Trump Plan to Reduce “Fraud” in the Citizenship Test Will Actually Increase It

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President Donald Trump has continually been challenging who gets to be American. His administration has removed thousands of predominantly Black and brown immigrants, and revoked visas and eliminated legal pathways that for decades have allowed people from around the world to visit, live, and work here. Now, his administration has found a new avenue to attack in order to make it harder for immigrants hoping to establish a life in the U.S.: The citizenship test.

“I am declaring war on fraud,” Joseph Edlow, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said^[2] at an event in Washington this month. “I am declaring war on anyone that is coming to this country and wants to get a benefit, but doesn’t want the responsibility of what it means to actually be a U.S. citizen.”

Edlow claimed the current version of the U.S. citizenship test is “just too easy” and that the U.S. government needs a better way of assessing “whether someone has a true attachment to the Constitution, as required by the statute.” The process of becoming a U.S. citizen is called naturalization, and only a select few are eligible: those who have been given lawful permanent resident status—known as a green-card holder—for at least five years, those married to a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident for three years, U.S. military service members, or a child of a U.S. citizen. Once an applicant satisfies one of these requirements, they must pay a handsome filing fee, clear extensive background checks, and pass the citizenship test, which consists of an English proficiency test and a civics exam.

This test has mostly stayed the same since the 1980s, with educators and scholars advising the federal government on an appropriate test that’s based on a level of knowledge of American history and civics that an average native-born American would have. Cases of fraud are relatively uncommon, though the Trump administration has directed^[3] the Department of Justice to prioritize denaturalization cases to strip people of their American citizenship. Now, it seems, they want to target the test itself.

To understand how the U.S. citizenship test was created and how the Trump administration’s plans to make it harder could actually play out, I spoke with Doris Meissner^[4]. She was director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under Bill Clinton’s administration, where she worked on reforms to the naturalization process. She’s currently a senior fellow and director of U.S. immigration policy at the Migration Policy Institute. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Slate: So there is an English language component to the citizenship test and a civics section. Who created this and why?

Doris Meissner: The written test that we’re talking about is the civics test. There hadn’t been a standardized citizenship test until about 1986, and prior to that time, when people had their citizenship interview, they were all interviewed by an immigration adjudicator, who were previously called examiners. The adjudicator speaks to the person in English so they can demonstrate their English language capability through conversation. The civics test, prior to 1986, was informal, with immigration officers all over the country asking questions about the American system of government: Do we elect our president? Who is our current president? What is the first line of “The Star Spangled Banner”? They asked these types of questions at random, and it could be different in any office and among every adjudicator. It was up to the adjudicator to verify that the person had an understanding of the American system of government. This informal process changed to a standardized test process in 1986, and it’s taken various forms since then, but basically followed a similar format.

Generally, over the years, it’s been a list of 100 questions which serve as a study guide for the naturalization applicant, and it is all questions that have to do with the American system of government. What we would consider middle-school civics curriculum is the type of questions the applicant has to study in advance. From those 100 questions, the adjudicator will typically ask 10 questions, and, for most of recent decades, a passing grade is considered anywhere between six to eight correct answers. These 10 questions are randomly selected off of this list of 100 questions, because it presumes that the applicant has studied the test questions and therefore knows the answers to many more of the questions than the ones that are actually asked.

The level of learning that it takes to understand and answer those 100 questions has not just been randomly put together. The Immigration Service has gone through a thorough process of working with educators, English language experts, and history scholars in order to determine what the range of questions should be that actually meet the statutory requirement of knowledge of civics and American government. Over the years, that level of learning has been pegged at about a sixth-grade level of understanding. That is based on a much broader set of standards in the education community about what is a level of learning and understanding that represents what most Americans understand.

The Trump administration said it plans on making the citizenship test harder, establishing a higher bar for passing and adding an essay section. Besides the shift to a standardized test in 1986, how often does this test actually change?^[6]

The tests have somewhat improved over the years. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a system where the test would be reviewed every 10 years and updated and refined to reflect constitutional amendments and those kinds of changes. When those reviews took place, test questions may have been edited or changed to a degree, but the test itself remained intact, until the first Trump administration. Instead of a 10-year review, the first Trump administration made the argument that the test was not hard enough and needed to require more answers to questions. Then with the Biden administration in 2020, it was time for the 10-year review, and the test changed again and they made it a little bit more like what the test had been prior to the first Trump administration. Now, we’re seeing, with the return of another Trump administration, that same pattern has come back: The test is not hard enough, we need to make it more rigorous, people need to demonstrate their commitment to being an American, and they need to be convincing about their loyalty and their patriotism.

I’m not sure that the federal statute actually requires this. The statute requires knowledge of the English language and of American government. I don’t know that an attachment to the Constitution is actually language that is in the statute. I would have to say that over the years, when the 100 questions are put before native-born Americans, the failure rate is quite high. If you ask a random group of Americans to answer these questions, they don’t do as well on the test as people who are applying for naturalization do; usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 to 91 percent pass the citizenship test. Research also shows that people who are applying for naturalization are worried far more about being able to demonstrate their English language capability than about their ability to pass the civics test, because the knowledge of American government is something you can study, and people do study hard.

How would the government implement an essay section within the current citizenship test?

I don’t think it’s practical at all. What would be the standards for judging whether an essay meets some level of scrutiny? I think that introducing an essay into a system like this would actually make it be more prone to misuse, because there would be all kinds of ways of getting ahold of template essays that have been approved by prior applicants, going to ChatGPT, using who knows what. That proposal to introduce something like an essay, I can’t see doing anything but trying to raise the level of intimidation and an effort to discourage people from naturalizing when they might otherwise be eligible.

The fact that this process, for many decades now, has been one informed by professional opinion and experienced educators gives it the “good housekeeping” feel that is more than sufficient.

The Trump administration has been pushing the idea that immigrants are bad and using that as a justification to completely upend our legal immigration system. Do you think this latest announcement about making the citizenship test harder is another way to fuel more negative sentiment about immigrants?

Yes, I agree with that, and I think that’s a very important shift. Discussing naturalization now entirely through the lens of fraud and of manipulating and misusing the system, being opposed somehow or another to Americanness—whatever that might mean—is very much at odds with what the experience has been. First of all, to apply for naturalization, there is a sizable fee. People have to not only be motivated, but have the financial means. And people who apply for naturalization want to be American, that’s why they do it. They are absolutely attached to the idea of America. This is painting a picture of people going through the naturalization process that is not representative at all of what the experience and the reality is of people who are applying for naturalization.

I think one of the things to really reflect on with all of this is that up until now, the administration has been talking about illegal immigration and being opposed to it, obviously through the mass deportations initiative and the high level of priority that the administration is giving to that. That’s one thing, but they’ve always, until now, basically said, We want people to play by the rules and we want people to use our legal immigration system. But now what’s happening is that the very people who are in fact playing by the rules, exercising their rights under the legal immigration system, are being characterized in a very negative light, and that is a big shift.

In your experience, is there actually a high level of fraud in the U.S. citizenship application process?

No. Any major system has a degree of fraud and does need to be highly vigilant and have procedures in place that detect fraud, like Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security. Immigration is also one, so fraud is always a possibility. But the naturalization system, and the immigration system overall, has had a very consistent focus on fraud detection, and the procedures that are required for people to pass background checks have gotten better and better over the years, particularly since 9/11. Federal government databases have become linked and technology has made it possible to include not only immigration information, but all of the information that the FBI has, like terrorism information—that is in the hands of the government; information from states and localities around the country, in terms of crimes that might have been committed at a local level. Now databases also allow for information on credit history and borrowing patterns. There is a tremendous amount of information that is available in the initial screening, and these are people, of course, who have been screened a number of times already because they have gotten a green card, a visa to come into the country. They’ve been screened at a number of points along the path of the immigration system to even get to the point where they have the basic eligibility to apply for naturalization now.

If one goes back over a number of administrations, I remember during the Obama administration there were some issues that were detected in the naturalization process that had to do with some fraud. There were vigorous efforts to adjust the system to prevent that. The USCIS, as an agency, and the naturalization process as a system, has always been vigilant about its screening process and about the possibilities for fraud. This is not the kind of system that lends itself to fraudsters.

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