January 31, 2006--Take My Frau, Please
I have for some time wondered why becoming a US citizen is considered to be naturalization. Then there was an intriguing article in the NY Times (linked below) on the subject of how the US and other countries test immigrants who have applied for citizenship that helped me understand.
This is an issue of great moment and hotly debated both here and in Western Europe where we and they have very different traditions of welcoming immigrants, much less offering or conferring citizenship. We “welcome” immigrants and have had a fairy clear process through which individuals proceed in order to become citizens. And a large part of our national consciousness about what it means to be American is based upon these founding myths and ideals.
We say someone becomes naturalized because it changes that person from being the alien, the foreign into the familiar, the natural. How this works in practice for people from different nationalities is of course frequently another matter—is it easier to become “natural” in America if one is from, say, England than, say, Nigeria? But at least we have attempted to grapple with these issues for many decades, with some of that grappling making us feel proud while at certain anti-immigrant times we have much of which to be ashamed.
The test for citizenship in the US includes a considerable amount of historical trivia (the name of the Pilgrims’ ship, the month in which the president is inaugurated, who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb—sorry, just a cheap joke) but also some more important questions about government structure and the Bill of Rights.
We are currently revisiting our test to make it a bit more robust and substantial. And we are also seeing that countries such as Britain, France, and Germany, which have very different histories of associating with and assimilating aliens, are struggling with how to make citizens of the new populations who have been filtering into their countries in recent decades, peoples who come from very different cultures (read Islamic) and who do not feel welcomed in societies that do not have immigrant traditions.
So in England, their new citizenship test includes questions about women’s rights and the participation of young people in politics. The Germans are being much more direct, some would say blatant, when asking,
What is your position on the statement that a wife should belong to her husband and he can beat her if she isn’t obedient? What do you think about parents forcibly marrying off their children? Imagine your grown son comes to you and declares that he is a homosexual and wants to live with another man. How would you react?
I suspect anyone facing the prospect of these questions might get on the next train back to Turkey. Come to think of it, maybe the Germans know what they are doing?
This is an issue of great moment and hotly debated both here and in Western Europe where we and they have very different traditions of welcoming immigrants, much less offering or conferring citizenship. We “welcome” immigrants and have had a fairy clear process through which individuals proceed in order to become citizens. And a large part of our national consciousness about what it means to be American is based upon these founding myths and ideals.
We say someone becomes naturalized because it changes that person from being the alien, the foreign into the familiar, the natural. How this works in practice for people from different nationalities is of course frequently another matter—is it easier to become “natural” in America if one is from, say, England than, say, Nigeria? But at least we have attempted to grapple with these issues for many decades, with some of that grappling making us feel proud while at certain anti-immigrant times we have much of which to be ashamed.
The test for citizenship in the US includes a considerable amount of historical trivia (the name of the Pilgrims’ ship, the month in which the president is inaugurated, who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb—sorry, just a cheap joke) but also some more important questions about government structure and the Bill of Rights.
We are currently revisiting our test to make it a bit more robust and substantial. And we are also seeing that countries such as Britain, France, and Germany, which have very different histories of associating with and assimilating aliens, are struggling with how to make citizens of the new populations who have been filtering into their countries in recent decades, peoples who come from very different cultures (read Islamic) and who do not feel welcomed in societies that do not have immigrant traditions.
So in England, their new citizenship test includes questions about women’s rights and the participation of young people in politics. The Germans are being much more direct, some would say blatant, when asking,
What is your position on the statement that a wife should belong to her husband and he can beat her if she isn’t obedient? What do you think about parents forcibly marrying off their children? Imagine your grown son comes to you and declares that he is a homosexual and wants to live with another man. How would you react?
I suspect anyone facing the prospect of these questions might get on the next train back to Turkey. Come to think of it, maybe the Germans know what they are doing?
posted by Steven Zwerling at
6:22 PM
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