Court Opinion

ID: 9445594
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:34:05.953771+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:20.577991
License: Public Domain

HINCKS, Circuit Judge
(dissenting)..
Judge Edelstein found, and no one disputes, that in this case there was a literal compliance with the requirements of 8 U.S.C.A. § 1440a and granted the petition for naturalization. The Government appeals, however, on the ground— as stated in its brief — that the Act, although it does not say so, should be interpreted to require “that the one year physical presence must directly follow a lawful admission to the country.”
The Act was plainly adopted as a reward to certain aliens who accepted the burden of service in our armed forces. Its thrust may be contrasted with that of 8 U.S.C.A. § 1426 which debars from future citizenship those who assert their alienage to escape such service. The structure of § 1440a is so simple that Congress must have realized that the language used failed to provide continuity between the lawful admission and the “single period of at least one year.” Indeed the requirement of a single period of presence imports that Congress foresaw that occasionally after a lawful admission the alien might come and go, or go and come. Yet Congress failed to provide that a subsequent illegal entry should, for purposes of the Act, nullify a previous lawful admission. It expressly provides that the period of physical presence should immediately precede “the time of entering the Armed Forces.” Its failure to provide that the period should immediately succeed the lawful admission, it is reasonable to infer, was intentional.
The prototype of this Act which provided special naturalization privileges for noncitizens who had served in World War I or in World War II, did not include as a prerequisite either lawful admission to the United States or any stated period of residence or physical presence therein. 8 U.S.C.A. § 1440, 66 Stat. 250. House Report 223 which accompanied H.R. 4233 (in which the Act here involved, § 1440a, had its genesis) although disclosing an intent to provide somewhat parallel treatment for aliens serving honorably in the Korean hostilities, contains utterly nothing indicative of an intent to require that the one-year’s presence must immediately succeed the new requirement of a lawful admission. House Report No. 223, 83rd Cong., 1st Sess., 1953. It is true that the Act which emerged, § 1440a, is less lib*101eral to the service-man than its prototype. But it does not follow that the beneficent provisions of the Act should be restricted by judicial interpretation.
Finding nothing in the case law and nothing in the language or history of the Act which supports the restrictive interpretation which the Government urges, I would affirm.