Americanization; Civics; Immigrants -- United States; Naturalization -- United States; Noncitizens -- United States
[note 1: Cleveland, New York (Boroughs of Manhattan, Bronx, and
Queens); Bridgeport, Connecticut; Cincinnati; Paterson, New Jersey;
Portland, Oregon; Rochester, New York; Seattle, Washington;
Worcester, Massachusetts.]
[note 2: _United States Census_, 1910, vol. 1, chap. xi.]
[note 3: Includes aliens and those holding first papers.]
Considerable variations will be observed between the racial
distribution of petitioners studied and that of the unnaturalized
but potentially naturalizable males in the whole country in 1910.
For instance, while 18.5 per cent of the unnaturalized persons in
the United States were born in Italy, only 13.7 per cent of the
petitioners studied were Italians; on the other hand, while 29.9 per
cent of the petitioners studied were from Russia, only 17 per cent of
the unnaturalized males in the United States in 1910 were Russians.
These discrepancies do not prove, however, that even in such
cases the groups of petitioners studied are not representative of
the foreign-born population, because racial distribution varies
considerably from state to state. Fortunately, moreover, it is
possible to compile from the census figures to show by country of
origin the distribution of unnaturalized white males in the cities
covered by the study, and these figures, also included in the last
column of the table, show conclusively that the racial distribution
in those cities is fairly typical. The percentages do not exactly
agree, nor is that to be expected. In the first place, there is a
difference of three years between the times represented respectively
in the two sets of figures--years during which there was a heavy
immigration. The figures given for the unnaturalized are not
complete, inasmuch as for those cities the citizenship status of 9.8
per cent of the foreign-born males 21 years of age and over was not
reported by the 1910 census. Furthermore, the petitions studied were
not all from these nine cities, although nearly nine out of ten (86.8
per cent) of them were. On the whole, the nativity distribution in
those nine cities of the petitioners studied coincides remarkably
with that of the unnaturalized but naturalizable males.
RELATIVE “CIVIC AND POLITICAL INTEREST”
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