McWhorter: Harvard, Brown and Other Top Schools Are Thinking About Black Freshmen the Wrong Way

2024/09/14 Leave a comment

Interesting suggestion on how to interpret the numbers:

Several highly selective universities have recently reported that in their first freshman classes admitted after the Supreme Court banned racial preferences in admissions, the number of Black and Latino students has fallen.

The percentage of Black freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, declined from 15 percent last fall to 5 percent for this fall. At Amherst College the number fell from 11 percent to 3 percent. Other schools have reported less precipitous but still noticeable drops, such as from 18 percent to 14 percent at Harvard, 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — a taxpayer-supported public university in a state where 23 percent of the population is Black — and 15 percent to 9 percent at Brown University, a school that has spent considerable energy looking at its early ties to the slave trade. Yale and Princeton held relatively steady, but an overall trend is clear.

The conventional wisdom is that this is alarming, but I’m not seeing it that way. We are trained to regard news on racial preferences in a way that makes us see tragedy where, through different glasses, we might just see change.

A first question to ask: Will Black students who weren’t admitted be OK? There is every reason to suppose so. Racial preferences were banned for the University of California in 1996, and the way critics discussed it back then, one would almost have thought that the highly selective U.C. Berkeley and U.C.L.A. were the only campuses in the entire university system. I taught at Berkeley at the time, and some young Black filmmakers had me audition (long story) for a film about a fictional Black teenager who was so devastated by being denied admission because of the new rules that he took his own life in despair.

In real life it was hard to see tragedy in a Black student having to go instead to one of the many other excellent options, like U.C. Davis and U.C. Santa Cruz. As regards that student’s future success, time has borne out that intuition. A study by the Berkeley economist Zachary Bleemer found that the ban had no effect on the post-college wages of Black applicants to University of California schools. (There was, however, a differential for Latinos, an effect that was difficult to explain.)

A second question to ask is whether the universities themselves are OK. There seems to be an assumption that they suffer if Black students are represented at less than our 14 percent presence in the population. But it is difficult to specify just what that assumption is based on.

For example, at Brown, almost one in 10 freshmen is Black (and that doesn’t count applicants who did not specify their race). Black America has suffered too much genuine tragedy for it to be considered ominous that “only” one in 10 students in a matriculating class at an Ivy League school is Black.

Nevertheless we are told to bemoan the decrease in general diversity. But wait — how many Black students do the white ones need in order to get an acceptable dose of diversity? The same question applies to whether Black students will feel there are enough people who look like them to feel at home at the school. I would think that at Chapel Hill, for example, 7.8 percent — about one in 12 freshmen — is enough to build a healthy community.

Plus, there is no real evidence that diversity enhances a good college education. No reasonable person is seeking lily-white campuses. But the idea that diversity means, specifically, better learning has turned out to be difficult to prove. Terrance Sandalow and others observe that what are considered Black views — on topics like police conduct or the availability of quality schooling — are as likely to be aired by non-Black students as by Black ones (a good thing, by the way).

The 1999 report by the psychologist Patricia Gurin, which is often cited as demonstrating that diversity improves college education, was based on students self-reporting vague, self-congratulatory qualities such as whether they came out of college with a drive to achieve or with a sense of satisfaction with their college work. Nor is there much proven benefit post-graduation: This spring, a meta-analysis of 615 studies has shown that workplace diversity does not substantially enhance team performance and cooperation.

There is, however, one other argument for giving extra points to Black applicants. Despite the California data I mentioned, nationwide it is true that going to an Ivy League school rather than a solid non-Ivy increases lifelong earnings, as well as the chance of attending graduate school or getting a job at a top-ranked law firm.

But that one advantage is not worth the endless dissonance that racial preferences in admissions would continue to create, whether we liked it or not.

There would always have been a sense among many non-Black students (and even professors) that many Black applicants got in for different reasons than white and Asian applicants did.

Asian families would always have felt they were evaluated more stringently than Black students, as was clearly shown to be the case at Harvard. This feeling would have persisted especially because they, too, are part of minority groups that experience racism.

Eliminating both Black students’ stigma and Asian students’ sense of foul play is more important than closing any gap in future earnings, which in any case hardly indicates that Black students outside of the Ivies are relegated to washing cars for a living. Admissions preferences intended to promote socio-economic rather than just racial diversity would encounter much less pushback and confusion.

Here’s a proposal, radical though it may (unfortunately) seem: Colleges should be very happy with the new numbers. Brown, for example, should be saying, “Hey look — even without that outdated and condescending Blackness bonus, we’re still at 9 percent!” Getting into an elite college is hard, and we should celebrate Black applicants pulling it off in such high numbers, even if they don’t happen to fall precisely at 14 percent. We are taught that on race, professional pessimism is enlightened. I don’t get it.

Source: Harvard, Brown and Other Top Schools Are Thinking About Black Freshmen the Wrong Way

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U.S. border patrol reports record number of encounters with migrants at the Canadian border

2024/09/13 Leave a comment

Quite a shift from most coming North to many going South:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection says it recorded a record-high number of encounters with migrants between border posts on the Canada-U.S. border between October 2023 and July of this year.

It’s a pattern experts say could be a problem for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government as the question of illegal immigration heats up in a close-fought U.S. election.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) records an “encounter” in its database when it comes across someone who is inadmissable to the U.S., or when border patrol officers find someone who has illegally crossed the border into the U.S. between border posts.

CBP reported encountering 19,498 migrants between border posts on the northern border between October 2023 and July 2024 — 15,612 of them in the Swanton Sector, which runs along the Quebec’s border with New York and Vermont.

While the numbers still pale in comparison with the U.S southern border, that’s more than twice as many as the 7,630 encountered between border posts during the same time period the previous year.

The year before that, CBP reported encountering only 2,238 migrants between border posts at the northern border.

U.S. news coverage of the surge in migration over its northern border intensified over the summer. In an interview with Fox News on Aug. 22, after complaining about illegal migration over the southern border, former president Donald Trump said the U.S. now had a problem on the northern border with migrants coming in from Canada.

Kelly Sundberg of Mount Royal University said the matter could become a political hot potato for the Trudeau government, regardless of who becomes the next president of the United States.

“I hate to admit it, but I think that Donald Trump is right on this, that there is a need to focus north,” said Sundberg, who worked for many years as an enforcement officer with the Canada Border Services Agency.

“But it’s not just the Trump campaign. The [Kamala Harris] campaign has indicated also that they have acknowledged that there’s concerns on the northern border.”

RCMP Sgt. Charles Poirier said “there isn’t a day or night where there isn’t a crossing.” In Quebec alone, the RCMP intercepts an average of more than 100 people per week on the Canadian side of the border and Poirier said that’s only a portion of those headed for the U.S….

Source: U.S. border patrol reports record number of encounters with migrants at the Canadian border

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Are noncitizens really voting in US elections?

2024/09/12 Leave a comment

Spoiler alert. This detailed review indicates they are not:

With illegal immigration one of the top issues on voters’ minds heading into the 2024 election, Republicans are making a nationwide push to require proof of citizenship in order to vote. The GOP-run House of Representatives passed a bill that would do just that, the SAVE Act, in July – with support from five Democrats.

Former President Donald Trump has also repeatedly urged such measures, including in Tuesday night’s debate, alleging that his opponents are irresponsibly encouraging undocumented immigrants to vote. “A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote, they can’t even speak English, they don’t even know what country they’re in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote,” he said.

Now Speaker Mike Johnson is saying that unless the House and Senate agree to the SAVE Act, he’ll shut down the government when the fiscal year ends Sept. 30 – though it appears he lacks the support within his own party to do so.

But Democrats, citing a lack of documented cases of noncitizen voting, say the law is unnecessary since it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote. Moreover, they argue, it would result in disqualifying eligible voters. They accuse Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, of pushing this issue to lay the groundwork for claiming the election was stolen if they lose in November.

Is proof of citizenship currently required to vote?

The short answer is, citizenship is required in federal elections, but proof of citizenship generally isn’t, although some voters may provide that while establishing their identity and residency.

Sixteen municipalities allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, according to Ballotpedia. But elsewhere there’s pushback to the idea. Amendments to bar noncitizen voting are on the ballot this fall in eight states: Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.

Source: Are noncitizens really voting in US elections?

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The quiet technocrat who steered Biden’s effort to tighten the border

2024/09/03 Leave a comment

Of interest:

The lead architect of President Joe Biden’s border strategy is not Vice President Kamala Harris, despite persistent Republican claims to the contrary. That role belongs to a bookish, little-known policy adviser named Blas Nuñez-Neto.

A data-driven technocrat, Nuñez-Neto has helped engineer Biden’s pivot toward tougher border enforcement and sweeping restrictions on asylum — moves that contributed to a nearly 80 percent drop in illegal crossings since December.

The transformation is shoring up one of Democrats’ biggest vulnerabilities ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election and potentially defusing a top-polling issue for Republican nominee Donald Trump. After three years of record crossings, the U.S.-Mexico border is quieter and more controlled today than at any point since late 2020, before Trump left office.

Nuñez-Neto pulled that off by steering the administration back to a border policy framework Democrats used to embrace more easily, according to current and former administration officials. The formula: Be generous and welcoming to immigrants seeking to come lawfully, but stingy and firm with those who don’t.

The White House declined to make Nuñez-Neto available for an interview. Biden officials said the administration’s border policy moves have been shaped by senior White House officials and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whom Nuñez-Neto worked for before being promoted to the White House in June.

In a statement, White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said Biden “believes it is a false choice to say we have to walk away from being an America that embraces immigration in order to secure our border.”

“We must enforce our laws at the border and deliver consequences to those who do not have a legal basis to remain in the United States, and we must expand lawful pathways,” Fernández Hernández said.

Southwest border apprehensions by month

Illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border have declined in 2024, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.

Nuñez-Neto’s policy approach embodies the political calculus that while most Americans remain favorably disposed toward immigrants, few things erode the welcoming spirit faster than an out-of-control border. The growing U.S. economy needs workers, too, and immigrants help offset declining U.S. birth rates. But how they arrive matters.

Relying heavily on the president’s executive powers to grant entry using an authority known as parole, the Biden administration has been allowing nearly 75,000 migrants to enter each month through legal channels.

Republican critics denounce those pathways as a “shell game,” arguing the administration is facilitating mass migration through doors that should not be opened in the first place. But the expansion — paired with the most severe restrictions on asylum eligibility at the border from a Democratic administration in decades — has corralled the disorder.

Trump has largely ignored the change, displaying at his rallies a chart that shows record illegal crossings during Biden’s first three years and cuts out data showing the 2024 decline. He continues to label Harris, his Democratic opponent in the upcoming election, as the “border czar,” though she never held such a role. Biden tasked Harris with leading the administration’s plan to reduce Central American emigration by promoting investment and job creation, not to deal with immigration enforcement at the southern border.

That task — arguably one of the least-desirable in a Democratic administration — would become Nuñez-Neto’s.

A change in direction

The Argentine-born Nuñez-Neto was working on border security issues at the Rand Corporation in early 2021 when DHS policy adviser David Shahoulian — one of the few voices in the administration urging tougher measures at the border — recommended him for a job. He became chief operating officer for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Trump’s rhetoric and harsh policies in the White House had galvanized immigration advocacy groups and many Democrats against enforcement and the very idea of deterrence as an element of border security. Biden loosened restrictions, fueling a perception that the border was more open even as officials — including Harris — told would-be migrants “do not come.”

Shahoulian soon left the administration in frustration. In late 2021, Nuñez-Neto took over his role shaping border policy at DHS.

More than a year later, as the administration ended the pandemic-era Title 42 border restrictions, Biden officials increasingly sought help from Mexico, Panama and other nations in the region to help contain migration and cooperate with U.S. policies. Nuñez-Neto took on a second role as DHS’s top international envoy. He became a major diplomatic asset: a bilingual U.S. official capable of explaining policy to Spanish-language media and speaking directly to Latin American officials.

Nuñez-Neto developed an especially close partnership with Roberto Velasco, the top official at Mexico’s Foreign Ministry for North American affairs, according to current and former senior officials from both nations. Mexican authorities this year have arrested record numbers of migrants traveling through the country toward the U.S. border, a crackdown that Biden officials credit with sharply curtailing illegal crossings.

Angela Kelley, a senior adviser at DHS until June 2022, said the Biden administration has worked to craft a careful balance of incentives and penalties — carrots and sticks. She had been a longtime advocate for asylum seekers, and worked to resist Trump’s policies. Nuñez-Neto was laser-focused on border crossings, checking enforcement data daily.

“He’s more of a sticks guy, given his background,” said Kelley, now chief policy adviser at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Nuñez-Neto was promoted to the White House as the president announced strict new emergency measures that have upended decades of asylum law, closing the border when crossings are high and essentially barring access to U.S. courts for migrants who enter the country illegally.

The restrictions were made possible by a breakthrough agreement Nuñez-Neto helped negotiate with Velasco and other senior Mexican officials. It allows the United States to return large numbers of non-Mexican migrants back across the border — a crucial tool for agencies that have struggled to send deportees to Venezuela and other nations whose relations with Washington are strained.

As the deterrence policies took shape, the number of migrants released into the United States with a pending asylum claim — the procedure decried as “catch and release” — plummeted. It was Nuñez-Neto, not someone from Harris’s team, who fielded questions about the measures from reporters and on Capitol Hill.

“Those of us who follow the inside baseball of immigration know he’s the person that has become the de facto border czar,” said one policy adviser close to the administration who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe informal conversations with top officials.

Nuñez-Neto has done so with a quiet, disciplined manner that is the stylistic opposite of swaggering Trump-era border officials. Some immigration advocates and activists have come to view him with scorn, as a border-cop-in-sheep’s-clothing who speaks of migrants sympathetically while orchestrating the kind of crackdown immigration hard-liners have only dreamed of.

The sharp drop in illegal crossings has allowed the Harris campaign to go on offense. She blames Trump for sinking a bipartisan Senate bill last winter that would have provided billions in new funding for more border agents, detention capacity, deportation flights and other enforcement tools. She has called for Congress to pass the bill, and says she would sign it into law if she’s elected.

But several of its toughest provisions — in particular the emergency asylum restrictions — are already in place…

Source: The quiet technocrat who steered Biden’s effort to tighten the border

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Prejudice against Muslims higher than towards any other group in US, poll finds

2024/08/30 Leave a comment

Not too surprising given encampments and other Israel-Gaza protests:

Favourable attitudes towards Muslims among Americans have declined and public prejudice against them remains higher than any other religious, ethnic or racial group, a poll published by The Brookings Institution has found.

Released on Tuesday and conducted between 26 July and 1 August, the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll (UMDCIP) consists of two tracks, one measuring the change in American public attitudes concerning Islam and Muslims and the second which studied prejudice towards racial, religious and ethnic groups – including Jews and Muslims.

Generally, favourable views of Muslims and Islam increased over the last year. The findings show a drop to 64 percent from 78 percent in comparison to 2022 regarding favourable views of Muslims, and a drop to 48 percent in favourable attitudes towards Islam.

Favourable views of Muslims dropped among both Democrats and Republicans, but the drop was starker among Republicans.

In February 2024, 52 percent of Republicans viewed Muslims favourably, but in July 2024, the figure dropped to 46 percent. For Democrats, the drop went from 83 percent in February to 80 percent in July.

The survey sampled 1,510 American adults with oversamples of 202 Blacks and 200 Hispanics.

Anti-Muslim versus anti-Jewish sentiment

Following Israel’s war on Gaza, there has been a dramatic increase in incidents of hate and prejudice against both Jews and Muslims globally.

Prejudice toward Jews and Judaism is included in the poll for the first time.

Among all respondents, favourable views of Muslims were at 64 percent and 48 percent for Islam while it stood at 86 percent for Jews and 77 percent for Judaism.

“The gap between attitudes toward people and religion is not uncommon and has been consistently found in our previous polling, particularly toward Muslims,” the poll says.

Another key factor is race. While only nine percent of white people view Jews as unfavourable, 37 percent of white people view Muslims as unfavourable. Among Black and Hispanic people, the difference is less stark, with 29 percent of Black people viewing Muslims as unfavourable, and 21 percent for Jews. For Hispanics, 33 percent view Muslims unfavourably, with 22 percent for Jews.

College education, familiarity and personal relationships with Jews and Muslims are significant contributing factors that lead to more favourable views towards both Jews and Muslims, according to the poll.

Generational gap

The poll shows that younger Americans have more favourable views towards Jews than Muslims overall, but there is a generational gap. Americans under 30 still have more favourable opinions of Muslims and Islam than Americans aged 30 and over.

While factors explaining this trend still need probing, the reason for the less favourable views of Jews among young people may be the fact that white people tend to have more favourable views of Jews than non-whites, although the share of white people among younger Americans is smaller.

Prejudice toward Muslims is also higher than other groups when it comes to their perceived contributions to American society, the poll says.

Polling shows that only one-third (37 percent) of Americans believe Muslims strengthen American society, while a majority of Americans say the same about every other ethnic, racial and religious group.

Young Americans (under 30) have identical views of the degree to which Muslims and Jews strengthen American society, but older Americans believe Jews (55 percent) contribute far more to American society than Muslims (32 percent).

The lowest figure is found among older Republican Americans, with only 21 percent believing Muslims contribute to American society.

Source: Prejudice against Muslims higher than towards any other group in US, poll finds

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USA: Ending Birthright Citizenship Is Harder Than It Sounds

2024/08/27 Leave a comment

Good analysis:

….All of this could affect birth tourism. In his last administration, Trump issued an executive order outlawing B1/B2 tourist visas for birth tourism, where an alien comes to the U.S. specifically to give birth here and “create” an American citizen, an “anchor baby,” who will file for legal status for his parents at age 21. Prior to Trump’s EO, traveling to the U.S. to give birth was fundamentally legal, although there are scattered cases of domestic authorities arresting operators of birth tourism agencies. Women abroad were often honest about their intentions when applying for visas and even showed contracts with doctors and hospitals to prove they would not become public charges.

As it stands, visitors will be denied temporary visas if it is found the “primary purpose” of their travel is to obtain citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States. The rule does not apply to the 39 countries in the Visa Waiver Program, and the State Department in implementing the EO forbids its visa officers from even asking in most cases if an applicant is pregnant, making the order hard to enforce.

“This is the first recognition that it’s not OK to use a visitor visa for the purposes of ‘birth tourism,’ so it has a symbolic strength in that respect, at the same time it’s not a very effective way at going after the ‘birth tourism’ industry,” said an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. While the federal government does not specifically track birth tourism, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention annually publishes the number of known births in the U.S. to foreign women who reside overseas—around 10,000 such births every year for the past few years.

Source: Ending Birthright Citizenship Is Harder Than It Sounds

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Canadian residents face the longest waits in the world for U.S. visas

2024/08/26 Leave a comment

Of note:

Canadian residents who require a visa to visit the United States face the longest wait times in the world.

A CBC News analysis of wait times for appointments to obtain U.S. tourist visas shows that while wait times in countries like India and Mexico have been improving since November 2022, wait times in Canada have been getting worse.

Six of the 10 longest wait times around the world were recorded at the U.S. embassy and consulate offices in Canada that offer visa appointments.

Currently, those who apply for a B1/B2 visitor visa appointment in Ottawa or Quebec City face the longest wait times in the world — 850 days. Halifax is not far behind at 840 days, followed by Calgary at 839 days. Getting a visa appointment in Toronto takes 753 days, while in Vancouver it’s 731 days.

Wait times can fluctuate from day to day. Earlier this month, Toronto had the longest wait time in the world — 900 days.

The other locations with the longest current wait times are Istanbul, Turkey (774 days), Bogota, Colombia (677 days), Guatemala City, Guatemala (645 days) and Hermosillo, Mexico (576 days).

Source: Canadian residents face the longest waits in the world for U.S. visas

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Adams: Why is the Trump campaign getting involved in the gender wars? They’re reading the room

2024/08/20 Leave a comment

Contrast between Canada and USA with respect to gender always interesting:

…The next few months will reveal whether an openly patriarchal appeal to U.S. voters is a winning move in America in 2024. It’s not a slam dunk: some Americans who believe Dad should be on top may nonetheless be put off by some of the harder edges of the conservative agenda. But while the U.S.’s election result will inevitably influence Canada, Canadian politicians should be careful about borrowing from the gender wars chapter of the U.S. playbook. The underlying values landscape in Canada is marked by more common ground, especially on social issues. Canadian leaders who aspire to be the boss in the House are wise to be circumspect about who’s on top (if anyone) in our households.

Source: Why is the Trump campaign getting involved in the gender wars? They’re reading the room

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U.S. speeding up asylum claim processing along the Canadian border

2024/08/15 Leave a comment

Of note, an area that Canada has to improve upon:

The U.S. government is moving to speed up asylum claim processing at its northern border in an attempt to deter migrants from illegally crossing over from Canada.

Washington is making two changes that fall under the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which calls for asylum seekers to apply for refugee status in the first of two countries they enter.

First, migrants looking to prove that they’re exempt from the STCA will have to provide their documents to U.S. border officials at the time of their screening. Migrants previously were allowed to postpone screenings to gather necessary documentation.

Second, migrants will only have four hours — down from 24 hours — to consult a lawyer prior to their screening.

CBS News first reported on the changes. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed the changes to CBC News.

“DHS carefully reviewed its implementation of the Safe Third Country Agreement with Canada and concluded that it could streamline that process at the border without impacting noncitizens’ ability to have access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum or equivalent temporary protection,” the department said in a media statement.

The U.S. has seen a sharp increase in illegal crossings into the country from Canada in the past few years.

Border agents have taken 12,612 migrants who crossed the U.S.-Canada border illegally into custody in the first six months of 2024, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s up from 12,218 in all of 2023 and is more than the number that were taken into custody in 2021 and 2022 combined.

Earlier this year, Ottawa reimposed some visa requirements on Mexican nationals visiting Canada, in part to answer a request from Washington to help stem illegal border crossings into the U.S. The number of Mexican migrants attempting to cross into the U.S. from Canada has since dropped.

In 2023, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden announced that they were making changes to the STCA by expanding its application to the entire Canada-United States border, rather than just official points of entry.

Source: U.S. speeding up asylum claim processing along the Canadian border

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Immigrants Are Becoming U.S. Citizens at Fastest Clips in Years

2024/08/14 Leave a comment

Not surprising, post Trump administration and prior to the 2024 elections. 5 month average processing time is impressive. While I don’t have the average number of months for Canadian citizenship, 71 percent of all applications in 2023 were processed in one year (below the target of 80 percent):

The federal government is processing citizenship requests at the fastest clip in a decade, moving rapidly through a backlog that built up during the Trump administration and the coronavirus pandemic.

At ceremonies in courthouses, convention centers and sports arenas across the country, thousands of immigrants are becoming new Americans every week — and becoming eligible to vote in time for the presidential election this fall.

It’s unclear how many of the new voters live in battleground states, but a number of the states where Kamala Harris or Donald Trump must win have large and growing numbers of voting-age naturalized citizens, including Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

In Savannah, Ga., people from 19 countries streamed into a federal courthouse recently to take the oath of allegiance.

“My case was done in less than six months,” said Gladis Brown, who is married to an American and emigrated from Honduras in 2018.

Generally, lawful permanent residents, known as green-card holders, are eligible to become naturalized citizens if they have had that status for at least five years, or have been married to a U.S. citizen for at least three years.

Green-card holders have many of the same rights as citizens. But voting in federal elections is a right accorded only to citizens. And that can be a powerful motivation to pursue citizenship, especially when big national elections are on the horizon.

“I’m so glad that the process moved quickly,” said Ms. Brown, who was one of the 31 immigrants being sworn in. “People like me want to vote in the election.”

After the ceremony, Ms. Brown celebrated with cake and punch from a local women’s volunteer group — and by completing a voter-registration form provided by a representative of the League of Women Voters.

Naturalization applications typically spike upward in the approach to an election.

“The surge in naturalization efficiency isn’t just about clearing backlogs; it’s potentially reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election,” said Xiao Wang, chief executive of Boundless, a company that uses government data to analyze immigration trends and that offers services to immigrants who seek professional help in navigating the application process.

“Every citizenship application could be a vote that decides Senate seats or even the presidency,” Mr. Wang said.

At under five months, application processing speed is now on a par with 2013 and 2014. About 3.3 million immigrants have become citizens during President Biden’s time in office, with less than two months to go before the close of the 2024 fiscal year.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services took 4.9 months, on average, to process naturalization applications in the first nine months of the current fiscal year, compared with 11.5 months in fiscal 2021.

After taking office in 2021, Mr. Biden issued an executive order that sought to dial back his predecessor’s hard-line immigration agenda and “restore faith” in the legal immigration system. Among other steps, the order called for action to “substantially reduce current naturalization processing times” with the goal of strengthening integration of new Americans.

Unlike many federal agencies, the citizenship agency is funded mainly by fees paid by applicants, rather than by congressional appropriations, giving the administration latitude to define its priorities and the allocation of resources.

The Biden administration began deploying new technology and additional staff in 2022 to reduce the pending caseload of citizenship applications, which had ballooned because of heightened scrutiny by the Trump administration and protracted pandemic-related delays in conducting the swearing-in ceremonies.

The Biden administration also shortened the naturalization application to 14 pages from 20. It raised the application fee in April to $710 from $640, but made it easier for low-income people to qualify for a discount.

While there has long been partisan disagreement over how to tackle illegal immigration and overhaul the nation’s immigration laws, naturalizing lawful residents had broad bipartisan support. As president, George W. Bush signed an executive order in 2002 expediting naturalization for noncitizens serving in the military. Since he left office, he has hosted oath ceremonies at his institute in Dallas.

But citizenship has become more politicized in recent years.

Intent on curbing legal immigration, the Trump administration conducted lengthier reviews of naturalization applications. The processing time roughly doubled to about 10 months during Mr. Trump’s tenure.

The bottleneck prevented some 300,000 prospective citizens from naturalizing in time to vote in the 2020 election, according to estimates by Boundless.

It is a crime for noncitizens, including legal permanent residents, to attempt to vote in federal elections. Some Republicans, including former President Trump and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, have spread unfounded narratives about undocumented immigrants being encouraged to vote by Democrats….

Source: Immigrants Are Becoming U.S. Citizens at Fastest Clips in Years

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