These questions, says immigration lawyer Ira Kurzban, are asked to see whether an applicant obtained their residence validly, a prerequisite for citizenship. US immigration authorities have, he says, become “very exacting” on this point over the past 10 years.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Service didn’t respond to an inquiry about whether forms used by its predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, asked exactly these questions at the time Musk would have been using them, but experts say he would have been asked substantively similar questions, as the relevant law hasn’t changed.
“Those grounds of deportability have been around for decades,” says Yale-Loehr, “and the forms back then probably had similar or identical questions.”
An immigrant who makes misrepresentations as part of the naturalization process can also face criminal exposure: Under…
