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Chapter Six AMERICANIZATION While most Arab-American immigrants retained their Arab culture and ties to their homelands, they nevertheless chose to become U.S. citizens. To do this, they had to file two papers: a Declaration of Intention to become a citizen and, after a five-year residency, a petition for naturalization. The only exception to the residency requirement was made for men who had served in the armed forces. Before 1922, when a husband or father became a naturalized citizen, the wife and children automatically became citizens. The benefits of citizenship were the opportunity to homestead in the West and to vote. For an Arab alien the reference to renouncing allegiance to ‘‘Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’’ was lined out on the declaration form, and in its place was a handwritten reference to the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamed (Abd al-Hamid ii), who ruled from approximately1876 to1909. The declaration of Hanna Abdallah, for example, read as follows: United States of America, Massachusetts District, ss. Be it Remembered , That at a District Court . . . at Boston, . . . Hanna Abdallah . . . Pedler [Peddler], an Alien, and a free white person, by his Declaration in writing, on oath, sets forth, that he was born in Syria . . . in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty and is now about thirty-two years of age; that he arrived in Philadelphia in the District of Pennsylvania . . . in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and ninety, that it then was, and still is, his bona fide intention to become a citizen of the United States of America, and to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to every foreign Prince, State, Potentate and Sovereignty whatsoever,—more especially to Abdul Hamed, Sultan of Turkey whose subject he has heretofore been. He therefore prays, that his said Declaration and Intention may become a record of said Court, agreeably to the laws in such case made and provided. Whereupon the Declaration of the said Petitioner is admitted to become a record of said Court accordingly. 131 132 ARAB-AMERICAN FACES AND VOICES In Testimony Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and affixed the seal of said Court, . . . this 24th day of September, a.d. 1892, in the one hundred and seventeenth year of the Independence of the United States of America. [Signed and sealed by the] Deputy Clerk of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Citizenship and the Caucasian/Asian Controversy The reference in the declaration to the alien as a ‘‘free white person’’ was the result of restrictive and amended naturalization laws passed by Congress and the courts. For example, the amended naturalization law of 1870 defined the terms ‘‘white person’’ and ‘‘Caucasian’’ as well as the part nativity played in those definitions. Alixa Naff wrote that although the naturalization law of1870 stated that free whites and aliens of ‘‘African descent or African nativity’’ could apply for naturalization, it failed to define ‘‘white,’’ leaving the interpretation of that term to the subjective opinion of individuals in the courts.1 Naff continued: When in1899 the Bureau of Immigration initiated the ‘‘racial’’ classi fications of ‘‘Syrian’’ and ‘‘Palestinian’’ for immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean provinces of the Ottoman Empire, they were regarded [correctly] as Caucasian. Race did not become an issue until after 1906 when immigrants from western Asia became entangled in new naturalization laws designed to determine suitability for citizenship. . . . Then when Congress and the courts, in order to control illegal naturalization of immigrants for voting purposes, added ethnic origins to requirements for suitability, based on a law that declared Chinese ineligible for citizenship, the problem of race for many non-European immigrant groups surfaced. In1910, the U.S.Census Bureau classified peoples from the eastern Mediterranean —Syrians, Palestinians, Turks, Armenians, and others—as ‘‘Asiatic .’’ To further provoke the issue, a directive emanated from the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization in 1911, ordering court clerks to reject applications for first papers from ‘‘aliens who were neither white persons nor persons of African birth and descent.’’ The directive was acted on nationwide by a bureaucracy that included bureau chiefs, naturalization examiners, and district directors.2 The Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization frequently denied citizenship to an alien on the ground that as an Asian-born subject of the Ottoman sultan, he/she was not a ‘‘white person .’’ The question of Asian nativity was unresolved, and Asian-born immigrants were vulnerable to nativist interpretations. Ultimately...

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