What Should an American Know?

IMMIGRANTS seeking citizenship are required to pass a test on U.S. history and government. Here are five sample questions, drawn from the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s list of 100 recommended possibilities: What are the colors of our flag? Who was the first president? Who is the president today? What are the two major political parties? How many states are there?

It’s not exactly the stuff of a doctoral dissertation, or even a high-school civics class. It’s the sort of thing we’d expect an ordinary ten-year-old to know. And yet the INS doesn’t expect immigrants pursuing naturalization to know even this much. Its test-taking guidelines suggest that they need to answer only 60 percent of the questions correctly—that’s three out of the five listed above (though they often face a total of ten). In a lot of schools, a score of 60 percent translates into a letter grade of D minus. One lesson many immigrants learn from this process is that their new country really doesn’t expect a lot of them.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.

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IMMIGRANTS seeking citizenship are required to pass a test on U.S. history and government. Here are five sample questions, drawn from the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s list of 100 recommended possibilities: What are the colors of our flag? Who was the first president? Who is the president today? What are the two major political parties? How many states are there?

It’s not exactly the stuff of a doctoral dissertation, or even a high-school civics class. It’s the sort of thing we’d expect an ordinary ten-year-old to know. And yet the INS doesn’t expect immigrants pursuing naturalization to know even this much. Its test-taking guidelines suggest that they need to answer only 60 percent of the questions correctly—that’s three out of the five listed above (though they often face a total of ten). In a lot of schools, a score of 60 percent translates into a letter grade of D minus. One lesson many immigrants learn from this process is that their new country really doesn’t expect a lot of them.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.