Revealing clash over new citizenship test
The Boston Globe’s excellent immigration reporter Yvonne Abraham provides a terrific primer on the vapidity of pro-immigrationism in an article on the planned new citizenship test that aims to check whether immigrants actually grasp anything about American values.
Here are some quotes from the article:
”If you’ve vetted them already to give them a green card, you’ve already decided you want them in the country,” said Marylou Leung, who helps prepare immigrants for citizenship at the International Institute of Boston, a nonprofit immigrant assistance organization. ”They go through quite a bit of understanding to learn the answers to those 100 questions. Don’t make the next step harder. Besides, how many Americans understand these concepts?”
”Let’s live up to our heritage as a nation of immigrants [that] helps people through the process,” [Jeff Chenoweth, national programs director at the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc.] said. ”So that we don’t see, as the years go by, a disparity between the haves and have-nots, where some obtain citizenship because of financial ability, or language ability, or access to assistance.”
”I think all of us . . . support the idea that if you want to become a citizen, you should know what America is about,” [Lynne] Weintraub said. ”But whether you can address content like that in simple words in ordinary usage is the big question.”
Weintraub suggested one way to truly gauge immigrants’ understanding of American principles would be to administer the history and politics quiz in their native languages.
Language barriers, inadequate education, and financial constraints hold immigrants back, [Michael Fix, vice president of the Migration Policy Institute] 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?“
In other words, a mish mash of Ellis Island mythology and nostalgia, English last-ism, distortion, and profiteering.
Profiteering? Oh, yeah. Besides Weintraub - author of Citizenship: Passing the Test, a “Best-selling citizenship textbook and teacher’s guide and workbook for preparing newly literate adults taking the standardized citizenship test. Companion text for INS naturalization interview preparation.” - there’s the Church.
Abraham is a great reporter, but what she didn’t mention is that the Catholic Church makes tons of federal tax dollars on bringing over foreigners or assisting immigrants.
