Nyt
June 11, 2004
A Longer Wait for Citizenship and the Ballot in New York
By NINA BERNSTEIN
ew York, long the doorway for immigrants seeking entry into American society, now has one of the nation's longest backlogs of newcomers awaiting answers to their citizenship applications. It now typically takes triple the time to become a United States citizen in New York as in San Antonio — a year and a half compared with six months.
The backlog of pending citizenship cases in New York exceeds 100,000, more than in any other district in the country. The waiting list is likely to prevent a large number of would-be citizens from voting in the November election, frustrating voter registration drives and raising questions among advocates about why federal offices in some cities have fallen so far behind others in processing applications.
"There are many people who should be able to vote now, but because of the backlog, they're stuck, they won't be able to register," said Dan Smulian, training and legal services director for the New York Immigration Coalition, an umbrella advocacy group for more than 200 groups that work with newcomers.
Immigrants eligible to apply for citizenship are heavily concentrated in six voter-rich states: California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey and Illinois. A growing number live in states like Arizona and Washington whose immigrant populations soared in the 1990's. Yet while application delays are shrinking in Seattle, Phoenix, El Paso and even in Los Angeles, government figures show, New York is one of many areas where deep backlogs rule.
Applications in West Palm Beach take 19 months to handle, more than twice as long as the seven months in Seattle, unpublicized government figures obtained by The New York Times show. Applications in Detroit take more than two and a half times as long as they do in Phoenix. The longest wait is in Cleveland: more than three years from application to oath of allegiance.
Such are the new mysteries of a federal battle against a growing naturalization backlog, one that President Bush pledged to eliminate in the last campaign.
Federal immigration officials say they are making headway in meeting the president's promise, to cut naturalization paperwork to six months or less. But current figures and long-term trends show the effort being outpaced by rising demand from a growing pool of 11.5 million eligible noncitizens, more of them now prompted to naturalize by a mix of insecurity and allegiance.
The sharp disparities among districts defy easy explanation, but theories abound. Some experts point to the special registration program for thousands of Muslim and Arab men after Sept. 11, 2001, which pushed districts with many such immigrants, like New York, to shift more workers from naturalization to background checks. Some advocates, like Celeste Douglas, the New York citizenship coordinator for the health care workers union, suggest that the Bush administration might be slower to give the vote to immigrants in New York, presumably Democratic-leaning, than to Hispanics in Texas.
Federal officials said that high-volume districts were just lagging smaller ones in instituting better business practices, but that assertion was not supported by agency data. A Feb. 28 agency document calculating backlogs showed 28 months in low-volume Detroit, 11 months in Phoenix, 9 months in Baltimore, 21 months in Miami and 13 months in Los Angeles, which handles the largest caseload in the nation.
"There is absolutely, positively no connection between the amount of time it takes for someone to naturalize and any voter registration system," said Christopher Bentley, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, now part of the Department of Homeland Security.
Norine Han, one of his superiors, declined to provide a breakdown of the workload, resources and performance of the nation's 83 districts, part of a required progress report being prepared for Congress later this year. She ended an interview when this reporter sought more information to explain disparities.
Many would-be citizens have been waiting years without information, including Margaret Marsden, 74, the wife of a former Navy serviceman. Ms. Marsden said her first application was lost in the early 1990's when she lived in New York. She reapplied in 1998 when she moved to West Palm Beach and has supplied her fingerprints to immigration authorities three times.
"All I did was to work all my life and pay my taxes," said Ms. Marsden, who came to the United States from Trinidad in 1970. "We all want that sense of belonging."
In another case, a letter summoning Errol Taylor to be sworn in as a citizen on May 14 arrived at his Flatbush home more than a year after his interview and two years after he had applied for citizenship. But it was too late for Mr. Taylor, a hospital worker who had lived and worked in Brooklyn for decades after leaving Trinidad in 1975. He died in March at 60.
Several experts rejected the notion that the disparities could reflect political calculation, including Doris Meissner, who was commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization in the Clinton administration at a time when Republicans accused the administration of playing politics with naturalization by trying to speed up the process. A Justice Department investigation ultimately found no wrongdoing.
"It's pretty impossible to me to imagine that there could really be a conscious slowing down, a freezing in some states and not in other states," said Ms. Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization. "That being said, it is not defensible in my opinion to have such incredible ranges of different times to do the same thing around the country when it is the same process."
An explanation for some of the most startling extremes was offered by lawyers at the American Immigration Lawyers Association: higher backlogs in districts with disproportionately large Middle Eastern and Muslim populations like Washington, Detroit and Cleveland. In such districts, said Crystal Williams, head of government liaison for the association, many more immigration officers had to be shifted from citizenship cases to registering thousands of Arab and Muslim men, a program that proved all but useless in finding terrorists and that was eventually dropped by Homeland Security.
"Offices that had a high number of special registrations are the ones having the hardest time recovering," she said. "A number of offices have given a very high priority to catching up on their naturalization backlog, sometimes to the detriment of other areas."
Some immigrant advocates in New York, like Myriam Rodriguez, deputy director of the Immigration Center at Hostos Community College in the Bronx, report that just the wait for the first appointment to provide fingerprints is stretching beyond seven months, much longer than a year ago.
In contrast, Wafa Abdin, the head of legal immigration services for Catholic Charities in Houston, spoke of a dynamic improvement, with processing cut from up to three years to as little as five months.
Ms. Abdin credited a new director of the federal district office in Houston and a high priority placed on naturalization. But the contrast with New York awakened deep suspicions in Ms. Douglas of the health care workers union, 1199/S.E.I.U.
"I'm wondering how political that is," Ms. Douglas said. "What is the difference in Texas? Does it have anything to do with Mexican immigrants, and assumptions about the Latino vote? Are there assumptions about immigrants in New York and how they're going to vote?"
All would-be citizens in the post-9/11 era face delays from centralized fingerprint and background checks and shifts of immigration personnel into enforcement, government officials and immigration advocates agree.
"We have to wait on the F.B.I.," said Shaconia Burden-Norton, a federal community relations officer in the New York district immigration office. "The F.B.I. will just say `pending.' And we can't push them."
Many waiting have lived in the United States much longer than the five years usually required. Some were part of a post-9/11 surge in applications attributed by officials to a mix of patriotism and insecurity.
Another nationwide spike in applications occurred in March — up 65 percent, to 77,000, compared with a year ago — and may reflect a one-time scramble to beat an April fee increase, federal officials say. They still project about half a million applications in the fiscal year ending in September, fewer than in 2002.
But scholars of immigration say the pool of those eligible for naturalization will grow in the next year or two, shadowing a rise in legal entries from 1999 to 2001. The proportion that applies for citizenship has been growing since the mid-1990's, said Jeffrey Passel, a researcher on immigration at the Urban Institute, in part because of anti-immigrant measures that made even longtime holders of green cards feel vulnerable.
Eugenia Claxton, 68, of Brooklyn, is one of many who had been satisfied with a green card for decades. By the time she applied for citizenship in December 2001, she had already made America her home the hard way.
Bit by bit over 40 years, working as a live-in maid, then as an aide in New York city nursing homes, she sent children to college, paid off a mortgage and saved for her retirement, which began the week the World Trade Center fell. That is when Ms. Claxton said she finally realized she was not going back to live in her native Costa Rica.
"All my children are here, all my grandchildren," she recalled of her decision. "I said to myself, it's worthwhile for me to vote."
But two and a half years later, Ms. Claxton is still waiting.
June 11, 2004
A Longer Wait for Citizenship and the Ballot in New York
By NINA BERNSTEIN
ew York, long the doorway for immigrants seeking entry into American society, now has one of the nation's longest backlogs of newcomers awaiting answers to their citizenship applications. It now typically takes triple the time to become a United States citizen in New York as in San Antonio — a year and a half compared with six months.
The backlog of pending citizenship cases in New York exceeds 100,000, more than in any other district in the country. The waiting list is likely to prevent a large number of would-be citizens from voting in the November election, frustrating voter registration drives and raising questions among advocates about why federal offices in some cities have fallen so far behind others in processing applications.
"There are many people who should be able to vote now, but because of the backlog, they're stuck, they won't be able to register," said Dan Smulian, training and legal services director for the New York Immigration Coalition, an umbrella advocacy group for more than 200 groups that work with newcomers.
Immigrants eligible to apply for citizenship are heavily concentrated in six voter-rich states: California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey and Illinois. A growing number live in states like Arizona and Washington whose immigrant populations soared in the 1990's. Yet while application delays are shrinking in Seattle, Phoenix, El Paso and even in Los Angeles, government figures show, New York is one of many areas where deep backlogs rule.
Applications in West Palm Beach take 19 months to handle, more than twice as long as the seven months in Seattle, unpublicized government figures obtained by The New York Times show. Applications in Detroit take more than two and a half times as long as they do in Phoenix. The longest wait is in Cleveland: more than three years from application to oath of allegiance.
Such are the new mysteries of a federal battle against a growing naturalization backlog, one that President Bush pledged to eliminate in the last campaign.
Federal immigration officials say they are making headway in meeting the president's promise, to cut naturalization paperwork to six months or less. But current figures and long-term trends show the effort being outpaced by rising demand from a growing pool of 11.5 million eligible noncitizens, more of them now prompted to naturalize by a mix of insecurity and allegiance.
The sharp disparities among districts defy easy explanation, but theories abound. Some experts point to the special registration program for thousands of Muslim and Arab men after Sept. 11, 2001, which pushed districts with many such immigrants, like New York, to shift more workers from naturalization to background checks. Some advocates, like Celeste Douglas, the New York citizenship coordinator for the health care workers union, suggest that the Bush administration might be slower to give the vote to immigrants in New York, presumably Democratic-leaning, than to Hispanics in Texas.
Federal officials said that high-volume districts were just lagging smaller ones in instituting better business practices, but that assertion was not supported by agency data. A Feb. 28 agency document calculating backlogs showed 28 months in low-volume Detroit, 11 months in Phoenix, 9 months in Baltimore, 21 months in Miami and 13 months in Los Angeles, which handles the largest caseload in the nation.
"There is absolutely, positively no connection between the amount of time it takes for someone to naturalize and any voter registration system," said Christopher Bentley, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, now part of the Department of Homeland Security.
Norine Han, one of his superiors, declined to provide a breakdown of the workload, resources and performance of the nation's 83 districts, part of a required progress report being prepared for Congress later this year. She ended an interview when this reporter sought more information to explain disparities.
Many would-be citizens have been waiting years without information, including Margaret Marsden, 74, the wife of a former Navy serviceman. Ms. Marsden said her first application was lost in the early 1990's when she lived in New York. She reapplied in 1998 when she moved to West Palm Beach and has supplied her fingerprints to immigration authorities three times.
"All I did was to work all my life and pay my taxes," said Ms. Marsden, who came to the United States from Trinidad in 1970. "We all want that sense of belonging."
In another case, a letter summoning Errol Taylor to be sworn in as a citizen on May 14 arrived at his Flatbush home more than a year after his interview and two years after he had applied for citizenship. But it was too late for Mr. Taylor, a hospital worker who had lived and worked in Brooklyn for decades after leaving Trinidad in 1975. He died in March at 60.
Several experts rejected the notion that the disparities could reflect political calculation, including Doris Meissner, who was commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization in the Clinton administration at a time when Republicans accused the administration of playing politics with naturalization by trying to speed up the process. A Justice Department investigation ultimately found no wrongdoing.
"It's pretty impossible to me to imagine that there could really be a conscious slowing down, a freezing in some states and not in other states," said Ms. Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization. "That being said, it is not defensible in my opinion to have such incredible ranges of different times to do the same thing around the country when it is the same process."
An explanation for some of the most startling extremes was offered by lawyers at the American Immigration Lawyers Association: higher backlogs in districts with disproportionately large Middle Eastern and Muslim populations like Washington, Detroit and Cleveland. In such districts, said Crystal Williams, head of government liaison for the association, many more immigration officers had to be shifted from citizenship cases to registering thousands of Arab and Muslim men, a program that proved all but useless in finding terrorists and that was eventually dropped by Homeland Security.
"Offices that had a high number of special registrations are the ones having the hardest time recovering," she said. "A number of offices have given a very high priority to catching up on their naturalization backlog, sometimes to the detriment of other areas."
Some immigrant advocates in New York, like Myriam Rodriguez, deputy director of the Immigration Center at Hostos Community College in the Bronx, report that just the wait for the first appointment to provide fingerprints is stretching beyond seven months, much longer than a year ago.
In contrast, Wafa Abdin, the head of legal immigration services for Catholic Charities in Houston, spoke of a dynamic improvement, with processing cut from up to three years to as little as five months.
Ms. Abdin credited a new director of the federal district office in Houston and a high priority placed on naturalization. But the contrast with New York awakened deep suspicions in Ms. Douglas of the health care workers union, 1199/S.E.I.U.
"I'm wondering how political that is," Ms. Douglas said. "What is the difference in Texas? Does it have anything to do with Mexican immigrants, and assumptions about the Latino vote? Are there assumptions about immigrants in New York and how they're going to vote?"
All would-be citizens in the post-9/11 era face delays from centralized fingerprint and background checks and shifts of immigration personnel into enforcement, government officials and immigration advocates agree.
"We have to wait on the F.B.I.," said Shaconia Burden-Norton, a federal community relations officer in the New York district immigration office. "The F.B.I. will just say `pending.' And we can't push them."
Many waiting have lived in the United States much longer than the five years usually required. Some were part of a post-9/11 surge in applications attributed by officials to a mix of patriotism and insecurity.
Another nationwide spike in applications occurred in March — up 65 percent, to 77,000, compared with a year ago — and may reflect a one-time scramble to beat an April fee increase, federal officials say. They still project about half a million applications in the fiscal year ending in September, fewer than in 2002.
But scholars of immigration say the pool of those eligible for naturalization will grow in the next year or two, shadowing a rise in legal entries from 1999 to 2001. The proportion that applies for citizenship has been growing since the mid-1990's, said Jeffrey Passel, a researcher on immigration at the Urban Institute, in part because of anti-immigrant measures that made even longtime holders of green cards feel vulnerable.
Eugenia Claxton, 68, of Brooklyn, is one of many who had been satisfied with a green card for decades. By the time she applied for citizenship in December 2001, she had already made America her home the hard way.
Bit by bit over 40 years, working as a live-in maid, then as an aide in New York city nursing homes, she sent children to college, paid off a mortgage and saved for her retirement, which began the week the World Trade Center fell. That is when Ms. Claxton said she finally realized she was not going back to live in her native Costa Rica.
"All my children are here, all my grandchildren," she recalled of her decision. "I said to myself, it's worthwhile for me to vote."
But two and a half years later, Ms. Claxton is still waiting.