U.S. Citizenship Test

 

New US Citizenship Test Makes It Harder for Immigrants to Become Citizens

Lawful permanent residents seeking to become U.S. citizens will now be required to take a more difficult and longer citizenship test. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced the change on November 13.

The new test increases the total number of questions from 100 to 128. Applicants will be verbally asked 20 questions and must answer at least 12 correctly, up from six out of 10.

A longer and more challenging test will likely prevent some immigrants from becoming citizens. It will also delay the citizenship process for hundreds of thousands more who are already waiting in months- or years-long backlogs.

The new test will apply to any person who files a citizenship application after December 1, 2020. These changes come on the heels of other targeted efforts that make it harder to become a U.S. citizen, including higher naturalization fees, increased vetting, and backlogs in citizenship applications.

The New Citizenship Test Questions Are More Complicated

Some of the questions have been made explicitly more difficult—even though there’s no evidence the old test wasn’t challenging enough.

While applicants previously may have been asked to identify one of the branches of government, they may now be asked to identify all three branches of government. Applicants who may have been asked to identify three of the original 13 states may now be asked to identify five of the original 13 states.

USCIS says one of the goals of the new test is to ensure applicants learn more about civics and history and aren’t simply learning names and dates.

For example, the old test asked, “What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?” The new test asks, “What does the Bill of Rights protect?”