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 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.
Why It Matters
The Trump administration has previously given little indication of plans to update or modernize the legal immigration system, focusing on illegal immigration enforcement instead for much of its first six months. Edlow’s comments mark a change in messaging from USCIS as it seeks to further deliver on President Donald Trump‘s immigration agenda.
What To Know
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 and a planned redesign announced in the last few years was canned after largely negative feedback in late 2024.
Edlow told the Times that USCIS plans to return to a 2020-era style test soon.
As for the H-1B visa, which has been widely criticized as being used by companies favoring foreign workers on low wages over American-born employees, Edlow said there was a place for the program, but it should favor companies paying higher wages instead.
It was recently revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees USCIS, was looking at changing the current lottery-style system for H-1B selection and replacing it with a “weighted selection process” that would help with Edlow’s approach.
In January, the Institute for Progress, a nonpartisan think tank examining innovation policy, floated the idea of eliminating the H-1B lottery. It argued that the economic value of the visa program could be increased by 88 percent if applicants were evaluated based on seniority or salary.
Despite the America-first messaging from the White House and those within the MAGA movement wanting to see all immigration cut off, Edlow made it clear in his interview that immigration could benefit the U.S. if managed correctly.
What People Are Saying
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, told Newsweek: “Assigning H-1B visas only to the highest wage offers would favor older workers who may retire or leave the country, while eliminating the main path for college grads to stay in America.
“It’s strange to say that the test is easy when it’s a test most Americans would fail.”
Edlow, in his interview with the Times: “I think it absolutely should be a net positive, and if we’re looking at the people that are coming over, that are especially coming over to advance certain economic agendas that we have and otherwise benefit the national interest — that’s absolutely what we need to be taking care of.”
Connor O’Brien, a researcher at the Economic Innovation Group, previously told Newsweek: “The H-1B is the primary way through which we bring in skilled immigrants and we only have 85,000 visas to give away each year. Giving away these visas randomly is an enormous, missed opportunity to attract truly scarce talent that would benefit American businesses and communities.”
What’s Next
USCIS cannot technically change the way it issues visas or runs the citizenship test without getting permission from other agencies or even Congress, where lawmakers are proposing bipartisan changes to the immigration system overall.
The post Trump Admin Reveals Planned Changes to US Citizenship Test, H-1B Visas appeared first on Newsweek.
