The story “The Teacher Who Changed My Life” led me to this topic of “How to become a U.S. citizen.” The story is about a nine year old boy from Greece whose mother sent him to live with his father in the United States while she stays back and dies because of her decision to send her kids away. The topic best relates to the story because the kid needed to become a United States citizen in order for him to achieve the things he dreams of.

There are a couple of steps in becoming a United States Citizen and doing so can take a couple of years or more than you expect it would. The first step would be to check your eligibility. If you are eligible for citizenship then you should apply for U.S. residency, and live in the U.S. for at least five years. After applying for U.S residency you should then complete the citizenship application process, which can take up to a year. In applying for American Citizenship, there’s a lot of work and papers you would need to file and you would need a lot of patience in doing so; if you would like to look more into the steps of becoming a citizen then you can visit https://www.reference.com/government-politics/long-become-u-s-citizen-ea0887ea9be52fbd. Some people would also like to know how much money they would be spending during this process. Well, according to https://www.us-immigration.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-apply-for-us-citizenship the current filling fee for Form N-400, which are the needed papers for becoming a U.S citizen, the application for Naturalization cost $725, this includes the $640 citizenship application fees and the $85 background check cost, which is also know as the biometric fee.

You sometimes catch yourself asking how many people becomes a U.S citizen in a year or so. According to globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/…/immigration-nation-what-you-need-to-know/ in the last decade, an average of 700,000 people a year became naturalized citizens of the United States. That’s roughly one each year for every 500 U.S residents, or one every 79 seconds. As of 2012 the population of illegal immigrants in the U.S is estimated to be approximately 11.43 million, roughly 3.7% of the United States population. 59% of the immigrants in the country illegally are from Mexico, and 25% of all immigrants in the country illegally reside in California. But legally more than one million people were granted legal permanent residency (LPR) in the U.S. in 2012. The number one country for these immigrants are from Mexico, with about 150,000 Mexicans legally becoming permanent residents.