Mr. FONTE. If I could say something. it is not a non-issue because it undermines American liberal democratic values, and most of the new citizens who take the oath of allegiance, and in that oath they renounce previous citizenship, they are thrilled when it is over.

If you talk to new citizens—and all of us have seen these ceremonies, they are wonderful-and at the end of the ceremony, they do renounce previous allegiances and they swear full allegiance to the United States, and these people could not be more thrilled. So those are the kinds of ceremonies that we need.

Senator SIMPSON. Let me just conclude, because I think this one is of some interest to us. Some scholars say that changes in transportation and communication technologies have made it more likely that immigrants, obviously, retain emotional ties and allegiance to their original country and cultures.

Do any of you, in just like 1 minute, have thoughts on that issue, and what its implications are for U.S. policy on naturalization, Americanization, or immigration?

Obviously, it is a whole new game compared to 30 years ago, with all the electronic and communication and transportation technologies. What is your thought? Just 1 minute, because I have taken too long, and then we will go to the second panel, unless Ted has a question.

Mr. KLUSMEYER. Well, I think it is one of the causes behind the proliferation of dual citizenship, and I think that this proliferation is going to continue.

And again, I return to my original point. You can think of all sorts of scary hypotheticals about what could happen, but this phenomenon has been growing throughout the 20th century, and there is simply no empirical evidence that I know of, that anyone else here has cited, to suggest that it is a problem.

Now if empirical evidence is gathered, and it appears to be a problem, then you should revisit it. But at this point it is purely hypothetical.

Mr. FONTE. By that time it will probably be too late.

Senator SIMPSON. You have used up 5 seconds. You have 1 minute to respond to that.

Mr. FONTE. That is true, that the proliferation of the closer communications have led to this. It has also led to, some people think assimilation is going to McDonald's, watching American cultural, mass cultural television.

This is essentially a worldwide phenomenon. It is a Westernized, it means modernization, Westernization. It is not patriot assimilation. It is not, I think, what we should be aiming at.

Senator SIMPSON. And finally Professor Harrison.

Mr. HARRISON. This touches on the question of the global village versus the Nation-State, and I think that both things are a reality, but that for a long time to come it is going to be the Nation-State which is going to be the most decisive actor in the lives of individuals, in the lives of groups, lives of a society. And that at some considerable peril, we focus on the global village, if there are significant costs to our cohesiveness as a national society.

Senator SIMPSON. Ted, do you have any further questions?

Senator KENNEDY. Just that I think that so many of us, starting from the point about, you know, general concern about where the

country is going, and we want people to be involved, and be participating in both exercising responsibilities of citizenship on this, and we are concerned about it.

I do not know whether we are going to get ourselves-we may very well be in just a red hot, drag-out emotional kind of issue. Maybe in the next Congress, with enormous sort of-I see sort of political implications, and something that makes a lot of as the Professor points out-very much a difference in terms of the reality. I mean, I have not really gotten into it, or dwelled on it, but I mean, there are obviously tugs and emotions on all sides on this. But it is certainly something that I am sure we are going to be addressing and be voting on, and it is good we have at least triggered some important thinking about it here today.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator SIMPSON. Thank you, Senator Kennedy. Thank you very much, all of you. This has been a very helpful discussion.

Panel two, then, the final panel of the day.

Georgia Anne Geyer, the syndicated columnist, author of a current book, "Americans No More: The Death of Citizenship."

Also Mr. Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza.

Good to have you all here. I am sure none of you know what the other one is going to say, but maybe. [Laughter.]

Anyway, let me say before you begin, I could have said it at the conclusion, that all three of you have been very active in the debate, in the national debate, in the national interest. I know your views differ and certainly differ with mine sometimes and with Senator Kennedy. You have all added a very high degree of civility and bringing good faith to the process. I think that is true from my experience with all of you.

So in that order, Georgie Anne Geyer, good to have you here.

PANEL CONSISTING OF GEORGIE ANNE GEYER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST AND AUTHOR OF AMERICANS NO MORE: THE DEATH OF CITIZENSHIP; DAN STEIN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, FEDERATION FOR AMERICAN IMMIGRATION REFORM; AND RAUL YZAGUIRRE, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL COUNCIL OF LA RAZA

STATEMENT OF GEORGIE ANNE GEYER

Ms. GEYER. Ladies and gentlemen, Members of Congress, fellow American citizens. For more than 30 years, I have been a foreign correspondent and syndicated columnist covering virtually every area of the world. I have also, at the same time, always felt myself to be a representative of America abroad. These were years of conflict and turbulence in the world, the years of the cold war, and I often found myself covering countries in the process of breakdown and disintegration-Lebanon, Afghanistan, parts of Central Asia and the Caucasus, finally, the worst of all, Bosnia.

During those years, all of us had one great assurance about our own beloved country, that it cannot happen here. We, after all, were blessed geographically by being protected by the arms of two great oceans. We had great, open frontiers to absorb our misfits.

Most of all, we had the principles of the modern world, the principles of self-government, of respect for the results of the vote, of the jury system, and, above all, the rights, duties, and spirit of the citizenship oath, that volitionary allegiance, to name my favorite definition of citizenship, that we all make one to another and to our Nation.

I no longer believe that it cannot happen here. We are at a point in our national life where many, many trends and tendencies are coming together to demean, to diminish, and to destroy citizenship. I am absolutely convinced that, if allowed to continue, they will destroy America as we have known it and substitute a very different country, one that is spiritually incoherent, humanly conflict-ridden, and economically hobbled by the very differences that we have created with our own hand.

Let me touch upon the major trends and tendencies. First, the citizenship process. You may remember as in some distant misty past the days when new citizens were sworn in by black-robed judges in sober and beautiful court ceremonies, when new citizens often testified to their love of freedom in America, and where citizenship testing on civics and the English language was real and serious.

Today, let me characterize what we now face through the famous, or infamous, Question 86 on one of the major citizenship tests. Question 86 asks the question, “Name one benefit of being a citizen of the United States." Ladies and gentlemen, there are only three acceptable answers, but first, a warning. Please do not mention Lincoln or Jefferson or Washington, FDR, or JFK. Do not, please, let the words liberty, responsibility, or love of country somehow accidentally trip from your tongue, for you will not pass.

There are only three correct answers, to obtain Federal jobs, to travel with a U.S. passport, and to petition for close relatives to come to the United States to live. Nowhere is the sense of American citizenship today better exemplified than in those cynical words by which we tell the world that the United States of America is not really very much, just a bunch of benefits and entitlements thrown randomly together for almost anyone who wants to come. Few Americans realize I surely did not before I began writing my book, "Americans No More: The Death of Citizenship," that in 1988, citizenship preparation, testing, and even approval of the tests was given over by the INS to ethnic and religious lobbies and to private companies. At the same time, the old testing on American history and civics and the English language by INS officers, admittedly, often imperfect, gave way to oversimplified, dumbed down, and historically irrelevant standardized tests.

Most immigrants will get only two or three questions and they are toughies. What is the capital of the United States? Who was the first President? One of the INS chiefs told me that every question cost them $5,000 to devise. Ladies and gentlemen, I am from the South Side of Chicago and I could only tell him, "You have been gypped."

But not to worry if you cannot answer even those questions. Just call your friendly ethnic lobby or even the INS itself. They will send you a list of 20 questions, and, in fact, they are so very kind

41-503 97-10

and understanding that they will include the answers right along with the questions.

But it does not end there. When I was finishing my book last winter, I was stunned by the devolution of the entire citizenship process down to these outside groups with their own agendas that naturally and expectedly cannot be the agenda of the Nation. But I was not prepared for the corruption of the tests and for the scandal which have since ensued, of an American administration deliberately using the Nation's sacred citizenship process for its own political purposes. Today, we know that is true, as memo after memo has been released from the White House averring it.

All you need to do is to read the papers every day and you see scandal after scandal-one testing company, NAS, falsifying the whole process and raking in the money; ethnic lobbies, as in Chicago, dumbing down the requirements for English language capability; and, think of this, one of them in Chicago, my hometown, complained that the tests should not complain that the new citizens were becoming American citizens, so they changed it. The INS changed it to U.S. citizen.

At this point, after story after story and on television shows like "20/20", there is really no question anymore that this Administration has deliberately and systematically and utterly without concern to the spiritual coherence and inner stability of this Nation pushed through new citizens this year with no regard whatsoever to their preparation.

Five thousand pushed through with criminal records. Thousands pushed through without fingerprints, little or no English testing, et cetera, et cetera. Judgments from the Inspector General's Office that all of this was impermissible and illegal were just ignored by the INS.

Ladies and gentlemen, what have we come to as a nation when we allow the one commitment and process that unites us all or whose absence disunites us all to be so demeaned and disparaged? In the short time we have, let me go over very quickly some of the other areas of my profound concern. First, non-citizen voting. I can already hear good citizens saying, what are you saying? It is illegal in all States for non-citizens to vote. That is true, but the fact is that all you need to do is get a library card in Chicago, or most cities, and with our lax immigration laws, you can get a driver's license and a voting card. The Los Angeles Examiner has estimated that at least 20 Congressmen and women owe their vote to the illegal vote.

Illegal immigration-in today's America, many illegal immigrants often have more privileges than do Americans. But my major deep concern is that what we have done with illegal immigration is to completely cutoff the benefits of the Nation from the responsibility of citizenship.

Ladies and gentlemen, illegal immigration corrupts everyone. It utterly destroys the connection between commitment to nation and responsibility to one's fellow man and replaces it with a cynical view of American society as simply a carcass upon which to feed. If the mantra of the dumbed down citizenship test is "easy, easy, easy", then the mantra for how we Americans are advertising our country is "benefits, benefits, benefits".

We used to have reasonable restrictions on citizenship. We used to assume that English was the language of the land. We knew such things. Today, dual citizenship is common, character confirmation does not exist, et cetera, et cetera. We have new movements in the Southwest which are essentially separatist movements. I never took them seriously before now, but I do take them seriously, particularly the movements for Aztlan or for reclaiming the Southwest for Mexico.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have only touched upon the tip of the iceberg, but let me say that every single element that I have seen overseas in the countries that I have seen collapse under me, whether it was Lebanon or Bosnia, I am seeing now in America— the death of an all-encompassing ideology, the deconstructing of nations in the name of ambitious individual egos, the breakdown of one language as the unifying element in society, the sudden thundering of legal or legitimized population power balances.

If, indeed, the United States goes as I believe it is, we will be just generally neutralized internally and this will affect not only us, the last best hope of mankind, more critically necessary in the post-cold war world than ever will be gone. Citizenship stands at the center of all of this. It is what will keep us together or drive us apart, or as is happening, simply set us one against the other, a bartering and bargaining crowd, quarrelsome and conflictive strangers in the land where once we knew the brotherhood and sisterhood that was citizenship.

Thank you.

Senator SIMPSON. Thank you very much.
Dan Stein, please.

STATEMENT OF DAN STEIN

Mr. STEIN. Mr. Chairman, my name is Dan Stein. I am the director of FAIR. The hearings of this type are a poignant reminder of how much we will all miss you in this Congress. The importance of the subject matter and thoughtfulness of the hearing and breadth of it are vitally in the national interest and you will be sorely missed, but we think you have done a great job. I know you will stay involved.

Senator SIMPSON. Thank you very much.

Mr. STEIN. This citizenship scandal reminds me of the old saw. The order comes in, "Daddy, my teacher is nervous." "Why is that?" "Daddy, she says that if I do not get better grades, somebody is going to take a licking," and in the old days, everyone understood what that means. But today, it does mean that the standards are the things that take a licking if the students do not do well, the educational standards.

The standards for new citizens are being demeaned dramatically as we all observe the effort by the Administration to naturalize by election 1.3 million new citizens with zealous efforts, as the interoffice memoranda indicate, to water down, smooth over, accelerate and waive or otherwise make the process as easy as possible.

I think this really implicates a broader concern here, which is the sheer volume. The sheer volume of new immigrants, new citizens using this system, the number of people coming through will have a great bearing on the quality of resources we can deliver to