Many Americans are quick to be nativists, to believe that America should only be for Americans, meaning that we should not allow immigrants into our country, as they, supposedly, cannot be Americanized.
But while many Americans have these prejudiced, often racist, attitudes, many Americans cannot pass a basic citizenship test that immigrants MUST pass to become citizens!
Quick to judge others, these bigots are not informed enough about their own country, but seem to think it is perfectly alright to be ignorant, simply by the fact that they were born in this country!
Imagine if we were to say that if you do not know the history and government of the country in which you were born, that you should lose your citizenship rights, as a basic part of citizenship should be to have an intelligent understanding of the heritage and traditions of your homeland!
Before any citizen should be judging immigrants, better to look in the mirror and improve oneself! And doing so would also improve ability to vote intelligently and understand the issues that government must deal with every day, rather than simply being ignorant and apathetic, as if they are birthrights!
Newsweek and The Daily Beast polled 1,000 Americans on ten random questions from the 100 that make up the list of questions of the US Citizenship test given to immigrants applying for citizenship.
38 percent failed to gain even six correct out of the random ten questions!
29 percent could not name Joe Biden as Vice President of the United States!
73 percent did not understand the concept of the Cold War as a half century conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union!
44 percent did not know that the first ten amendments to the Constitution are the Bill of Rights, our basic civil liberties that very few nations possess!
Six percent did not know that July 4 is Independence Day, absolutely unbelievable!
The knowledge of international affairs is absolutely abysmal, but realize that many Republicans act as if the United States is so wonderful and special that it cannot learn anything from “old Europe” or any other parts of the world!
What causes this tragedy about lack of knowledge of the government and history of America? Among the crucial factors are a very inequitable and inadequate education system; and the extreme inequities of wealth, with the top 400 households having more money than the bottom 60 percent combined!
We have a small percentage of Americans who are very tuned in and understand government and history, while a very large number of Americans have no clue at all! This is a danger to American democracy, as education enlightens us, and ignorance breeds further ignorance!