This week, USCIS officials announced that agency investigators will resume “neighborhood investigations” of legal immigrants who are applying for naturalized American citizenship.
USCIS may seek “testimonial letters from neighbors, employers, co-workers, and business associates who know the alien and can provide substantiated information about the alien, including any of the requirements for naturalization” to avoid a neighborhood investigation, a memo detailing the policy states:
If such evidence is not contained in the alien’s application for naturalization, USCIS may request that the alien submit such evidence. Submitting such evidence proactively with the Application for Naturalization can assist USCIS in determining whether a waiver of a neighborhood investigation is appropriate in a particular case without a need to issue a Request for Evidence. [Emphasis added]
The goal, USCIS Director Joseph Edlow told CBS News, is to “ensure that only the most qualified applicants receive American citizenship.”
“Americans should be comforted knowing that USCIS is taking seriously its responsibility to ensure aliens are being properly vetted and are of good moral character, attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and well-disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States,” Edlow said.
As the USCIS memo states, from 1802 to 1981, the agency required legal immigrants seeking naturalized American citizenship to present a pair of witnesses who could attest to their qualifications for citizenship.
By 1981, though, Congress eliminated the witness requirement, and thus USCIS shifted to neighborhood investigations of legal immigrants when they sought naturalized American citizenship.
A decade later, in 1991, USCIS had stopped conducting neighborhood investigations and has relied mostly on biometric data and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal background checks ever since.
Edlow revealed in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News that former President Joe Biden’s administration truncated critical security questions in the naturalization process to quicken the rate of such naturalizations.
In fewer than four years, the Biden administration awarded citizenship to almost 3.5 million foreign nationals, which the Migration Policy Institute noted is “by far the most [naturalizations] of any single presidential term.”
For perspective, the number of foreign nationals who secured citizenship under Biden eclipses those who were awarded citizenship under former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush combined.
The result is that there are now 23 million naturalized Americans, born outside of the United States, who are eligible to vote in local, state, and federal elections.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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