Why Joe Biden should scrap US citizenship tests
Exactly 10 years ago, I joined 136 people from 43 countries at a naturalization ceremony in a courtroom in downtown New York to proclaim our allegiance to the country that had embraced us as its own. Overcome by the emotional charge of the occasion, we struggled to keep our voices steady — and our eyes dry. Even Janet Napolitano, administering her final oath as secretary of homeland security, teared up as she welcomed us as “my fellow citizens.”
I was flanked by a young woman from Ukraine and a middle-aged man from Peru; she worked on Wall Street, and he was a cab driver. As we told each other of the journeys that had brought us to that magical moment, her English was heavily accented; his was liberally interspersed with Spanish.
At one point, we talked about what had been the final hurdle on the path: The citizenship tests. She’d found the civics quiz quite stressful; he, like me, thought it had been easy-peasy. We didn’t talk about the other test — the one that judged our English skills. More than likely, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services officers who had interviewed us skipped over that part of the process in order to move things along. In my case, the examining officer had said something along the lines of, “You’ve made it this far. There’s no need to waste our time on this.”
The Biden administration, which is proposing to make the English test harder, apparently does not understand what my USCIS examiner had come to recognize, from some combination of intuition and experience: If you want to be an American and have lived in this country long enough to qualify, then a language test is entirely redundant.
US citizenship test changes are coming, raising concerns for those with low English
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