Legation of
the United States,
Teheran,
Persia, August 12, 1893.
(Received September 16.)
No. 74.]
[Inclosure in No. 74.]
Mr. Sperry to the
prime minister.
Legation of the United States,
Teheran, Persia, July
21, 1893.
Your Highness: I have the honor to state to you
that the Government of the United States has decided that Hajie Seyyah
is not a citizen of the United States. The Hon. Walter Q. Gresham,
Secretary of State, in the course of his decision on the subject, writes
to me as follows:
“The effect of naturalization under the laws of the United States is in
no wise dependent upon or affected by the laws of the alien’s country.
So far as we are concerned, it is perfectly immaterial whether Hajie
Seyyah had or had not permission to emigrate, if he be lawfully admitted
to American citizenship; and his rights would be effectively respected
in the United States and protected in a third country. But when he
voluntarily returns to his native country, presumably knowing the law
thereof in this regard, he becomes the subject of a conflict of laws.
The legality of his naturalization in the United States is not to be
questioned except by allegation of fraud in its procurement, which does
not enter into the present case.
“The claim of the Persian minister that the naturalization here is not
valid because lacking the prior consent of Persia, can not be admitted,
but on the other hand, and
[Page 501]
in
the absence of a treaty of naturalization, its validity may not be
practically enforceable in Persia against the counterclaim of that
Government that under its law the man has not lost his original
allegiance. The emigration treaty of July 3, 1814, between Russia and
Persia, which the minister invokes, has no relation whatever to the
naturalization of Persians according to the laws of the United States,
for the widest expansion of the most-favored-nation doctrine could not
make a treaty between two foreign states the measure of the validity of
a judicial act done in the United States in conformity to our municipal
law. To sum up, I have no hesitancy in regarding as unworthy the claim
of Hajie Seyyah to be protected as a person who has bona fide conserved the rights and discharged the reciprocal
duties of American citizenship, however lawful be the act of his
naturalization.”
Your Highness will observe that my Government sustains me in the position
which I took during my friendly discussion of this subject with his
excellency and your representative, the Moandes-el-Mamalek, and that as
to the point which I expressly avoided, as to whether or not Hajie
Seyyah was in law a citizen of the United States—I saying in this
respect that I would not and did not assert that Hajie Seyyah was a
citizen of the United States—my Government decides that Hajie Seyyah is
not a citizen of the United States, on the ground that the rights which
he acquired by receiving a certificate of naturalization from a court of
the United States have been lost because he never made any use of these
rights. The rights acquired by him in the United States would be good if
he had used them, hut not having used them, he has lost them, and
therefore he is now as much a subject of His Imperial Majesty as he
would have been if he had never stepped across the Persian frontier.
Permit me to acknowledge in this formal manner the uniform personal
courtesy and friendliness for the United States with which your highness
and your representatives conducted the discussion in regard to the civil
status of Hajie Seyyah. Persia and the United States have so long been
good friends that nothing, I am sure, will be permitted to weaken their
friendly regard for each other. This is certainly my hope.
Please to accept, etc.,
