Becoming a US citizen
My good friend Rex and his wife Jenny became American citizens yesterday, after 29 years of test-driving the US as non-resident aliens, resident aliens, and, generally, aliens. Rex shared with me some of the questions they were required to answer on the Department of Homeland Security’s Application for Naturalization, and a few are just too good not to share …
** Time outside the United States. (Including Trips to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean Islands)
A. How many total days did you spend outside of the United States during the past five years?
B. How many trips of 24 hours or more have you taken outside of the United States during the past five years?
C. List below all the trips of 24 hours or more that you have taken outside of the United States since becoming a Lawful Permanent Resident.** Have you ever been a member of or associated with any organization, association, fund foundation, party, club, society or similar group in the United States or in any other place? If you answered ”Yes,” list the name of each group below.
** Have you ever persecuted (either directly or indirectly) any person because of race, religion, national origin, membership in a particular social group or political opinion?
** Have you ever committed a crime or offense for which you were not arrested?
** Have you ever:
a. Been a habitual drunkard?
b. Been a prostitute, or procured anyone for prostitution?
…
d. Been married to more than one person at the same time?
…
g. Failed to support your dependents or to pay alimony?
I especially like the use of “drunkard,” a lively word that is too often shortened to the more pedestrian “drunk.”
There were also a bunch of questions about US history and US law, which most Americans could never answer. One of our requirements for citizenship is apparently that you have to know these topics well enough to cover for all the US-born people who don’t know or care about these topics.
Rex has now moved on to lobbying for an amendment to the constitution which will allow foreign-born citizens to be elected President. Stay tuned.
P.S. I had the hardest time posting this — Wordpress kept crashing in a way I’ve not seen before. I finally figure out it was because of too many naughty words, and that’s why there are some “…” entries in the list about. With those colorful phrases omitted, it worked. Man, I didn’t know I had the G-rated version!
This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 2:31 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on May 23, 2008 at 2:37 pm Thomas wrote:
Rumor it has .. the German regulations and questioning are comparable …
on May 23, 2008 at 7:03 pm Lynn Bradley wrote:
I think our governor is hoping for a change in the law.
on May 25, 2008 at 5:38 pm Tom wrote:
Okay. Let’s pretend, for sake of argument, that these are respectful questions to ask of fellow human beings asking to live in your country. Does this mean that we’re going to kick out a few adulterous or polygamist drunkards to make room for hardworking resident aliens? Seems to me if that’s where you draw the line, you should be holding natively born Americans to the same standards.
I guess the problem is finding somewhere to SEND our adulterous or polygamist drunkards. Places like Jamaica and Grand Cayman like them for a while, but they still expect us to take them back when they run out of money.
Though really, the one about whether you’ve ever committed a crime for which you’ve not been caught is a good question. Anyone dumb enough to answer that one honestly would bring our already sputtering national intelligence average down even farther.
on May 30, 2008 at 4:07 pm Doug wrote:
Yeah, I think that question could be reworded “would you like to stop this process immediately?”