How many bubbles are in a bar of soap? What’s the significance of the 10th Amendment?
Can’t answer the first question? If you were a Black American in the South before passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act forget about voting. Over a century ago, Southern states adopted so-called literacy tests (hint: there were no right answers!) to disenfranchise Black people.
Can’t answer the second question? You might fail the new citizenship test imposed this month by the Trump administration.
Before 1917, immigration judges typically devised their own questions to test a prospective citizen’s literacy or civic knowledge. In 1917, the federal government initiated standardized literacy and civics tests as part of the naturalization process.
Although not completely exclusionary like the Southern tests, these new requirements, along with the rigid national origins immigration quotas adopted by Congress in 1924, weeded out many so-called undesirables, including those with less education or familiarity with English. My grandmother, who came from Poland as an unaccompanied minor shortly before 1900, qualified for legal residency but as an illiterate could not become a citizen.
The citizenship tests were periodically revised to reflect evolving notions of what mattered historically. A multiple choice format of about 100 potential questions was developed in the 1980s and last modified in 2008. A study guide was available to test takers who had to answer correctly six out of ten questions randomly selected by an examiner.
Allowed several tries, about 90 percent of immigrants passed the test. In contrast, a study revealed that only about a third of native born citizens could achieve a passing score.
The 2020 iteration of the test draws from an expanded base of 120 questions, about half newly formulated. To pass, 12 out of 20 randomly selected questions must be answered correctly. Many of the novel questions reflect the Trump administration’s wariness of immigrants as well as its conservative legal and historical perspectives on issues such as “states’ rights.”
For example, the acceptable answer to the question who does a senator represent has changed from all the residents of a state to all the legal “citizens of a state.”
A question about why the U.S. entered the Vietnam War has only one correct response: “to stop communism.” Test takers had better be able to explain the function of the Electoral College or why senators and members of the House serve terms of different lengths. They also must know the exact number of constitutional amendments. One especially ambiguous question requires citing an example of “an American innovation.”
Twenty-five years ago, when Donald Trump was best known for his appearance in the gossip columns of New York tabloids, “The Simpsons” TV show featured the intrepid Indian immigrant Apu preparing for his citizenship exam. Tutored by the ever befuddled Homer, Apu provides detailed, nuanced and sophisticated answers to a barrage of questions about the nation’s political system and history.
Later, when asked by an immigration examiner to explain the cause of the Civil War, Apu describes how diverging economic, political and social developments between North and South resulted over decades in two antagonistic societies sharply divided along racial lines. The exasperated official interjects “just say slavery.” Then “slavery it is,” responds an elated Apu.
During the past four years the Trump administration has focused public attention on efforts to block undocumented migrants, most notably by building a border wall.
But under the radar, the administration has worked consistently to impede legal immigration and raise the bar for citizenship.
It has invoked the “public charge” exclusion, seeking to disqualify from citizenship legal migrants who have ever utilized public services such as Medicaid or subsidized childcare while resident in the United States.
This ruse was implemented during the 1930s often to disqualify German-Jewish refugees whose money had been confiscated by the Nazis as the price of leaving Germany.
Over the past year the Department of Homeland Security has cited the COVID-19 threat as justification for suspending legal migration from many countries while also excluding most asylum seekers — even though the U.S. has higher infection rates than most of the world.
This portfolio of measures to suppress legal immigration preceded the new citizenship test. We all might agree that requiring prospective citizens to demonstrate a basic knowledge of the nation’s history and political system is reasonable. But the revised exam includes questions that are oddly specific, sometimes vague, and often irrelevant. Do you happen to know why there are 13 stipes on the flag or the name of a 19th-century battle? None of these questions seem likely to screen out the fanciful caravans of “rapists and drug dealers” whom Trump warned were flooding the country.
And this brings me back to the story of my grandmother, Bessie. I don’t know if my grandmother heard the possibly apocryphal story that in the 1930s President Franklin D. Roosevelt scandalized a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) by addressing them as “my fellow immigrants.”
She certainly knew that in 1939 first lady Eleanor Roosevelt publically resigned from the DAR when it barred the Black opera singer Marian Anderson from performing in the group’s segregated Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Mrs. Roosevelt then arranged for Anderson to perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
She may have had this memory in mind when in the 1950s, already in her 70s, she resolved to take a literacy class. As she told her awed grandchildren upon finally becoming a citizen, she could now vote and “read a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.”
The election of a new president offers an opportunity to undo many of the recent restrictions on legal immigration and to restore basic dignity in how we treat those seeking the promise of America.
