The study published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, of the National Academy of Sciences, is particularly exhaustive. It relied on an empirical analysis of decisions made by US citizenship and immigration services regarding naturalization applications. The researchers scanned 2,687,101 applications filed between October 2014 and March 2018. They tallied approvals and rejections based on race, ethnicity, religion and gender. They also adjusted their analyzes for factors that might have affected decisions, such as age or marital status.
Their conclusions are clear:We see significant disparities between groups in naturalization approvals based on applicants’ race, ethnicity, gender and religion.”
said otherwise, written Scientific American :
When it comes to seeing who reaches the finish line for U.S. citizenship, women are favored over men, white people are favored over people of color, and non-Muslims are favored over people. Muslims.”
A serious historical precedent
The authors recall that the Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted access to citizenship to “Free Whites”. It was not until 1870 that the law was changed to allow people of African descent to become citizens, while continuing to exclude other non-white groups. It wasn’t until 1952 that Congress made it illegal to deny naturalization on the basis of ethnicity, gender, or marital status.
Despite this, emphasizes Scientific American, “biases persist when it comes to deciding who gets citizenship”. This meant, for example, that white applicants from countries with a non-Muslim majority had a greater than 95.5% chance of being accepted, compared to 90.4% for white applicants from countries with a Muslim majority. For black women, the likelihood of approval was 90.9%, compared to 94.1% for white women. What’s more, “being Hispanic or male was also associated with reduced odds” of approval.
“This is a really important example of the inequality that is embedded in the immigration system”, underlines David Hernández, a professor of the university Mount Holyoke. Noting that most applicants are married and have children and must complete a long form – the N400 – and pay the equivalent of 660 euros, Mr Hernández told the American magazine that a rejection can have repercussions enormous on entire families.