Articles Posted in Citizenship & Naturalization

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) recently completed a multi-year redesign of the naturalization test. The major goal of the redesign process is to ensure that naturalization applicants have uniform, consistent testing experiences nationwide, and to provide a fair and meaningful naturalization process. The USCIS believes that the newly designed test will help encourage citizenship applicants to learn and identify with the basic values we all share as Americans.

To accomplish their goals, USCIS piloted a new test with an overhauled English reading and writing section, as well as new history and government questions in several sites across the country. The feedback from the pilot program was used to finalize testing procedures, reading and writing prompts and new history and government questions.

Naturalization applicants will begin taking the redesigned test on October 1, 2008. To determine whether you will take the current or redesigned test, please refer to the chart provided by the USCIS.

In July of 2007, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) received a record 460,000 applications for naturalization. Moreover, for 2007, the USCIS received 1.4 million naturalization applications. This is double the normal annual volume. As a result of the record volume of applications, the USCIS announced in April
of this year that depending on the region that an applicant’s citizenship application was filed, it was taking the USCIS at least five to fourteen months. As a result, over the past few months, the USCIS has increased the number of officers adjudicating naturalization applications. Moreover, USCIS just announced that it will centralize the initial naturalization processing. Hopefully, these changes speed up the process for the thousands of individuals who are waiting to become citizens.