Hello and welcome back to my blog. This is the final post! In this post, I will be covering the struggles of a specific group of immigrants in America, refugees. Refugees face the problems that immigrants face and more. I will be highlighting more specifically in this post their struggle to find long-term work in America and the long wait for refugee status to get approved.  

The Struggle to Find Long-Term Work 

One of the many problems facing refugees in America is the struggle to find work. Researchers have found that most refugees are less likely to find work the longer they stay in America. They found that five years after a refugee gained lawful permanent residency, their employment began to declined. The decline of federal funding was one of the major causes for this increase in unemployment. Researches have also found that a refugee’s ability to blend in can be disrupted by the expectations of others. Because of these issues, refugee support organizations have begun to form. There are federally funded organizations that focus more on short-term resettlement and there are privately funded programs that help refugees to look for long-term jobs. One of these is the UN Refugee Agency. This organization is dedicated to helping refugees to advocate for themselves, especially in the work force. They also teach immigrants how to avoid scam and fake job offers.  

Click here and here for two articles delving deeper into these civic issues.  

The Wait for Refugee Status 

One of the other major problems that is unique to refugees is the lengthy process of getting refugee status. In America, this wait used to take approximately two years. Once the Trump administration came into office, they began to alter the refugee status process. Now the wait can take up to almost five years. Trump changed this process with the intentions of stopping immigrants and refugees from entering America, especially during the pandemic. Click here to read an article covering more of this topic.  

Thank you for reading my final post. I believe that the immigrants of the world have overcome many obstacles to get to where they are today. We must also learn to be understanding and empathetic to each person’s situation. Especially in America, we should be more appreciative of our immigrants, as every immigrant makes America the nation it is today. I hope you learned at least a little bit from my blog.

Welcome back to my civic blog. As the end of the semester approaches, so does the final post of this blog. For this penultimate post, I wanted to go over a topic that almost all immigrants experience, the application process for citizenship. A common obstacle that immigrants face is the challenges that come with the process of applying for citizenship. In this post, I want to detail some of these challenges and talk about how we could improve this process in a way that benefits all groups.  

Citizenship Application 

The application process itself is a lengthy process in which you can get denied naturalization at every step along the way. The first step is determining if you are eligible to gain citizenship. Here is a link to a worksheet that uses a flow diagram to determine eligibility. If you then are able to apply for naturalization, you must fill out a form called the N-400 Form. You must also pay a fee of $700 to fill out this form. After that, you must get interviewed by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). And finally, after that (if you are not denied), you take the naturalization test. With passing this test, you can then take the Oath of Allegiance to the United States and are granted citizenship. Click here to read a full comprehensive list of the steps to citizenship.

The Naturalization Test

The naturalization test has been an area of controversy in the citizenship application process as many feel that it is unfair. In 2020, the Trump administration made revisions to the widely used 2008 naturalization test. This new 2020 version was named the civics test and created many new barriers for the immigrants taking it. When Biden came into office, he pushed to revert the naturalization test back to its 2008 form. Click here to read more about that. 

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, my father is an immigrant who came to America for college. He is still currently not an American citizen and has a green card instead. Since he is married, has children, has a full-time job, and has lived in America for more than thirty year, the naturalization process would be a bit easier for him. Even though he has still lived here for a very long time, he is still hesitant on becoming a US citizen. He is aware of how long the process would take and would need to set aside a lot of time to prepare. I believe that naturalization should still be a strict process, but it has become very time and money consuming. Many immigrants would not be able to easily pay $700 dollars on an application fee and be able to set aside time to study for the test.