Redesign Naturalization Exam

What color are the stars on our flag? How many representatives are in Congress? Who becomes president if the president and the vice president should die? Who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner? which US citizenship and immigration form is used to apply to become a naturalized citizen?

The federal government has decided that these questions-five of the 100 that could appear on the US citizenship test-are trivial. They say the exam, which is supposed to gauge how well immigrants understand and embrace US institutions, instead test only their ability to memorize answers (white, 435, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Francis Scott Key, Form N-400).

So the Office of Citizenship is designing a new test, to be administered starting in 2008. It will ask aspiring citizens about what it means to be American, rather than quiz them on picayune facts. Officials say it is more important to ask immigrants about such principles as freedom of speech and religion, than for them to know trivia quiz items like how many amendments there are to the Constitution.

The proposed change is already triggering debate over what should be expected of immigrants who want to become citizens.

But the goal, says Alfonso Aguilar, chief of the Office of Citizenship at the Department of Homeland Security, is to design a process that will ultimately produce citizens who are more involved, more aware of their rights and responsibilities, and more American. ”We don’t think the current test encourages civil learning and attachment to the country,” he said.

Yet for many more eligible immigrants, citizenship appears to be beyond reach. In Massachusetts, about 300,000 immigrants are eligible for citizenship but have not yet been naturalized. Nationally, the figure is about 8 million, according to Michael Fix, vice president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.

Language barriers, inadequate education, and financial constraints hold immigrants back, he said. According to a 2003 study by Fix and other immigration specialists, about 60 percent of eligible, noncitizen immigrants had limited English skills, one in four had less than a ninth-grade education, and at least 40 percent earned incomes of less than $40,000 a year for a family of four.

“That makes it problematic to tinker with the test in a way that will make it more difficult for a substantial number of people,” Fix said. “Some of the core concepts of American governance are fairly hard to get. Do we want this to be a barrier they have to climb in order to become citizens, given how much is at stake?”

Source: Boston Globe

bh