Mr. Hay to Mr. Wilson.
Washington, July 17, 1902.
Sir: Your legation’s dispatch No. 19,b of the 13th February last, reported having submitted to the Roumanian Government, through its diplomatic representative in Greece, as the outcome of conferences had by Mr. Francis with him on the subject, a tentative draft of a naturalization convention, on the lines of the draft previously submitted to the Servian Government, and Mr. Francis added that his excellency the Romanian minister had informed him of his hearty approval of the project, which he had forwarded to his Government with his unqualified indorsement. Minister Francis was instructed on March 4 that his action was approved. No report of progress has since been received from your legation, but it is presumed that the matter is receiving the consideration due to its importance.
For its part the Government of the United States regards the conclusion of conventions of this character as of the highest value, because not only establishing and recognizing the right of the citizens of the foreign state to expatriate themselves voluntarily and acquire the citizenship of this country, but also because establishing beyond the pale of doubt the absolute equality of such naturalized persons with native citizens of the United States in all that concerns their relation to or intercourse with the country of their former allegiance.
The right of citizens of the United States to resort to and transact affairs of business or commerce in another country, without molestation or disfavor of any kind, is set forth in the general treaties of amity and commerce which the United States have concluded with foreign nations, thus declaring what this Government holds to be a necessary feature of the mutual intercourse of civilized nations and confirming the principles of equality, equity, and comity which underlie their relations to one another. This right is not created by treaties; it is recognized by them as a necessity of national existence, and we apply the precept to other countries, whether it be conventionally declared or not, as fully as we expect its extension to us.
In some instances, other governments, taking a less broad view, regard the rights of intercourse of alien citizens as not extending to their former subjects who may have acquired another nationality. So far as this position is founded on national sovereignty and asserts a claim to the allegiance and service of the subject not to be extinguished save by the consent of the sovereign, it finds precedent and warrant which it is immaterial to the purpose of this instruction to discuss. Where such a claim exists, it becomes the province of a naturalization [Page 911] convention to adjust it on a ground of common advantage, substituting the general sanction of treaty for the individual permission of expatriation and recognizing the subject who may have changed allegiance as being on the same plane with the natural or native citizens of the other contracting state.
Some States, few in number be it said, make distinction between different classes of citizens of the foreign State, denying to some the rights of innocent intercourse and commerce which by comity and natural right are accorded to the stranger, and doing this without regard to the origin of the persons adversely affected. One country in particular, although maintaining with the United States a treaty which unqualifiedly guarantees to citizens of this country the rights of visit, sojourn, and commerce of the Empire, yet assumes to prohibit those rights to Hebrew citizens of the United States, whether native or naturalized. This Government can lose no opportunity to controvert such a distinction, wherever it may appear. It can admit no such discrimination among its own citizens, and can never assent that a foreign State, of its own volition, can apply a religious test to debar any American citizen from the favor due to all.
There is no treaty of amity and commerce between the United States and Roumania, but this Government is pleased to believe that Roumania follows the precepts of comity in this regard as completely and unreservedly as we ourselves do, and that the American in Roumania is as welcome and as free in matters of sojourn and commerce and legal resorts as the Roumanian is in the United States. We hear no suggestion that any differential treatment of our citizens is there imposed. No religious test is known to bar an American from resorting to Roumania for business or pleasure. No attempt has been made to set up any such test in the United States whereby any American citizen might be denied recourse to the representatives of Roumania in order to authenticate documents necessary to the establishment of his legal rights or the furtherance of his personal interests in Roumania. And in welcoming negotiations for a convention of naturalization Roumania gives proof of her desire to confirm all American citizens in their inherently just rights.
Another consideration of cognate character presents itself. In the absence of a naturalization convention, some few states hold self-expatriation without the previous consent of the sovereign to be punishable, or to entail consequences indistinguishable from banishment. Turkey, for instance, only tacitly assents to the expatriation of Ottoman subjects so long as they remain outside Turkish jurisdiction. Should they return thereto their acquired alienship is ignored. Should they seek to cure the matter by asking permission to be naturalized abroad, consent is coupled with the condition of nonreturn to Turkey. It is the object of a naturalization convention to remedy this feature by placing the naturalized alien on a parity with the natural-born citizen and according him due recognition as such. This consideration gives us added satisfaction that negotiations on the subject have been auspiciously inaugurated with Roumania. If I have mentioned this aspect of the matter, it is in order that the two Governments may be in accord as to the bases of their agreement in this regard, for it is indispensable that the essential purpose of the proposed convention should not be impaired or perverted by any coupled condition of banishment imposed independently by the act of either contracting party.
[Page 912]The United States welcomes now, as it has welcomed from the foundation of its Government, the voluntary immigration of all aliens coming hither under conditions fitting them to become merged in the body politic of this land. Our laws provide the means for them to become incorporated indistinguishably in the mass of citizens, and prescribe their absolute equality with the native born, guaranteeing to them equal civil rights at home and equal protection abroad. The conditions are few, looking to their coming as free agents, so circumstanced physically and morally as to supply the healthful and intelligent material of free citizenhood. The pauper, the criminal, the contagiously or incurably diseased are excluded from the benefits of emigration only when they are likely to become a source of danger or a burden upon the community. The voluntary character of their coming is essential; hence we shut out all immigration assisted or constrained by foreign agencies. The purpose of our generous treatment of the alien immigrant is to benefit us and him alike—not to afford to another state a field upon which to cast its own objectionable elements. A convention of naturalization may not be construed as an instrument to facilitate any such process. The alien, coming here voluntarily and prepared to take upon himself the preparatory and in due course the definitive obligations of citizenship, retains thereafter, in domestic and international relations, the initial character of free agency, in the full enjoyment of which it is incumbent upon his adoptive State to protect him.
The foregoing considerations, whilst pertinent to the examination of the purpose and scope of a naturalization treaty, have a larger aim. It behooves the State to scrutinize most jealously the character of the immigration from a foreign land, and, if it be obnoxious to objection, to examine the causes which render it so. Should those causes originate in the act of another sovereign State, to the detriment of its neighbors, it is the prerogative of an injured State to point out the evil and to make remonstrance; for with nations, as with individuals, the social law holds good that the right of each is bounded by the right of the neighbor.
The condition of a large class of the inhabitants of Roumania has for many years been a source of grave concern to the United States. I refer to the Roumanian Jews, numbering some 400,000. Long ago, while the Danubian principalities labored under oppressive conditions which only war and a general action of the European powers sufficed to end, the persecution of the indigenous Jews under Turkish rule called forth in 1872 the strong remonstrance of the United States. The treaty of Berlin was hailed as a cure for the wrong, in view of the express provisions of its forty-fourth article, prescribing that “in Roumania the difference of religious creeds and confessions shall not be alleged against any person as a ground for exclusion or incapacity in matters relating to the enjoyment of civil and political rights, admission to public employments, functions, and honors, or the exercise of the various professions and industries in any locality whatsoever,” and stipulating freedom in the exercise of all forms of worship to Roumanian dependents and foreigners alike, as well as guaranteeing that all foreigners in Roumania shall be treated, without distinction of creed, on a footing of perfect equality.
With the lapse of time these just prescriptions have been rendered nugatory in great part, as regards the native Jews, by the legislation and municipal regulations of Roumania. Starting from the arbitrary and controvertible premise that the native Jews of Roumania domiciled [Page 913] there for centuries are “aliens not subject to foreign protection,” the ability of the Jew to earn even the scanty means of existence that suffice for a frugal race has been constricted by degrees, until nearly every opportunity to win a livelihood is denied; and until the helpless poverty of the Jew has constrained an exodus of such proportions as to cause general concern.
The political disabilities of the Jews in Roumania, their exclusion from the public service and the learned professions, the limitations of their civil rights, and the imposition upon them of exceptional taxes, involving as they do wrongs repugnant to the moral sense of liberal modern peoples, are not so directly in point for my present purpose as the public acts which attack the inherent right of man as a breadwinner in the ways of agriculture and trade. The Jews are prohibited from owning land, or even from cultivating it as common laborers. They are debarred from residing in the rural districts. Many branches of petty trade and manual production are closed to them in the overcrowded cities where they are forced to dwell and engage, against fearful odds, in the desperate struggle for existence. Even as ordinary artisans or hired laborers they may only find employment in the proportion of one “unprotected alien “to two “Roumanians” under any one employer. In short, by the cumulative effect of successive restrictions, the Jews of Roumania have become reduced to a state of wretched misery. Shut out from nearly every avenue of self-support which is open to the poor of other lands, and ground down by poverty as the natural result of their discriminatory treatment, they are rendered incapable of lifting themselves from the enforced degradation they endure. Even were the fields of education, of civil employment, and of commerce open to them as to “Roumanian citizens,” their penury would prevent their rising by individual effort. Human beings so circumstanced have virtually no alternatives but submissive suffering or flight to some land less unfavorable to them. Removal under such conditions is not and can not be the healthy, intelligent emigration of a free and self-reliant being. It must be, in most cases, the mere transplantation of an artificially produced diseased growth to a new place.
Granting that in better and more healthful surroundings the morbid conditions will eventually change for good, such emigration is necessarily for a time a burden to the community upon which the fugitives may be cast. Self-reliance and the knowledge and ability that evolve the power of self-support must be developed, and at the same time avenues of employment must be opened in quarters where competition is already keen and opportunities scarce. The teachings of history and the experience of our own nation show that the Jews possess in a high degree the mental and moral qualifications of conscientious citizenhood. No class of emigrants is more welcome to our shores when coming equipped in mind and body for entrance upon the struggle for bread and inspired with the high purpose to give the best service of heart and brain to the land they adopt of their own free will. But when they come as outcasts, made doubly paupers by physical and moral oppression in their native land, and thrown upon the long-suffering generosity of a more-favored community, their migration lacks the essential conditions which make alien immigration either acceptable or beneficial. So well is this appreciated on the Continent that, even in the countries where antisemitism has no foothold, it is difficult for these fleeing Jews to obtain any lodgment. America is their only goal.
[Page 914]The United States offers asylum to the oppressed of all lands. But its sympathy with them in nowise impairs its just liberty and right to weigh the acts of the oppressor in the light of their effects upon this country, and to judge accordingly.
Putting together the facts, now painfully brought home to this Government, during the past few years, that many of the inhabitants of Roumania are being forced by artificially adverse discriminations to quit their native country; that the hospitable asylum offered by this country is almost the only refuge left to them; that they come hither unfitted by the conditions of their exile to take part in the new life of this land under circumstances either profitable to themselves or beneficial to the community, and that they are objects of charity from the outset and for a long time—the right of remonstrance against the acts of the Roumanian Government is clearly established in favor of this Government. Whether consciously and of purpose or not, these helpless people, burdened and spurned by their native land, are forced by the sovereign power of Roumania upon the charity of the United States. This Government can not be a tacit party to such an international wrong. It is constrained to protest against the treatment to which the Jews of Roumania are subjected, not alone because it has unimpeachable ground to remonstrate against the resultant injury to itself, but in the name of humanity. The United States may not authoritatively appeal to the stipulations of the treaty of Berlin, to which it was not and can not become a signatory, but it does earnestly appeal to the principles consigned therein, because they are the principles of international law and eternal justice, advocating the broad toleration which that solemn compact enjoins and standing ready to lend its moral support to the fulfillment thereof by its cosignatories, for the act of Roumania itself has effectively joined the United States to them as an interested party in this regard.
Occupying this ground and maintaining these views, it behooves us to see that in concluding a naturalization convention no implication may exist of obligation on the part of the United States to receive and convert these unfortunates into citizens, and to eliminate any possible inference of some condition or effect tantamount to banishment from Roumania, with inhibition of return or imposition of such legal disability upon them by reason of their creed, as may impair their interests in that country or operate to deny them the judicial remedies there which all American citizens may justly claim in accordance with the law and comity of nations.
I am, sir, your obedient servant,
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