Citizen Affairs: Billy’s Best Blog

I lived in Boston in 1991 after the attacks of Rodney King in Los Angeles and wanted to do something to support the demolition of systemic racism. So, I volunteered to be an adult literacy volunteer at the nonprofit then known as Harriet Tubman House. After the teacher training course, I matched a middle-aged Jamaican man named Devon. We meet regularly at the Dudley Square Library to attend his reading classes because he has a job nearby. Shortly after we started working together, he told me that he was applying for U.S. citizenship and he asked me to help him learn the test. This is my first time getting involved in the civic process.

Devon brought his citizenship application paperwork and the Citizenship Testing Research Guide to his reading course and I embarked on my own learning journey to understand how our government constitutes citizenship. To write this article today, I went online (USCIS.GOV) and downloaded a 52-Megabyte, 85-page PDF file called the “U.S. Citizen Test Textbook for Citizens in the United States”. Citizens are the social science of civil rights and obligations. There are 100 questions in the US Citizen Test, which has been updated since I last read many years ago. Even if I consider myself a civic activist, I don’t know the correct answer to each question. For example, I forgot that Pennsylvania is one of the states along the border with Canada, and I also forgot that jury service is one of the responsibilities of citizenship.

People like Devon are not born in the United States and apply for naturalized citizenship, and they will learn about the history and geography of the United States, our branches of government, constitutional amendments, and citizens’ rights and responsibilities. I suspect that most American citizens don’t know it all. I have four years of American history in public school education in Illinois, but it has been decades since I delved into these things. Today, many public school students do not study American history or citizenship. What many of us, especially our youngest generations, know nothing about is our rights and obligations as American citizens. However, millions of people in other countries want to live here and work here, so study our citizens to achieve our citizenship.

While trying to teach Devon reading, I found that he suffered from severe dyslexia. When he is nervous, he has a stuttering, and the speech barrier combined with his Jamaican accent may make it difficult for him to understand. But he had a naughty sense of humor, he told very funny jokes and made me even more satisfied with his childhood in Jamaica, Guinness’s medicines and the childhood of raising his grandmother. As a green card holder, he works on local convenience store inventory shelves. He remembers the retail list by the look of the project rather than by reading the tags. He then worked as a gatekeeper at Roxbury Community College. He knows his way on campus by remembering signs as pictures rather than reading them as words.

The citizenship application process requires in-person interviews and written tests at the government office. I was appointed with him and explained his dyslexia to the man behind his desk, and his first question to Devon was: “Who is the first president of the United States?” Devon smiled and said, “George Washington.” The next few questions were about the constitutional amendments, and Devon could not remember the exact answer, even though he remembered we had already talked about them. The interviewer paused for a while and looked at us. Then he asked, “Why do you want to be a U.S. citizen?”

Devon did not miss anyone saying, “Because America is the greatest country in the world. Look at me. I came here a poor boy and I could get a job. I have my own apartment. I have no welfare. Now this is my home. America is my country.” He was so shocked by his passionate words that tears came into my eyes. The interviewer smiled at me. Devon passed the test and was listed on the naturalization ceremony, and he joined a large group of new citizens to swear allegiance to the United States:

“I hereby declare that I absolutely, completely waive and conceal all loyalty and loyalty to any foreign prince, valid, state or sovereignty, that I or the person or citizen I have is one or citizen; where required by law, I will carry out non-armed forces in the armed forces of the United States as required by law;

The oath of loyalty is why citizenship is important. Citizenship is a system of shared responsibility that makes us a nation. This is a commitment to the public interest that leads to the national interest. As citizens, we are the co-owners of our sovereignty. Citizenship is our strength. Conscious citizenship requires education, mutual assistance and thoughtful consideration of our collective destiny. That’s why we need to teach citizens. The resilience of our democracy depends on citizens who accept participation, autonomy and responsibility. Citizenship is our responsibility to ourselves.

Now, we are being attacked by those who demolish public education and remove citizens from the curriculum to undermine our opposition to authoritarianism. Some people want to make us ignorant of our citizens because our indifference can capture their power. Some people want to keep millions of immigrants undocumented because they are cheap labor and convenient scapegoats to solve our social problems. Millions of workers without civic pathways have fewer ways to protect themselves from abuse, but we rely on them to power our economy.

What is the path to citizenship? I had to look it up (agrigrationforum.org). I am a citizen and I don’t know the way to citizenship because my family came to this country on a boat more than a hundred years ago, and I was born here. To become a citizen, a person not born in the United States must already have a family, employment or refugee status here. There are annual caps for family and employment paths. Mexican siblings of American citizens must wait at least 20 years to come here legally. Refugee roads were blocked due to lack of government resources to process applications.

Our government allows millions of people to enter the country without family, employment or refugee status. Then those without documents are considered illegal. But anyway, they were hired. Hiring illegal immigrants is not illegal. Law enforcement went to their workplaces and rounded them up to deport them. But they didn’t round up their employers.

For illegal immigrants, the process of becoming a legal immigrant requires leaving the United States, but immigration laws prohibit anyone who has been undocumented for more than a year from reentering the United States for 10 years. As a result, millions of immigrants are trapped in Capture 22: The only allowed method without a document, if they try to record it, they will be kicked out. This is a trap to capture cheap labor. We have an economic economy that requires millions of immigrants to work in low-wage jobs, and we obviously have the technology to track anyone for millions of people, but we don’t have a reasonable civic path. Who benefits from it?