Tough talk brings surge in citizenship applications
LOS ANGELES — For nearly a decade, Yonis Bernal felt perfectly secure carrying a green card that allowed him to live and work legally in the United States. Becoming a citizen was not a priority.
He changed his mind after Donald Trump clinched the presidency.
“All this tough talk about immigrants got me thinking I still could be deported,” said Bernal, 49, a truck driver who left El Salvador in 1990 and has two teenage children. “You never know.”
Last month, he was among 3,542 immigrants who raised their right hands to take the oath at a naturalization ceremony inside the Los Angeles Convention Rosalind Gold, senior policy director at the NALEO Educational Fund Center, joining a growing wave of new citizens across the country.
As Trump campaigned on promises of a border wall and strict crackdowns on immigration, 2016 became the busiest year in a decade for naturalization applications. But this year, the number of applications is on track to surpass that of last year’s, while a perennial backlog continues to pile up. It is the first time in 20 years that applications have not slipped after a presidential election, according to analysis by the National Partnership for New Americans, an immigrant rights coalition of 37 groups.
And with an unrelenting stream of hard-line rhetoric and enforcement in the news, as well as a swell of citizenship drives and advocacy, there are no signs the trend is abating.
In a year when the government has bolstered enforcement, backed curbing legal immigration and rescinded a program