The Trump administration is floating changes to the United States’ citizenship test that could broaden its ability to deny people status as citizens.
Joseph Edlow, the head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told Axios that the administration is planning to make the test questions harder and potentially to add a subjective essay question that could facilitate U.S. officials denying citizenship to aspiring immigrants.
Edlow reportedly told Axios last weekend that the current 10-question civics test is too easy. “Ultimately, what I’d like to see is moving to a standardized test where an applicant goes beforehand to a testing center, answers the questions, we’ll get a sense of whether they understand what’s going on,” he reportedly said.
And he told Axios about plans for an essay component:
Edlow also envisions an essay question on a subject such as, ‘What does it mean to be an American?’ or ‘Who was your favorite founding father?’ — ‘or something that is going to really show an attachment to the Constitution.’
The ripe potential for abuse seems obvious here. Edlow’s proposed changes to the citizenship test could potentially slow down the process, if not shut it down completely.
As I’ve written previously, Edlow has promoted the racist “replacement theory,” telling Breitbart that he assumed the Biden administration’s “long-term plan… was to grant some sort of mass amnesty, make [undocumented immigrants] all citizens, and then spread them out to try to change demographics elsewhere throughout the country.” So it’s quite easy to imagine the Trump administration’s handpicked essay-graders denying citizenship to people whose answers don’t align with the MAGA movement’s far-right ideology — let alone people who can’t “correctly” answer entirely subjective essay questions on the administration’s standardized test. And that may very well be the reason these changes are being pursued.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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