By this time I'm sure, based on the number of emails, text messages, Facebook and Twitter postings plus WhatsApp sessions flying back and forth that the entire civilized world and portions of Georgia know that Maribel passed her citizenship interview/test in Montgomery, AL last Tuesday. Not to denigrate the time and effort that Maribel put into preparing, but it seems to me that passing the interview is pretty much a no-brainer, if you've spent some time studying the questions you will be asked. The fact that you're there for the interview means that the reams of documents you've previously supplied have already been fact checked and your eligibility for citizenship has been established.
I don't know why we were sent to the USCIS field office in Montgomery; a four-hour drive when there are offices in Nashville and Atlanta only two hours distant, but in the past fifteen years I have learned not to be surprised at anything US Immigration does. Maribel is not yet a US citizen and won't be until she has taken the Oath of Allegiance at a swearing in ceremony. She was told she would be receiving information in the mail stating the date, time and location of the ceremony. I'm hoping it will be Atlanta or Nashville but who knows?
Because of the pandemic I was not allowed into the building with Maribel so occupied myself by reading and people watching. There was a steady stream of people entering and leaving the building, some for the interview and others for the swearing in ceremony. Seeing that many people made me wonder how many people were naturalized each year. The statistics surprised me.
I found information for the year 2018 on the Homeland Security webpage. In that year there were 761,901 people naturalized. Dividing that number by 261 working days I arrived at 2,919 people naturalized every day. That's a lot of new citizens. That doesn't mean that they just arrived. To become a citizen you must prove five years of continuous residence in the US, or three if married to a US citizen.
Some of the leading countries of those 2018 naturalizations are as follows: Mexico - 131,977; East India - 52,194; The People's Republic of China - 39,600; Philippines - 38,816; and Cuba - 32,089. The people I saw were overwhelmingly black which didn't make sense to me until more research reveled that in 2016 there were 4.2 million black immigrants living in the US, and that roughly one in ten blacks living in the US are foreign born. The vast majority of them came from Jamaica, Haiti, Nigeria and Ethiopia. Maribel will be joining an estimated 423,000 (as of 2017) foreign born Peruvians living in the US.
One day in the very near future Maribel will become a part of the Homeland Security naturalization statistics. It's been a long road and there is going to be a celebration when she has that citizenship certificate in hand.
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