New USCIS Director Will Revamp the Easy Citizenship Test

The new director of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) said Friday that the U.S. citizenship test is too easy and needs to be changed.

Joseph Edlow, who was confirmed this month, told The New York Times that the Trump administration was also looking at making changes to the H-1B work visa, which has been at the center of the legal immigration debate for several months now.

“I really do think that the way H-1B needs to be used, and this is one of my favorite phrases, is to, along with a lot of other parts of immigration, supplement, not supplant, U.S. economy and U.S. businesses and U.S. workers,” Edlow told the Times. The plan for the latter is to favor companies that pay higher wages.

Edlow said that he felt the U.S. citizenship test was “not very difficult” right now, and allowed immigrants seeking to naturalize to easily memorize the questions and answers. He argued this was not really “comporting with the spirit of the law.”

The test was largely random and non-standardized before 2008, when the Bush administration introduced a standardized civics test that required applicants to correctly answer six out of 10 questions, out of a possible 100.

During the first Trump administration, that number was raised to 128, and the number of correct answers to 12 out of 20, before the Biden administration switched it back in March 2021.

Edlow told the Times that USCIS plans to return to a 2020-era style test soon.