U.S. To Process Applications For Citizenship More Quickly

The federal government is announcing improvements in processing citizenship applications amid increasing criticism of delays in completing the naturalization process.

By hiring 1,500 more staff and increasing overtime, the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services will reduce the average national processing time to between 10 and 12 months from about 16 months, a spokesman for the agency, Shawn Saucier, said.

The immigration agency received about 1.4 million naturalization applications in fiscal year 2007, nearly double the normal annual volume. The surge in applications comes as many immigrants are applying for citizenship in an effort to vote in November's presidential election.

Immigrant rights groups say the shorter processing times are a welcome change but that much more work needs to be done to speed up the citizenship process.

"This is sort of catching up but not fixing the problem," the director of the Migration Policy Institute's office at New York University School of Law, Muzaffar Chishti, said. "It's very frustrating because citizenship goes to the core of a democratic society.

And if people who are fully eligible to be participants of a democratic society are prevented to do that because of bureaucratic delays, it is not only frustrating to them but also undermines our commitment to democratic principles."

"There are still hundreds of thousands of people who applied in the expectation of being able to vote in the November election, and they have yet to be naturalized," the president and general counsel of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, Cesar Perales, said. "There are obviously large numbers of Latinos who want to vote, who have done everything asked of them ... and they are being denied that opportunity."

Immigrant advocates have criticized Uscis for continuing to use a paper-based system, for failing to address the disparities in processing times among districts around the country, and for breaking its pre-surge promise to complete citizenship applications within six months.

Another reason for the delays, Mr. Chishti said, is that since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the FBI must individually clear every name before naturalization can be granted. For people who have first or last names similar to that of a suspected terrorist, the wait on the FBI clearance can be up to three years, he said.

Surges in applications are cyclical, and Uscis should be better at predicting them, a senior director at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Rosalind Gold, said.

"They need to be better-prepared for these increases and to start making the management changes," she said.

"It's progress toward where we want to be," Mr. Saucier said, adding that it takes time to implement major changes. "We're not just going to snap our fingers and people are going to get their citizenship overnight."