It's the Exam That Fails
Aizenman, Nurith C.
It's the Exam That Fails How the INS citizenship test misses tha point BY NURITH C. AIZENMAN AS A YOUNG MAN IN ETHIOPIA, BINYAM Tamene was not exactly the silent type. “I thought the world...
...At her confirmation hearings current INS Commissioner Doris Meissner indicated that she was deeply disturbed by the chaotic and irrelevant nature of the naturalization process, and she is clearly committed to reforming it...
...Immigrants who failed to provide the correct answer-Martin Luther King dayautomatically failed the entire test...
...Perhaps the most harrowing incidents are those uncovered by Juan Jose Guttierez of One Stop Immigration in Los Angeles: “I’ve documented cases where INS agents have asked such questions as, What’s the name of Gov...
...This seems the ideal opportunity to have a thoughtful public discussion about what we think even the most poorly educated new citizens should know about our nation and our democracy-and by extension what we feel citizenship really means...
...In addition it seems likely that rather than having individual officers administer it orally,ter it, the test will be given in a written form similar to that of a number of standardized citizenship tests already developed by several testing companies...
...Instead, says David Rosenberg, the INS is leaning toward using the history and civics standards set for high school students by the recent Goals 2000 initiative as its guide...
...Finally, while the widespread adoption of the 100 questions may have made the test a little more predictable within many district offices, across districts there is still tremendous variation in terms of the number of questions an applicant is asked and the number he must answer correctly in order to pass...
...citizenship were, lofty thoughts of freedom and democracy came rushing to mind...
...Many examiners make the test easier or more difficult based on who they’re interviewing,” explains Ros...
...So why does the INS citizenship exam test for knowledge that is so irrelevant to this goal...
...Since the time of the founding fathers the whole point of allowing, and indeed encouraging, foreignborn residents to naturalize has been to ensure that these newcomers will help sustain-and not undermine-our democratic system of government...
...Civil War buffs might protest that the answer to the latter question is a vitally important historical fact...
...Duke University immigration specialist Noah Pickus points out the absurdity of this: “The citizenship test is largely shaped by material developed for illegal immigrants by two INS folks practically over the course of a weekend...
...Many academics and immigration advocates are already piping up with their suggestions...
...Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the vast majority of immigrants pass the history and government test...
...It's the Exam That Fails How the INS citizenship test misses tha point BY NURITH C. AIZENMAN AS A YOUNG MAN IN ETHIOPIA, BINYAM Tamene was not exactly the silent type...
...According to US...
...So the directors of many district offices began casting about for a way to make their tests more .standardized...
...They arrested Tamene and imprisoned him along with many of his friends...
...However since that last amendment had been passed fairly recently, all of the INS materials say there are 26...
...I know of people who were asked dificult things like, What’s the Uth amendment’or, What’s the 26th amendment,”’ says Mary Ellen Ros of the New York Association for New Americans...
...A recent conference on the subject hosted by Noah Pickus at Duke generated a myriad of recommended questions ranging from, “Name one difference between the Republican and Democratic parties” to, ‘What did President Kennedy mean when he said, Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country...
...This helps explain some of the quirkier questions that often get asked as part of the citizenship test...
...A recent Department of Education study of student achievement in American history found that 57 percent of U.S...
...Another problem with basing the citizenship exam on the list of 100 is that since the list was never designed for that purpose, not all of the answers on it are accurate...
...To their credit, the district directors who adopted the 100 questions were at least taking a stab at introducing some consistency into the system...
...Though the INS does not have firm statistics, it’s estimated that only 10 to 20 percent fail...
...Unfortunately, Meissner’s early efforts were overtaken by more pressing concerns...
...less sophisticated applicants are often let off with brain teasers like, ‘What are the colors of the American flag...
...Immigrants who land an unforgiving examiner are simply out of luck...
...One of my attorneys was at an INS interview with a client at which the examiner asked, ‘How many amendments are there to the constitution...
...Of course, the system’s arbitrariness often works in applicants’ favor...
...Tamene’s answer may have made a mockery of his emotional decision to renounce his homeland and seek full membership in our society, but his instinct to play it safe was a wise one...
...Sympathetic interviewers also often coach immigrants who give a wrong answer on their first try...
...But Tamene had been forewarned that as far as the local INS office was concerned, that’s not what American citizenship is about...
...and, “Who is the current president...
...So it’s no wonder that after Congress introduced the civics and history portion of the citizenship test, INS headquarters simply issued a two-volume textbook on the subject and left it up to its 33 district offices to figure out how to check that applicants had mastered the material within...
...Which raises a question that those who advocate against naturalizing more foreigners may want to focus on instead: Just how well are we preparing native-born Americans for citizenship...
...And that’s more than could have been said for INS headquarters...
...As a result, the citizenship exam can often be either unconscionably hard, or laughably easy...
...But in the absence of anything better, many INS district directors instructed their examiners to choose their questions off of the list of 100...
...high school seniors had failed to attain even the “basic”leve1 of achievement...
...However, INS headquarters in Washington allows its officials in the field tremendous discretion in assessing those qualifications...
...The good news is that as part of that rehaul the INS is looking to completely redesign the citizenship exam by the end of next year...
...recalls Mary Ellen Ros...
...citizen will get me a U.S...
...to each individual examiner to decide what and how many questions to ask at a candidate’s interview, how many questions the candidate must get right to pass the tistand what constitutes a right or wrong answer...
...But even they must concede that denying citizenship to someone just because he doesn’t know it is a wee bit draconian...
...Ironically, all too many American luds may fall short of those standards...
...A good number of them were killed, but Tamene survived and found refuge in the United States...
...But both sides are ignoring the real problem...
...was included on the list of 100 not because anyone thought this was crucial information that every would-be citizen should know, but because “this fact was in the last few pages of the INS textbook [that illegal aliens tahng the special course would be using] -so it’s just an old teacher’s trick to make sure they go through the whole book...
...As for INS officials, they appear leery of opening up the issue to a wide-ranging debate, fearing that this may bog down an already slow-moving process...
...The list had been developed in the late 1980s by two INS agents to provide some guidance to private companies developing a history and civics course that illegal immigrants were allowed to take in order to become legal under a special amnesty law then in effect...
...Around the time she took office, the number of applicants for U.S...
...What does it matter, for instance, whether an applicant has been able to memorize that the length of a senator’s term is six years if the applicant doesn’t understand why senators must periodically come up for reelection in the first place...
...So he bit his tongue and gave the answer he’d memorized from the INS’ study materials: “Being a US...
...That’s when they hit upon the list of 100 questions...
...The Communists then in power weren’t quite so progressive...
...For example, says Ros, “there have been situations where the INS officer says, ‘Can you name three states?’ and the person names two states and a city, so the examiner says, ‘Can you name another state...
...law the INS must ensure that citizenship applicants demonstrate “a knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals of the history, and of the principles and form of government, of the United States...
...However, there is some hope on the horizon...
...So the examiner marked our client wrong, and when our attorney tried to correct him the examiner got furious...
...It is up...
...passport, make me eligible for federal jobs, and allow me to bring over relatives...
...Unfortunately, the public is almost totally unaware of the big changes to the citizenship exam now underway at INS...
...To begin with the test will be standardized across all districts...
...The question of what is on the test will also be revisited...
...Our client answered 27-which was correct...
...The trouble is that no one at INS headquarters ever sat down and developed the citizenship test in a thoughtful and comprehensive way...
...That‘s because for years the INS has been extremely decentralized...
...He aced the test...
...Until recently the agency’s regional commissioners were actually political appointeesmany of whom openly questioned the authority of the national commissioner in Washington...
...citizenship jumped from several hundred thousand per year to over a million-forcing the INS to scramble to process both the new influx and the rapidly accumulating backlog of applications...
...This has led right-wing critics like Georgie Anne Geyer to charge that the INS is opening our national gates to a flood of barbarians whose failure to assimilate will end up balkanizing the nation...
...Immigrant advocates counter that the current system can still be too tough on immigrants...
...r h e illegals also had the option of taking an INS administered test based on the list...
...Thus while the occasional well-educated immigrant has been quizzed on such esoterica as, ‘At what stage in the writing of the Constitution did the idea for a bill of rights first come into play...
...One INS examiner in Baltimore was notorious for asking the question, ‘What was the last federal holiday...
...By the early 1990s a number of critics were grumbling that the citizenship exam was completely arbitrary -varying widely from both district to district and individual examiner to examiner...
...Pete Wilson’s wife?’ What’s his birth date?’ or Who were the commanding generals at the Battle of Gettysbq...
...In its haste, the INS failed to conduct adequate criminal background checks on 180,000 immigrants to whom it had granted citizenship -prompting a public outcry, congressional investigations, a proposal to scrap the INS (currently being considered by the White House), and a Justice Department-mandated rehaul that is now in progress...
...For instance, according to David Rosenberg, Director of Program Initiatives at the INS, the question “What is the 49th state of the Union...
...Although the 100 questions on the list were derived from the material in the INS history and civics textbooks, they had never been intended to serve as an appropriate measure of an applicant’s qualifications for citizenship...
...I thought the world was free, and I was saying things openly,” he remembers...
...So when the INS officer administering Tamene’s naturalization exam asked him what the benefits of U.S...
...Regardless of whether they are too hard too easy, almost none of the questions asked in the citizenship exam touch on what immigrants really need to know in order to become responsible participants in our democracy...
Vol. 30 • January 1998 • No. 1
