Aspiring citizens will face new test

After months of test-marketing, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials believe they have come up with a new citizenship exam that standardizes the naturalization process and does a better job of gauging how well immigrants understand what it means to be American.

The new test comes at a time when the number of legal immigrants in Arizona applying for citizenship has doubled, in part due to community efforts to boost Latino voting power.

Nearly 22,000 legal immigrants in Arizona applied for citizenship from Oct. 1, 2006, through August this year, compared with about 11,000 during the same period the previous year, according to data from the Phoenix and Tucson offices of the CIS.