gc0299 - "Citizenship Now Collaborative"
http://www.immigrationportal.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=95433
http://www.uoregon.edu/~jbloom/race/immigrat/backlog.htm
April 20, 1998
Backlog of More Than 2 Million Immigrants Waiting to Become Citizens
By MIRTA OJITO
NEW YORK -- More than two million immigrants throughout the country are waiting to become citizens of the United States, the largest backlog of naturalization applications since the federal government began keeping records at the turn of the century.
The backlog means that for those in the pipeline -- legal residents of the United States who, for the most part, have already waited five years for the right to apply -- the waiting time for citizenship is up to 18 months, immigration officials said. Before the backlog started increasing in 1996, the normal waiting time was six months.
Advocates for immigrants estimate that, unless emergency measures are taken, the wait could be much longer than 18 months in some places. In New York, they say, it could take five years at the current pace of about 4,600 cases decided per month.
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The backlog is so great that it has created a secondary one -- people who have waited so long to have their applications reviewed that their criminal background checks have expired after 15 months, forcing them to have their fingerprints retaken. There are about half a million people in that situation in the six cities with the heaviest flow of applicants: Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago and Newark, N.J.
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The growing backlog prompted Immigration and Naturalization Service to ask Congress last year for $150 million to modernize the entire citizenship operation. Four months ago, Congress granted the request and approved an additional $61 million.
About $14 million has been earmarked to begin chipping away at the backlog. Last month, retired INS officers and other temporary workers were hired and dispatched to Los Angeles, the city with the worst backlog of applications in the nation (405,000 as of Friday). New York, with a current backlog of 282,000 applications, comes second. Immigration officials said they are ready to do the same in other cities with heavy caseloads.
Some of the money, immigration officials said, will be used to open and staff 129 offices where fingerprints will be taken and written tests will be conducted for applicants. The rest of the funds will be used to deploy 44 vans to roam the country taking applicants' fingerprints, to maintain four newly opened centers that handle only citizenship applications and to purchase new computers and software to fully automate a system in which some applications are still processed by hand.
With the help of an outside management firm hired last year, the immigration service has also come up with a blueprint for changes that it says will eliminate the backlog by the end of 1999, immigration officials said.
"There is a plan and a way to get there," said Eric Andrus, an INS spokesman in Washington. "We just need time." He called the elimination of the backlog "one of the agency's top priorities."
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"We simply had a record number of applications hit a 1950s sort of system, totally unprepared to deal with that volume," Andrew Lluberes, an INS spokesman in Washington, said. "It hit us like a storm."
A report released last week by The Citizenship Now Collaborative, a national coalition of six immigrant rights coalition, blames the INS and Congress for allowing citizenship applications to mushroom while the two bickered about how best to run the agency.
Congress has been particularly hard on the INS since 1996, when it was discovered that an earlier initiative to reduce the citizenship backlog had resulted in sloppy work. Hundreds of people with criminal backgrounds were granted citizenship. Republicans accused the Clinton administration of rushing the naturalization process to gain votes for Clinton's re-election from immigrants, who are thought to largely vote Democratic.
The debate caused Congress to delay much-needed money for the INS, and it forced the agency to come up with a series of rushed measures to placate Republican members of Congress. Immigration officials say the measures will ultimately improve the system. Now, however, they are having the opposite effect.
The mandated measures, such as having two people and a supervisor go over the same citizenship application and waiting to receive clearance from the FBI for each set of fingerprints (formerly, a lack of response from the FBI was a sign of a clean criminal record), have doubled the waiting time in some cities.
"Congress exaggerated our flaws. They used a 50-pound hammer to hit a fly," said an INS official in Washington who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Creating the hammer and training people how to use it made the backlog grow wildly."
Margie McHugh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said neither Congress or the INS have realized the impact the new procedures have had. "In the mean time, more and more people have filed," she said. "At this rate, the backlog will only continue to grow and more and more people will fall behind."
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(comment by kashmir)
This article was written five years ago.
The situation about Naturalization at that time is very similar to the current situation about EB I-485.
The INS asked $150M to Congress and Congress granted the request.
I wonder if the BCIS and Congress are taking an action for EB I-485 backlog.
