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More than two million immigrants are currently waiting for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to handle their citizenship applications. This includes 90,000 immigrants in the Chicago area and throughout the state of Illinois. Thousands have been waiting since 1996 or even before. All too often INS will send notice of an interview or a swearing-in ceremony to the wrong address, or so late that the applicant does not receive it until after the date has passed. In too many cases, INS loses documents that the applicant sends in to support her application, or loses the application file altogether.
The problems with the INS naturalization process only multiply when the applicant gets to her interview. While Joravsky nitpicks about whether France was a U.S. ally during World War II, he utterly misses the bigger picture: INS officers too often are rude, insensitive, and condescending. Officers have been known to reject “Bill Clinton” as the answer to “Who is the president of the United States”; they insist that the applicant answer “William Jefferson Clinton.” While testing applicants on whether they can read basic English, interviewers have frequently asked applicants to read and explain the naturalization oath, which is so fraught with Latinisms that educators grade it as college-level English. Should we really expect nonnative English speakers to understand words and phrases such as “abjure,” “potentate,” and “mental reservation” to qualify for citizenship?
Executive Director
