Why Not

Opinion

One morning this January, Yulia Wardani stepped into a small office in downtown Newark to change her identity.

Across the desk was an officer of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, who began posing questions from the USCIS naturalization civics test.

Name the U.S. war between the North and the South.

What do we show loyalty to when we say the Pledge of Allegiance?

Twenty-seven years earlier, Wardani, born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, had married an American man. They had built a happy life together: two kids, a house in the Jersey suburbs, a cluster of close friends. But she had never become a U.S. citizen, because doing so meant relinquishing her citizenship in Indonesia, where much of her family lives. This year — her trips to Asia becoming less frequent, her American children now young adults — she decided it was time.

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To pass the test, applicants must correctly answer six of 10 questions. Wardani nailed the first six in a row like Caitlin Clark draining jump shots. By early afternoon, she stood in an auditorium, right hand raised, to recite her citizenship oath. Moments later, she was posing for family photos waving a miniature American flag.

For Team USA, adding Wardani to the roster is a huge win. I know that for sure. Because Yulia is my sister-in-law. And now she — Yulia Wardani Pink — is my fellow American.

For more than 100 years, the United States has used a civics test as a gentle screen for naturalizing new citizens. The idea behind the brief exam is straightforward: To participate fully in the life of the republic, newcomers must first evince some knowledge of the values and mechanics of that republic.

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Sensible enough, right? It’s an ideal whose clear logic and simple implementation make it easy to support. But watching a close relative navigate this process got me thinking.

Why not deploy a civics test more widely — as a modest hurdle other Americans must surmount before enjoying some of the many privileges of U.S. citizenship?

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The 14th Amendment holds that anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen. Neither a jackbooted federal marshal nor a well-meaning newspaper columnist can revoke that status or force you to renew it by passing a quiz.

But citizenship is more than a legal category. It carries a broader significance that the United States’ 24 million naturalized citizens inevitably consider, but that native-born Americans rarely ponder.

“We ask a lot of immigrants. We ask them to think about what their duty is in joining our community,” Sara Wallace Goodman, a political scientist at the........

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