Barriers to naturalization for green cardholders in the United States Virgin Islands who would like to become citizens.

Abstract

This study examines and seeks to find out why people in the Virgin Islands opt to keep their green cards, instead of surrendering them to the concerned authorities and then becoming citizens by naturalization. The study, therefore, seeks to establish the main barriers to the adoption of these immigrants who want to become citizens of the United States by adoption. The study was conducted with a sample population of people from the virgin island by the use of surveys, questionnaires, and personal interviews. Once the data is analyzed and interpreted, we will establish the various barriers to naturalization that these immigrants face and then give recommendations on the best alternative solutions to this problem that will ensure the smooth transition of eligible immigrants to become citizens so that these people can stop retaining their green cards and legally become the citizens of United States and enjoy all the accrued benefits that come along with being a citizen. The data will be examined and correlated, then using statistical software. It will be broken down into finer details that can then, reflect the real picture that the study aims to establish so that we can be able to supplement existing literature. If the concerned authorities look into our research, they can even have an idea of how they can solve this key issue.

Keywords: Barriers to green card naturalization, Citizenship, US Virgin Islands, Immigrants

 Barriers to naturalization for green cardholders in the United States Virgin Islands

There are various methods of gaining United States citizenship, and the primary techniques include birth, citizenship through acquisition, derivation, and naturalization. According to the United States law, any individual who happens to be born within the United States or on its territories such as Guam and Puerto Ricco are eligible to become citizens by birth. A child can, however, gain citizenship even though he or she was not born in the United States if one of the parents or both of them happen to be citizens of the United States at the time of the birth of the child. Still, other conditions that have been spelled out should also be met for one to gain citizenship through this method.

The derivation is also a way of gaining United States citizenship whereby, a parent who has obtained citizenship through naturalization and has small children who are not yet of the legal age, these children will derive American citizenship automatically from their parents. They should also be permanent citizens in the country or on their territories, and one of the parents must also be an American citizen (Gonzalez, 2018).

Naturalization that forms the bulk of our study refers to the process in which any individual who was born out of the United States voluntarily becomes a citizen of that country. It is the most common way that immigrants use to gain citizenship or any other individuals who are foreigners and have separate roots from other countries. The everyday situations that have been set out that can make one become eligible include: if the person has been a permanent resident in America for more than five years, if the individual has lived in a marital union with a United States citizen spouse for more than three years and if you pass the skills tests and are eligible to join the army or the armed forces can also be considered as potential people to be naturalized (Villalon, 2010).

They should also have been present- physically in the United States for at least 32 months, be an individual of good, unquestionable and upright character, they should also be able to write, read and even speak English language, be willing to take the oath of allegiance and also have knowledge on the history of the United States and also to show their attachment to the principles of the constitution and acceptance of the sovereignty of the rules of the country.

There are, however, some challenges that the people who want to be naturalized face; these include: the high financial cost of application, lack of proficiency in English, limited interest in applying, political feasibility, and age (Bishop, 2017). Age is a setback because most of them are under age and as a result of this, they are unable to get naturalized because the stipulated guidelines state that all persons who wish to be naturalized should be 18 years and above. These challenges might seem petty and manageable issues that should not be alarming. Still, the surprising thing is that they have made various people not to be able to enjoy this right and are not able to become citizens. This issue should, therefore, be delved into so that the appropriate remedial measurements can be implemented to ensure a smooth transition of eligible immigrants to become naturalized as American citizens who can then participate fully in the economic, political, and social activities of the state.

Significance of proposal research

There has been a rise in concern among immigrants and observers on why green cardholders opt to stay with their green cards instead of naturalizing to become American citizens. Based on the findings of the American Immigration Council, immigrants make up more than forty percent of the country’s population, accounting for a fifth of the world’s total immigrants’ population. This makes it the only country in the world that has the most number of immigrants in it, out of these very many immigrants, only a handful of them can become citizens by naturalization while most of them opt to continue using their green cards instead of applying. According to the findings of the Pew Research center, these immigrants are mostly from Mexico, China, Philippines, El Salvador, and India, with Mexico having more than 11.2 million immigrants living in the United States as of 2017 and 6% from China.

The existing literature does not, however, narrow down to specific places, territories, or geographical areas where they interview the immigrants on the difficulties they face in their quest to acquire citizenship. For example, the research on the statistics of the U.S Department of Homeland security (2017) gives a general description of the naturalization statistics. It hasn’t narrowed down to specific states to establish the challenges that they had faced.

Review of Literature

According to Pew Research Center estimates, 20 of the largest immigrant groups in the US recorded tremendous increases in rates of naturalization between 2005 and 2015. However, the number has since dwindled significantly since then. One primary reason for this drop is likely to be the increase in the application fees. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2008, the number of applicants reduced by 62% compared to the rates of 2007. This was down to the reason that a higher number of applications were filed in 2007 before the application fee rose from $330 to $595. The 2007 applications, therefore, spiked in anticipation of the increase in the prices, which was planned to take effect on July 30, 2007 (Krogstad, 2016). This, therefore, goes a long way to show the significance of financial barriers to green card naturalization. The financial barriers to adoption are not emerging issues; they have been present for a long time. In their publication A Place to Call Home: What Immigrants Say Now About Life in America, Scott Bittle and Jonathan Rochkind (2002) claimed that the economy and the financial problems played a significant role in influencing their attitudes towards green card naturalization back in 2002 (Bittle & Rochkind, 2002, p. 8).

A survey of Latino and Caribbean adults showed that most of them cited several reasons why they have chosen not to apply for permanent citizenship, with their rights being; the financial cost of application, lack of proficiency in English, and limited interest in applying. These barriers to citizenship or green card naturalization also affect immigrants from the US Virgin Islands, with their other reason being the close geographic proximity of their origin ‘countries’ to the US that may reduce the rates of naturalization because they maintain strong ties with their ‘countries’ and are highly likely to return to the Virgin Islands without ever acquiring permanent US citizenship (Gonzalez-Barrera & Krogstad, 2018).

While reviewing trends in Latino and Caribbean voter turnout, Mark Hugo Lopez, Seth Motel, and Eileen Patten (2014) found that Latino and Caribbean immigrants were not eligible to vote in the presidential election due to the fact that most of them had not naturalized their green card. Part of the reason is that most of the are younger and hence less likely to become permanent citizens or hold down their citizenship status than the other minority groups in the US. Age is, therefore, a barrier, in this case, as a survey conducted in 2014 revealed that around 55% of all Latinos or immigrants of Caribbean ethnicity were under the age of 18, which is a significant prerequisite for acquiring permanent US citizenship (Lopez, Motel, & Patten, 2014). Nevertheless, the rate of green card naturalizations is still significantly high, despite it being lower than the previous spikes of the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2005, the number of citizens who were eligible for naturalization was 8.5 million, and of those, more than three quarters were eventually naturalized (Passel, 2012). However, since 2015, the rates have significantly dropped, and much of it can be associated with the onset of the Trump presidency.

Political feasibility is another barrier to the naturalization process. Advocates of human-rights offer the argument that long-term migrants, after being admitted legally, ought not to be refused the right to acquire legal status and citizenship with time. Nevertheless, in several states, a presentation with citizenship to migrants is contentious politically. This is very true in case there exist large numbers of migrants who may be eligible for naturalization since this may aggravate fears among the locals that social identity and cohesion may be lost. The narratives of ‘Demographic bomb’ are the majority of the political debates, and they include fears that Palestinian Israelites expressed, Roma in Slovakia, and lastly, the Latinos within the United States.

In some instances, these kinds of concerns come up because migrants were mainly not permitted to be permanent within their host country when they were offered admission. It ended up taking many decades for Germany, for example, to acknowledge that Turkish guest workers and their children born in Germany were not going to return home. Within the United Kingdom (UK), British citizenship, as well as rights of becoming a resident, were mainly controlled after several migrants who hailed from the former British Empire made it to the country between the 1950s and the 1970s.

This is an issue that is compounded, where some state has an understanding of membership concerning indigenous or ethnic terms. Within such situations, like in the majority of the Gulf States, collective national identity necessitates that citizenship is restricted in a strict sense. Individual states have made use of involved measures to protect the national ideal. For example, as of 2014, Kuwait tried to buy Comoros passports for Bedouin groups that never had stated in the territory to avoid to have them recognized as Kuwaiti nationals.

The offering of citizenship to migrants may as well prove complex in a political sense and more so in those cases where some migrant group gets linked with oppression from history. Latvian’s reluctance in recognition of Russian-speakers like citizens, for example, emanates from the Soviet Union’s prolonged occupation of the nation.

The Proposed Study

There has been a rise in the number of immigrants in the United States and a reduction in the number of immigrants who want to surrender their green cards to become naturalized (Kerry, 2016). The existing literature is not sufficiently detailed or comprehensive. Still, the ones that are already there allude to the fact that there are various challenges that the immigrants face during the naturalization process. This study aims to explore and offer a description of the experience of holders of Green Card from Virgin Island because limited research has ever been done there. Some of the skills that these people have included economic challenges, political and social impacts also bombard them (Vale, 2015). The main sample population will be from the immigrant population living in the virgin island. Consequently, the experience includes what the situation is like to them when they get to enter the United States. This brings the author to answer the research questions for this paper.

The research questions:

From the target population selected and objectives of the study, this proposed research aims at answering the following questions; How do the Virgin Islands immigrants describe their experience of coming to the United States? How do these Virgin Island immigrants with Green Card negotiate their situation while they are living in the United States? What are the challenges that immigrants face while trying to acquire citizenship by naturalization?

The null hypothesis of this study is that, is there any relation between the decrease in the number of people ready to surrender their green cards and the underlying challenges they face or are subjected to during this process? The alternative hypothesis that was investigated for this study are:

• H0- There is no relationship between the reduced number of people being naturalized and the various policies put in place
• H1- there is a relationship between the reduced number of people being naturalized and the multiple systems put in place.
• AH3: There is a linear relationship between the challenges that the immigrants face in their bid to get naturalized and holding on to their green cards.
• AH4: There is a linear relationship between the challenges that the immigrants face in their bid to get naturalized and holding on to their green cards.

Proposed Method

Design

This study will be a similar correlational design; this is a type of research design where a researcher seeks to understand and establish the relationship between various variables, based on information that they collect from the field.  Furthermore, to test the variables within this study, the researcher will be doing multiple regression analysis.

Participants  

The sample of participants (N=300 (150 males, 150 females) was selected by a random sampling method from a population of immigrants living on or around the Virgin Islands who have not yet been naturalized and have not decided to surrender their green cards. Attending. These people should also have stayed in that area for more than four years because it is the lowest allowable time limit for one to be considered. The immigrants to be selected will be between the age bracket of 18-35, and they will mainly the people who have the interest of being naturalized, but the underlying challenges that they faced when they tried or what they were told by other people have made them continue holding on to their green cards rather than processing for naturalization.

Instruments/Materials/Apparatus

The questionnaires to be used in this study will be filled physically by the respondents who will gather at specified points. Once there, the questionnaires will be administered to them, and they will be given ample time to fill their questionnaires.

To establish the problems and challenges that these immigrants go through, they were asked to indicate the specific types of trouble that they might have gone through in their process of seeking naturalization in the Appendix A. Some of the question statements asked to clarify this include: The policies put by the government for naturalization processes are costly and as a result discourage people from participating, and there is no guarantee that after you surrender the green card, you will gain American citizenship by naturalization or be considered during that process. They were also given slots to identify if they: agreed, strongly agreed, disagreed, strongly disagreed, or were neutral in any of the questions that had been asked in the questionnaire. This ensured that the various degrees of suggestions were taken into account and would ensure that the correct results and tabulations could be made during the analysis of the data.

The scale of measurement used is nominal in measuring the variables. The respondents were asked a series of interrelated questions to be able to measure their consistency in answering those questions that could then ensure that the results got could be as accurate as possible because the interrelation of the questions could help the researcher to detect any wrong answers that could have been deliberately answered by the respondents and could then act appropriately on those situations.

Having been the one who designed these measures, its reliability and validity are unknown.

Procedure

Participants will be recruited randomly from the various meeting points, social halls, and from their houses or any other places where these individuals can be located from at any time during the day around the Virgin Islands. Each participant will need approximately 10 minutes to complete the entire questionnaire that will have smooth and straight to the point questions that will have no ambiguity or bias. All the respondents will be informed about the purpose of the research, which is to establish the challenges and barriers to the naturalization of green card holders who then opt to stick with their green cards instead of undergoing the trouble of going through the hectic process of acculturation that may finally not be successful. The respondents who will participate in this study will be accorded the confidentiality of the information that they will give, and they will also be allowed to take all the time that they need to answer those questions frankly. All clarifications to any of the questions in the questionnaire will be handled swiftly during the process.

Proposed Data Analysis

The data collected from the respondents will be analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS).  The descriptive statistics to be used in this study would be the standard deviation, mode, and median. The inferential statistics utilized in this study will be a multiple regressions scale.

Discussion

            This section entails components of analysis as well for the research study. In the first place, the community analysis will offer a broader context of the environment for the study. The profile of the community will be undertaken. Since the Virgin Islands immigrants are some of the most diverse people in America, it is essential to evaluate them further. The profile of the community will highlight the significance of the people in the areas that they reside, among other factors.

Limitations of the proposed study

Some of the limitations of this study include difficulty in sourcing relevant materials for the research and related literature, and also the reliability of the data in them is a significant limitation of this study. Unwillingness, poor cooperation, and the reluctance of respondents to answer the questions is another setback that is anticipated, and therefore, solutions to curb these limitations will be addressed conclusively and professionally.

Strengths of the proposed study

The power that was weighed upon in limiting some of the challenges during the study was the use of questionnaires sent through emails and employed in websites for quicker feedback from the respondents.

The potential significance of the proposed study

This study is essential in informing the immigration status of immigrants who have been given the Green Card to settle in the United States. The information will even be helpful to the U.S communities in understanding the ways that they should live with those people who visit them or their new neighbors that they do not share such information with. In this regard, the information will be essential for planning and future decision making as far as immigration status is concerned in the U.S. Korey (2015) states that immigrants may be advantageous to the country and economy if they possess exceptional skills and know-how on how to perform various activities that may involve production of goods and services and so because of this, they should be taken care of and given fair chances of naturalization so that they can become permanent citizens who are able to participate in the economy fully and even develop technological instruments that may be the keys to a better and prosperous future.

References

Bhagwati, J. (2007). Behind the Green Card. The New Republic, 202(20), 31-39.

Bishop, S. C. (2017). Model Citizens: The Making of an American Throughout the Naturalization Process. Communication, Culture & Critique, 10(3), 479-498.

Bittle, S., & Rochkind, J. (2002). A Place to Call Home: What Immigrants Say Now About Life in America. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED513490.pdf

Bratsberg, B., Ragan, Jr., J. F., & Nasir, Z. M. (2002). The Effect of Naturalization on Wage Growth: A Panel Study of Young Male Immigrants. Journal of Labor Economics, 20(3), 568-597. doi:10.1086/339616

Charles, V. S. (2017). Mapping the Contours of the History of the Extension of U.S. Citizenship to Puerto Rico, 1898-Present. Centro Journal, 29(1), 38-55.

Gonzalez-Barrera, A., & Krogstad, M. (2018). Naturalization rate among U.S. immigrants up since 2005, with India among the biggest gainers. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/18/naturalization-rate-among-u-s-immigrants-up-since-2005-with-india-among-the-biggest-gainers/

Gutierrez, R. (2002). What Can Happen to Auspicious Beginnings: Historical Barriers to Ideal Citizenship. The Social Studies, 93(5), 202-208.

Hainmueller, J., Lawrence, D., Gest, J., Hotard, M., Koslowski, R., & Laitin, D. D. (2018). A randomized controlled design reveals barriers to citizenship for low-income immigrants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(5), 939-944.

Hernández, D. M. (2010). Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History. By Daniel Kan-stroom. Law & Society Review, 44(1), 202-204

Krogstad, J. M. (2016). Immigrant naturalization applications climb, but not as much as in past years. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/15/immigrant-naturalization-applications-up-since-october-but-past-years-saw-larger-increases/

Lopez, M. H., Motel, S., & Patten, E. (2014). A Record 24 Million Latinos Are Eligible to Vote, But Turnout Rate Has Lagged That of Whites, Blacks. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2012/10/01/a-record-24-million-latinos-are-eligible-to-vote/

Mukhopadhyay, S., & Oxborrow, D. (2011). The Value of an Employment-Based Green Card. Demography, 49(1), 219-237.

Passel, J. S. (2012). Growing Share of Immigrants Choosing Naturalization. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2007/03/28/growing-share-of-immigrants-choosing-naturalization/

Stevenson, D. (2018). Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card by Sara Saedi. Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, 71(6), 260-260.

United States Virgin Islands – Citizenship, Emigration, Immigration & Nationality. (2018). Foreign Law Guide.

Villalón, R. (2010). Formal Barriers to Citizenship. Violence Against Latina Immigrants, 41-78.

Appendix A

Questionnaire

Demographic Details

• Gender

Male

Female

• Age

18 – 20 years

20– 30years

30- 35 years

3)Occupation

Employed

Unemployed

Self-employed

Study Questions

• There are various difficulties that you face while seeking to acquire citizenship through naturalization.

Strongly Agree

Agree

Neutral

Disagree

Strongly Disagree

• The policies put by the government for naturalization processes are costly and, as a result, discourage people from participating.

Strongly Agree

Agree

Neutral

Disagree

Strongly Disagree

• There is no guarantee that after you surrender the green card, that you will gain American citizenship by naturalization or be considered during that process.

Strongly Agree

Agree

Neutral

Disagree

Strongly Disagree

• What are the various barriers to naturalization that you have undergone through or have been subjected to? Explain your answer briefly.