Trump official says administration will change visa, citizenship tests

The new head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in an interview with The New York Times Thursday that the Trump administration will make changes to the visa system for skilled workers and look to make the test for U.S. citizenship more difficult.

“The test as it’s laid out right now, it’s not very difficult,” said Joseph Edlow, who assumed the role in mid-July. “It’s very easy to kind of memorize the answers. I don’t think we’re really comporting with the spirit of the law.”

The first Trump administration instituted a version of the test with an expanded pool of questions that was later rolled back under former President Biden. Edlow told the Times that the government planned to return to a version of the test from the first term.

Edlow also told the Times that the administration would seek to modify the H1-B visa program for skilled workers by prioritizing people who will earn higher wages. 

“I really do think that the way H-1B needs to be used, and this is one of my favorite phrases, is to, along with a lot of other parts of immigration, supplement, not supplant, U.S. economy and U.S. businesses and U.S. workers,” Edlow said.

The program was a flashpoint among Trump’s allies in December, before the president took office. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy faced backlash from the MAGA base after they defended the use of the program to hire highly skilled engineers.

Alongside an aggressive push to deport immigrants, Trump also took aim at several avenues for legal immigration at the beginning of his term. A phone app run by Customs and Border Protection used during the Biden administration to register asylum claims now allows immigrants to register their departures from the United States if they choose to self-deport.