Why did the United States go to war in Vietnam?
Historians debate multiple motives, such as maintaining Western colonialism after France’s military and economic withdrawal from Indochina. Political scientists discuss the entanglement of Cold War ideologies in a Southeast Asian civil war. And millions of protesters took to the streets to denounce a war they attributed to U.S. imperialism.
But for the hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants taking the Trump administration’s new, longer and more demanding civics exam for U.S. citizenship applicants, there is only one correct answer: “To stop the spread of communism.”
Why did the United States enter the Persian Gulf War in 1990? “To force the Iraqi military from Kuwait,” would-be citizens must reply, without mentioning such unstated motives as oil.
Why is the Electoral College important? The “correct” answers omit any reference to the 18th-century agreement that arguably induced Southern states to ratify the Constitution by granting them electoral votes for three-fifths of their slave populations. Instead, the answers are either, “it decides who is elected president” or it was “a compromise between the popular election of the president and congressional selection.”
And whom do U.S. senators represent? The answer in former versions of the exam, reflecting the words of the Constitution, was “the people of their state.” The prescribed answer in the new exam is “citizens of their state.” For good measure, a new question asks whom House members represent, with the answer, “citizens of their district.” The answers coincide with President Trump’s argument that undocumented immigrants should be excluded from census counts that determine congressional representation.
“The shift parallels the effort from the Trump administration to shrink the boundaries of the political community,” said Ming Hsu Chen, a University of Colorado law professor and director of her school’s Immigration and Citizenship Law Program.
Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a professor of constitutional and immigration law at Santa Clara University, said federal law specifies that immigrants seeking citizenship must be “attached to the principles of the Constitution.” He said those principles include freedom of speech and thought, with no obligation to agree with government leaders.
The contents of the revised citizenship exam indicate that the Trump administration “is willing to outrightly suggest that it is un-American (and therefore not worthy of permanent membership in the American polity) to believe anything but what Trumpists believe about a host of social issues,” Gulasekaram said.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers the exam, made no reference to ideology in its explanation of the changes, the first since 2008.
The agency said it simply wanted to make sure the annual exam “remains an instrument that comprehensively assesses applicants’ knowledge of American history, government and civic values.” USCIS relied on experts in adult education, said Joseph Edlow, deputy director for policy, noting that naturalized citizenship “allows immigrants to become fully vested members of American society.”
The exam is available to about 9 million green-card holders, legal residents who entered the United States by obtaining visas from family members or employers, winning a lottery or being refugees from persecution, and have lived in the country for at least five years.
Those who pass the test and an oral screening on their ability to speak English are eligible to become U.S. citizens. The 843,000 new citizens who passed the exam in 2019 are no longer subject to deportation and have the right to vote, seek federal employment and sponsor relatives living abroad, among other benefits.
Trump has decimated the population of prospective citizens, lowering U.S. refugee admissions to 15,000 for the coming year — compared to 110,000 in President Barack Obama’s final year — while reducing employment visas. He has virtually closed the Mexican border, barring migrants from seeking legal status if they need food stamps or Medicaid, and banning U.S. entry from a group of predominantly Muslim countries. Incoming President Joe Biden has promised to reverse most of those actions, but some could require months or years of new regulations.
The former written citizenship exam contained 100 possible questions, and the examiner would choose 10 to ask the test-taker, who needed six correct answers to pass. The new exam, which took effect for new applicants Dec. 1, has 128 potential questions, including about 40 from the previous version. Test-takers will be asked 20 questions and need to answer 12 correctly.
New citizenship test
See the entire new test here: bit.ly/CitizenQuestions
Some sample questions:
1. The president of the United States can serve only two terms. Why?
2. How many Supreme Court justices are usually needed to decide a case?
3. What was the Great Depression?
Answers:
1. The 22nd Amendment. Or, to keep the president from becoming too powerful.
2. Five.
3. The longest economic recession in U.S. history.
The passing rate in recent years has been about 90%. That may decline with the new exam, even though the questions and answers are available in advance on the agency’s website. as they have been in the past.
“The question isn’t how many prospective citizens will flunk the test — people tend not to apply unless they are confident they will pass — it’s how many will be discouraged from even taking it due to the increased complexity,” said Steven Lubet, a law professor at Northwestern University.
Some simple questions now have more demanding answers — for example, test-takers were previously asked to name three of the original 13 states but now must name five. Asked about rights held by all U.S. residents — the listed answers are freedom of speech, expression, assembly, religion, petitioning the government and the right to bear arms — they now must name three instead of two. (Neither the old exam nor the new one mentioned freedom of the press or the right to equality under the law.)
Some new questions involve lesser-known topics of particular appeal to conservatives, like stating the purpose of the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment (“the powers not given to the federal government belong to the states or to the people”). Test-takers are also asked to identify one of the authors of the Federalist Papers in 1787-88 (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and their collective pseudonym Publius) and say why the papers were important (to help people understand the Constitution and support its passage).
And there is a new set of questions asking test-takers not to identify or define a law, public policy or historical event, but to explain it.
Besides the Electoral College and Federalist Papers, aspiring citizens are asked why Supreme Court justices serve for life (to keep them independent of politics); why it’s important to pay federal taxes (to fund the government); why there are three branches of government (so that one does not become too powerful), and why the United States entered a slew of wars (for the assorted reasons stated by the government).
Some of these may be prime topics for discussion in civics classes, but they haven’t previously been considered qualifications for citizenship.
“I don’t feel this kind of knowledge is essential for people to be engaged as active participants in our civic life,” said Rosalind Gold, public policy officer for NALEO, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. She said some of the stated answers seem vague, some are inaccurate — particularly those about Senate and House representation — and the changes will stretch out a naturalization process that already takes more than a year.
The Biden administration could rewrite or discard the new exam, but that may take awhile, as the current revisions have been in the works for two years. Gulasekaram, of Santa Clara, said some such action is essential for prospective citizens and the nation to which they will swear allegiance.
Applicants for naturalization, he said, should be presented “an aspirational idea of citizenship that is broadly acceptable to the American public,” and not simply a worldview “to benefit a particular political party, and a specific segment of that party.”
Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
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