Speech #1090159954

These facts and all the other testimony we received in Committee clearly demonstrate the ongoing need for section 203s protections and the need that we reauthorize these provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Of course there are critics. There are critics who say that the language assistance provisions in the Voting Rights Act should be eliminated entirely because immigrants must learn English to pass the citizenship test and therefore should be able to vote in English. This argument is unsound for two reasons. First. we received overwhelming testimony that the level of English proficiency required to pass a citizenship test does not approach the level of proficiency required to register to vote or to understand ballot measures. Naturalization requires a third or fourth grade knowledge of English. Sample test sentences on the Immigration and Naturalization Services Web site reveal that no sentence is more than 10 words long and most are seven or less. containing one or two syllable words. In addition. most candidates for citizenship are exempt from the English language requirements of the citizenship test because they are over the age of 50. Between 1986 and 2004. 9.055.732 people were naturalized of which 4.925.553 or 54 percent were over the age of 50. Voting requires English proficiency at levels much higher than the citizenship test. A survey of voter registration materials reported on the Warren Institute on Race.