction over the territory in which he lives, the situation is not so simple. ”

“ Relying on the phrases italicized in the quotation, the Government insists that the section embraces an alien who, after entry, has become a member of an organization, membership in which, at the time of his entry, would have warranted his exclusion, although he has ceased to be a member at the time of his arrest. We hold that the Act does not provide for the deportation of such an alien. ”

“ The state statutes at issue in the instant cases impose auxiliary burdens upon the entrance or residence of aliens who suffer the distress, after entry, of economic dependency on public assistance. Alien residency requirements for welfare benefits necessarily operate, as did the residency requirements in Shapiro, to discourage entry into or continued residency in the State. ”

“ By "residence," in the constitution, is to be understood, not an absolute inhabitancy within the United States during the whole period; but such an inhabitancy, as includes a permanent domicile in the United States. No one has supposed, that a temporary absence abroad on public business, and especially on an embassy to a foreign nation, would interrupt the residence of a citizen, so as to disqualify him for office. ”

“ These foreigners all occupy and hold more or less land in this Territory, and expect to avail themselves of the pre-emption law to the exclusion of actual citizens who are ready and desirous of occupying the land which the laws of the United States gives them aright to do. ”

“ It has long been recognized that citizenship may not only be voluntarily renounced through exercise of the right of expatriation but also by other actions in derogation of undivided allegiance to this country. ”

“ They have established homes and reared children, who have the status of American citizens by virtue of their birth in this country. And they have entered into the social and religious fabrics of their communities. Such ineligible aliens thus have a vital interest in the economic, social and political well-being of the states in which they reside and their loyalty has been proved many times. [21] The fact that they are ineligible for citizenship does not, by itself, make them incapable of forming these ties and interests. ”

“ The term "citizen," as understood in our law, is precisely analogous to the term "subject" in the common law, and the change of phrase has entirely resulted from the change of government. The sovereignty has been transferred from one man to the collective body of the people, and he who before as a "subject of the king" is now "a citizen of the State." ”