Mr. Hill to Mr. White.
Washington, May 21, 1901.
Sir: Mr. Jackson’s unnumbered dispatch of the 1st ultimo, transmitting returns of passports issued by your embassy during the preceding quarter, has been received.
Miss Ella Seemann applied for a passport through the consul at Hamburg, and received one February 20, 1901, No. 2671. The form used was that intended for a person claiming citizenship through the naturalization of the parent, and she was required to produce her father’s naturalization certificate. In another case—that of Miss Henrietta Augusta Herrmann, whose application was also through the consul at Hamburg—the applicant could not show her father’s naturalization certificate, but was required to make the statements usually required from a person whose citizenship is derived from the naturalization of the father. As both of these women were, as their statements show, born in the United States and had not forfeited their allegiance, they should not have been required to make the statements [Page 179] or produce the proof which the consul required, their citizenship being derived, not from their parents’ naturalization, but from the fact of their American birth. The provisions of the statutes on this subject and the decisions of the Federal courts, as well as this Department’s repeated rulings, are based primarily upon the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State where they reside.”
You will instruct the consul at Hamburg in this sense.
I am, etc.,
Acting Secretary.