From The Washington Post:
The “path to citizenship” currently being debated is more accurately a path to permanent residency, said Louis DeSipio, professor of political science in Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California at Irvine. After five years of permanent residency, immigrants are eligible to apply for citizenship. If changes were enacted, DeSipio predicted that the most engaged immigrants would start the process immediately. “We would see a big spike of up to 1 or 2 million new applications for citizenship five or six years after today’s unauthorized immigrants achieve permanent legal status,” he said, adding that thereafter there would probably be a steady flow of several hundred thousand a year. “Permanent residents face a greater rate of deportation today than in the early 1990s,” DeSipio said. “So incentive to naturalize has ratcheted up a little bit.”

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