ABSTRACT
Doubts about the quality of the US’s naturalization and integration process were raised again in the 1990s by the US Commission on Immigration Reform (the so-called ‘Jordan Commission,’ after its chair, the African-American former congresswoman Barbara Jordan). Jordan’s calls for reviving programs that ‘Americanize’ new immigrants, and for creating a more meaningful naturalization test, were assailed as discriminatory in practice and, often, as racist in intent. Her proposals failed to gain traction, in part because of opposition to them and, in part, because of the vagueness of the commission’s definition of Americanization and deep disagreements over its meaning (e.g., Pickus 1997).
