President Donald Trump’s United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is strengthening its evaluation standard for foreign nationals seeking naturalized American citizenship.
“U.S. citizenship is the gold standard of citizenship — it should only be offered to the world’s best of the best,” USCIS spokesman Matthew Tragesser told Breitbart News.
USCIS Director Joseph Edlow issued a memo titled “Restoring a Rigorous, Holistic, and Comprehensive Good Moral Character Evaluation Standard for Aliens Applying for Naturalization” to improve the agency’s good moral character determinations when a foreign national is looking to secure citizenship.
“Today, USCIS is adding a new element to the naturalization process that ensures America’s newest citizens not only embrace America’s culture, history, and language but who also demonstrate Good Moral Character,” Tragesser said.
“This memo ensures that USCIS officers are accounting for an alien’s positive contributions to American society — including community involvement, achievements, and financial responsibility rather than the absence of their misconduct,” he continued. “USCIS will continue to restore integrity in the nation’s immigration system — especially when it comes to the prestigious privilege of citizenship.”
In practice, USCIS officials will now look for a foreign national’s positive attributes when they apply for naturalized American citizenship — not just the absence of misconduct in their personal history.
The updated policy comes as Edlow recently told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview that former President Joe Biden’s administration had truncated vital security questions in the naturalization process to hurry the pace of foreign nationals securing citizenship.
Indeed, minimizing security questions worked in terms of meeting Biden’s goal of packing the U.S. electorate with millions of brand-new American citizens, born outside of the United States, who are now eligible to vote.
In fewer than four years, the Biden administration awarded citizenship to almost 3.5 million foreign nationals, which the Migration Policy Institute notes is “by far the most [naturalizations] of any single presidential term.”
There are now 23 million naturalized Americans, born outside of the United States, who are eligible to vote in local, state, and federal elections.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.
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