They Crossed Oceans to Read the Bill of Rights. Most Americans Never Have.
On the country’s 250th birthday, tens of thousands of immigrants across America raised their right hands, recited an oath, and became citizens — after passing an oral exam on the founding documents that a great many native-born Americans have never sat down and read.
Some of them are a reading group of middle-aged women — nannies and nursing-home aides from Africa and the Caribbean — who told their teacher, Larissa Phillips, that America had stripped away all their rights. She asked a simple question: had any of them ever actually read the Bill of Rights? Not one had.
So she taught them. What follows is a quiet, hopeful story for the Fourth of July — about the newest Americans, who learned the country’s founding promises by heart, and the ten amendments most of the rest of us can no longer name.
- 18%of Americanscould not name a single First Amendment right in 2025 — Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey
- 12 of 20to passquestions a new citizen must answer correctly on the redesigned 128-question civics exam — USCIS
- 818,500new citizensnaturalized in FY2024 alone — 2.6 million over three years — USCIS / DHS
- 250yearssince the Declaration of Independence — America's Semiquincentennial — America250
Larissa Phillips has worked with immigrants since 2006, starting in adult literacy centers; she founded the Volunteer Literacy Project and runs Honey Hollow Farm in upstate New York. These days she leads an online reading group for adult immigrants studying to pass the GED. Her students are mostly middle-aged women — legal immigrants and naturalized citizens from African and Caribbean countries — who work as nannies and nursing-home aides across New York City’s boroughs and send what they can back home. They chase an education, she writes, to climb and to lift their families with them.
One day the group turned dark. The women began voicing a growing despair that the country was taking their rights away. Phillips, in her Free Press essay, recounts the chorus of it.
“We don’t have any rights!”
“That’s true. They’ve taken all our rights away.”
“Everything is getting worse. They’re going to bring us back to Jim Crow.”
“They think you’re making so much money, but they don’t know how expensive it is to live.”
Rather than argue, Phillips asked a question. Had any of them ever actually read the Bill of Rights — the document they were certain had been taken from them? None had. So that became the lesson: she taught the ten amendments to a room of women who believed their rights were gone, by showing them exactly what those rights say. Her closing reflection sits at the heart of the essay, and of this page.
For our Independence Day package: a literacy teacher whose immigrant students were sure America had stripped their rights away — until she sat them down and had them read the Bill of Rights for the first time.
The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the Constitution, ratified on December 15, 1791. It is short. The whole of the First Amendment — the one Phillips’s students were sure had been erased — is a single sentence, and it names five distinct freedoms at once.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Forty-five words. Five freedoms: religion, speech, press, assembly, and the right to petition the government. — National Archives transcript
Read plainly, it is a list of things the government is forbidden to do to you — not a set of privileges it hands out and can take back. That distinction is the reason the document reassured a room of frightened women rather than frightening them further. The rights were not granted by anyone in power, so no one in power can simply repeal them. They are, in the language of the Declaration, unalienable — and once you have read them, they are hard to un-know.
Here is the quiet inversion at the center of this story. To become a citizen, an immigrant must study, recite, and pass an oral exam on exactly this material. Since October 20, 2025, applicants for naturalization face a redesigned test: a USCIS officer draws 20 questions from a published bank of 128, and the applicant must answer at least 12 correctly. (Applications filed before that date use the older 2008 exam — 10 questions from a bank of 100, six correct to pass.) Either way, it is a spoken test, in English, in front of a federal officer.
The questions are the civic bedrock a good high-school class is supposed to leave behind. What is the supreme law of the land? The Constitution. The idea of self-government is in the first three words of the Constitution — what are they? “We the People.” What do we call the first ten amendments? The Bill of Rights. Name one right or freedom from the First Amendment. Speech, religion, assembly, press, or petition. A would-be American is expected to know these cold.
Passing the test is only the threshold. At the ceremony itself, every new citizen recites the Oath of Allegiance — a promise, written into federal regulation, to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Joseph B. Edlow, the Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, is the federal official who administers this system; USCIS sits within the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Kristi Noem.
Congratulations to America's newest citizens sworn in this Independence Day. On the nation's 250th birthday, thousands took the Oath of Allegiance at ceremonies from Mount Vernon to Monticello. Welcome home. #NewUSCitizens
Now measure that against the people already here. Each year the Annenberg Public Policy Center asks a representative sample of Americans what the Constitution actually protects. In 2025, nearly one in five — 18 percent — could not name a single First Amendment right. Freedom of speech was the exception, recalled by 79 percent. Everything else fell below half: religion at 48 percent, assembly at 36, freedom of the press at 34, and the right to petition the government at just 12 percent. One in five even named the Second Amendment right to bear arms as a First Amendment freedom.
The gentler news is that the numbers are climbing. Seventy percent of Americans could name all three branches of government in 2025, up from 65 percent a year earlier, and 40 percent could name a majority of the First Amendment freedoms, up from 30 percent. Civic knowledge is recoverable; it responds to attention. But the raw comparison still stands: on the very questions the government requires the newest Americans to answer out loud, a sizable share of the native-born would not pass. Phillips’s students, once they had read the document, often knew it better than the neighbors born to it — and drew strength from it that humbled their teacher.
“How could I quail at life's challenges when surrounded by people who face them with such resolve?”
Larissa Phillips · The Free Press · July 4, 2026
Why does a forty-five-word sentence still carry that much weight? Brian P. Simpson, an economics professor at National University in San Diego and the author of A Declaration and Constitution for a Free Society, argues in the Washington Examiner that the founding rested on ideas that were genuinely radical in the eighteenth century — and remain worth remembering on the country’s 250th year.
The most radical, he writes, was the premise that human beings possess inalienable rights and that government exists to protect them, not to grant them. Drawing on John Locke and Aristotle, the founders built the Declaration and Constitution as the implementing documents of that single idea — that the individual’s life belongs to the individual. It is easy to forget how new that was.
“Never in the history of humanity had this been done.”
Brian P. Simpson, Ph.D. · Washington Examiner · on founding a government to protect rights, not grant them
That is the thread joining a reading group in upstate New York to a professor in San Diego to a courthouse full of new citizens: the founding documents are not relics to be admired behind glass. They are a working promise — one that means the most to the people who take the trouble to read it. The women who were sure their rights were gone found, in the plain text, that the rights were exactly where the founders had left them.
All of it came to a head this Independence Day. Across the country, July 4, 2026 ceremonies turned historic ground into naturalization halls for the Semiquincentennial. At Monticello — Thomas Jefferson’s home — 74 new citizens from 36 countries took the oath at the estate’s 64th annual July-4 ceremony, administered by Senior U.S. District Judge Michael F. Urbanski, who noted that the oath they recited traces to the Naturalization Act Jefferson signed in 1802. At Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate, C-SPAN carried an America250 ceremony. In Jackson, new Americans were sworn in at the Two Mississippi Museums.
At the North Carolina State Capitol, 49 people from 25 countries became citizens, and Gov. Josh Stein (D-NC) welcomed them to the story they had just joined.
“When we are united, we are one. Congratulations, and welcome to your chapter of the American story.”
Gov. Josh Stein (D-NC) · North Carolina State Capitol · July 4, 2026
The scale is easy to lose in the ceremony. USCIS naturalized roughly 818,500 new citizens in fiscal year 2024 alone, about 2.6 million over three years — each one having studied the same civics questions, recited the same oath, and joined a country whose founding promise they can, by requirement, actually name. The day’s official register was celebratory across the board, up to and including the presidential proclamation marking the anniversary.
“With a single sheet of parchment and 56 signatures, America began the greatest political journey in human history.”
Presidential Proclamation · 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence · July 2026
An incredible Fourth of July for our 250th. Despite the D.C. heat, the crowds were massive — the love of our Country has never been stronger. Our Country is Stronger than EVER!!
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Truth Social · paraphrasing the president's July 4, 2026 Freedom 250 posts, reported by Fox News Digital
To become an American, an immigrant must read the founding documents, pass an oral exam on them, and recite an oath to defend them. On the country’s 250th birthday, hundreds of thousands did exactly that.
Meanwhile, a fifth of the native-born cannot name a single First Amendment right, and only 12 percent can name the right to petition the government. The newest Americans often know the ten amendments better than the neighbors who were born to them.
Larissa Phillips’s students believed their rights had been taken. Then they read them — and found them right where the founders left them. That is the good-news story of the Fourth: freedom still says what it always said, for anyone willing to read it.
