Test Out Your Americanism
Around this time of the year, Americans think about their collective histories and what makes this country great. The United States truly is a great country with opportunities not found in many other countries. My family moved to the United States in the 1970s to take advantage of the opportunities and freedoms for a better life.
I am very grateful to be an American myself. I had the opportunity to grow up in a nice home, get a decent education, have a career as a journalist and start a business. There are not many places in the world where someone like me could do the things that I do.
Sometimes we Americans take for granted these freedoms and opportunities. I have a great deal of friends from around the world who want to come to this country to live, and they spend months training themselves for the naturalization test. As a US citizen born on American soil, I never had to take this test. This past weekend I was talking to my friend Rita from Eritrea about her upcoming test. She came here as a political refugee five years ago with her husband and 4 children.
“You Americans have it so easy,” she said. “I had to study for this test for three months. You just have to be born here and you automatically get citizenship.”
So I took the official 25-question self test online and another test from the Atlantic just for fun, and I did pretty good.
Actually, I am in the minority. According to a study, only one in three native-born Americans would fail the civics portion of the naturalization test, compared to 97.5 percent of immigrants that pass the test. If the pass rate was 7 out of ten, about half the native-born population would fail.
Test out your Americanism by watching the video: