The vital importance of this question of “derivative citizenship” is clear in the statistics gathered by the Americanization Study for the fiscal year 1913-14. Of the 26,284 naturalization petitions covered by that analysis, only 154, or .6 of 1 per cent, were those of women. But more than two-thirds (68.5 per cent) were married, from which it is evident that, in the large majority of these cases, foreign-born women were swept into citizenship by the naturalization of the husband. For less than one in ten of them were married to women born in the United States. And even these American-born women had lost their citizenship through marriage to aliens, regaining it only when their foreign-born husbands became citizens. CHILDREN OF ALIENS HERE AMERICAN BORN These statistics bring out also another extremely interesting, and to most people surprising, fact; that is, that the children of our foreign-born citizens largely were born in this country and are therefore, in their own right, American citizens. Probably most persons think of the foreign-born population as coming to this country with a horde of foreign-born children. This appears to be contrary to the facts. As can be seen in Table 56, in the Appendix, four out of five of the petitioners studied had children, and nearly three-quarters of them had native-born children only. One-fifth had foreign-born children only, and the rest had both foreign and native-born. The total number of foreign-born children under twenty-one years of age was 4,843. “DERIVATIVE CITIZENSHIP” ALMOST EQUALS THE DIRECT The thing that appears plain and highly significant in these figures is the fact that every 100 certificates of naturalization granted carried into citizenship on the average of 93 _other persons_, of whom 62 were women, virtually regardless of their own qualifications, and 31 boys and girls under twenty-one years of age. The number of unmarried women and widows was altogether negligible. And these 62 women were virtually all foreign born, the proportion of those men having native-born wives, who were thus restored to their birthright citizenship, being only 9.1 per cent. (It should be remarked, however, that the proportion of petitioners having native-born wives varies greatly--from less than 4 per cent in one court to more than 30 per cent in three of the smaller courts.)