The Trump administration is continuing its xenophobic tear by heightening scrutiny on legal residents seeking naturalization. On Aug. 15, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) released stricter standards for testing the “good moral character” of immigrants. This included advising officers to reject applicants guilty of drug offenses.
Good moral character is required for naturalization. Nativists have long argued it’s too low of a threshold. But the administration itself doesn’t clear the bar it’s setting. Health and Human Services head Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pleaded guilty to felony heroin possession. One of his college classmates even claims to have bought cocaine from him.
Elias Khoury is a law student at the University of Michigan who partly resides in Naples, Florida. (courtesy, Elias Khoury)
Kennedy isn’t the only cabinet member who doesn’t meet the new standards on good moral character. Those standards condemn conduct “inconsistent with civic responsibility … such as reckless or habitual traffic infractions.” Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, has accrued dozens of tickets. She has regularly sped, disregarded stop signs, and neglected to wear a seatbelt. Noem has even driven without a license, receiving six court notices for failure to appear and two arrest warrants in total.
While traffic infractions may not appear especially serious, the inconsistency is jarring. If she were a noncitizen, Noem’s rap sheet could easily bar her from citizenship. Yet it doesn’t disqualify her from the line of presidential succession, which should surely be a higher bar.
Alongside expanding exclusion criteria, USCIS is emphasizing affirmative evidence of good moral character. Its new guidance instructs officers to consider “positive attributes and contributions” including “[c]ompliance with tax obligations and financial responsibility.”
Ironically, Donald Trump himself hardly pays taxes on his exorbitant income. During the 2016 race, he infamously refused to release his tax returns. This was to conceal a frankly stunning record of avoidance. In 2011, Trump blustered that he’d “love to give [his] tax returns.” That same year, he paid a grand total of $0. Meanwhile, an undocumented Costa Rican housekeeper he employed at Trump National Golf Club paid $26,792.90. In 2020, Trump again paid no income tax.
This avoidance, while perhaps sleazy, is arguably legal. Even still, it may violate the new standards on good moral character. Those standards condemn not just unlawful activity but actions contrary to average behavior and civic duty. A billionaire refusing to fund his government, leaving his housekeepers to shoulder the burden, certainly fits the bill.
In 2022, a jury convicted the Trump Organization of helping executives dodge taxes on luxuries like Manhattan apartments and fancy cars. Had Trump been a noncitizen, this may well have prevented him from ever becoming an American.
Of course, the repercussions he actually faced were relatively minimal. Voters hardly held the criminality against Trump, re-electing him resoundingly less than two years after the judgment. And Trump isn’t the only one in his administration with tax-avoidance issues. Charles Kushner, the ambassador to France, did two years in prison for tax evasion, among other crimes. In typical Trump nepotism, Kushner is the father-in-law of Trump’s eldest daughter.
The administration itself falls well short of the new character standards it’s forcing upon immigrants. Not only is that hypocritical; it’s also nonsensical. If anything, we should hold public officials to higher standards than ordinary citizens.
What, then, is the purpose of the heightened bar for good moral character? The administration clearly isn’t terribly concerned with morality or civic duty. It does, however, care about demographics.
America’s racial composition has long been a fixation of the Trump movement. Since Trump rode down the golden elevator, the far right committed to “white identity” has idolized him. This racism goes beyond the grassroots, with the president himself bemoaning that too many immigrants come from nonwhite countries. Other powerful people in the Trump orbit like Stephen Miller and Ann Coulter openly decry the “browning of America.”
The new standards on good moral character are ultimately about frustrating this demographic shift. USCIS now has fresh (and largely arbitrary) pretenses to reject the citizenship applications of minority applicants. For Republicans, this has electoral benefits. Despite recent gains among voters of color, the GOP remains overwhelmingly white. In 2024, over 81% of Trump voters were caucasian. Despite fierce criticism for underperforming with minorities, Kamala Harris still won voters of color by 31 points.
A more diverse America remains threatening to the GOP’s viability. Elon Musk, a former administration official, routinely admitted this. He frequently argued mass amnesty would render America a “one-party state” of Democratic dominance. The new standards on good moral character are a means of avoiding that fate.
Elias Khoury is a law student at the University of Michigan who partly resides in Naples, Florida. He holds a graduate degree in public policy from the London School of Economics.
