It may be hard to imagine that any immigrant ready to take the oath of allegiance to the United States required of all prospective citizens would fail to understand its content. That is often the case, however, with immigrants disabled by mental retardation, Alzheimer's disease, or other cognitive impairments.

Though such conditions have not been a bar to obtaining citizenship in the past, that will change with the implementation of regulations that the federal government announced in March stating that any legal immigrant too impaired to comprehend the standard loyalty oath will be disqualified from becoming a U.S. citizen.

This policy shift, a sign of many federal lawmakers' increasingly anti-immigrant sentiment, comes despite a three-year-old law that exempted these mentally disabled individuals from having to prove their English proficiency or pass a civics test, mandatory preliminary steps to winning U.S. citizenship.

Not only will cognitively impaired immigrants run into this new roadblock on their citizenship quest, but as with all legal immigrants who are not citizens, they also face the imminent loss of any welfare benefits they may have been receiving. In addition, elderly immigrants who do not become citizens within the next six months are confronting the same cutoff of health and welfare benefits as are mentally impaired applicants.

The termination of welfare benefits, which includes Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a program intended to provide financial support for those too disabled to work, is part of a recently enacted and highly controversial immigration reform law. In seven states the cutoff will apply to Medicaid benefits as well.

(The seven states that have added Medicaid eligibility to the list of benefits that immigrants will lose are Alabama, Texas, Delaware, New Mexico, Louisiana, Nevada, and Wyoming. Medicaid eligibility standards are set by states, so continuing to permit legal immigrants to qualify for the program is an option that states can exercise.)

Unknown Number Affected

While the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is estimating that about 300,000 prospective citizens qualify for the English and civics proficiency exemptions, the agency does not have data detailed enough to indicate how many cognitively impaired immigrants will be affected by the new oath requirement.

Some of these individuals may still be able to qualify if they can communicate through some means other than language that they understand the oath and the requirement to forswear allegiance to their home country, said acting naturalization commissioner Terrance O'Reilly. He suggested that head nodding or eye blinking in response to questioning from INS examiners might satisfy the regulation's criteria.

Examiners' Qualifications

These examiners, who are charged with evaluating the ability of cognitively impaired immigrants to take and understand the allegiance oath, receive no concentrated training in this area. The education requirement for becoming an examiner is a 14-week course at an INS training institute in Georgia. Most examiners are college graduates.

While decisions about oath-taking competence will be in the hands of these examiners, requests for the exemption from the English language and civics proficiency requirements made on behalf of disabled applicants are assessed by a U.S.-licensed physician experienced with patients exhibiting this type of disability; a second-opinion option is open to the INS if its examiner elects to seek one.

The regulation went into effect on April 1 and is so widely misunderstood that in some areas panic has set in among immigrants who believe that mass deportations are awaiting them if they don't become citizens within the next six months. It was enacted as part of a large-scale overhaul of U.S. immigration laws designed to erect stronger barriers in the path of illegal immigrants. Another major aim of the new law was to make legal immigration--such as occurs when American citizens bring their relatives from their home countries to the U.S.--less appealing now that government benefits to which they were previously entitled will be harder to obtain or no longer available.

(Psychiatric News, April 18, 1997)