The number of immigration officers tackling the huge backlog of applications for green cards and citizenship in the New York City area is about to increase sharply. Currently, about 80,000 applications are pending, and the wait here for green cards is two-and-a-half years, the longest in the nation.

On Monday, 50 immigration officers were flown in from around the country for 90-day temporary postings aimed at alleviating the backlog.

Additionally, Citizenship and Immigration Services, which took on the Immigration and Naturalization Services’ responsibilities as part of the Department of Homeland Security, plans to hire an additional 14 adjudication officers, 24 information officers, and 66 “term” adjudication officers here by summer.

The New York district, which includes the city and parts of Long Island and Westchester, currently has 200 adjudication officers.

“The backlog is particularly severe in New York, and that’s why we’re bringing in these 50 people from other states to take a big stick and whack at the backlog,” a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, Shawn Saucier, said. “As the long-term solution, which is part of a realignment of our workforce, we are increasing the permanent and term staffing.” The term officers will probably serve here for 18 months on contracts that may be renewable, he said.

That is particularly troubling to the Department of Homeland Security, which has launched a public campaign to reduce the backlog nationwide to six months by the end of 2006.

New York has lagged behind the nation for a variety of reasons. With the city’s immense population of foreign-born residents, numbering 2.9 million according to the 2000 census – 36% of the city’s population – staffing has fallen far short of demand. During the 1980s and 1990s, when additional resources were poured into West Coast INS branches to cope with new immigration legislation, the agency’s East Coast offices did not receive the same attention. More recently, additional security checks following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have severely slowed immigration processing.

The new initiative, Mr. Saucier said, “is really to bring New York staffing up to where it needs to be, to make it comparable with the workload.”

It’s rare good news for applicants caught in the bureaucratic maze of the immigration agency.

“This is a huge step forward and a long time coming,” the chairman of the New York chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Matthew Dunn, said. “New York has not achieved such attention for the last decade.”

“Over the last few years the delays have just increased and resources, particularly for the New York district, have been sorely limited,” Mr. Dunn, who is an associate at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, said.

One concern, particularly with term officers who will be in New York for 18-month periods, is that the plan is not a real long-term solution.

“We hope this is not a temporary fix, because if it is temporary we will have a situation where we have backlog again,” the director of training and legal services at the New York Immigration Coalition, Dan Smulian, said.

Mr. Saucier said the introduction of new staff members came after recent streamlining and technological improvements. For example, with InfoPass, an online appointment system launched last year, the line that used to wrap around 26 Federal Plaza before dawn has essentially been eliminated.

Devon Russell, a home-care worker from Jamaica, waited 45 minutes inside 26 Federal Plaza yesterday in a line of individuals from all corners of the world. He wanted to make an appointment on a computer to receive his aunt’s green card, which she was told last year had been approved. He was not impressed by the changes.

Mr. Russell, who holds a green card, said he filed an application nearly six years ago for his son, who is now 12, to receive a green card. Not until last August, did he receive notice that the application was invalid and he would have to start the process over, Mr. Russell said.

“When the president was running for election this was the first thing he said, we need to speed up the immigration process,” Mr. Russell recalled. “There’s no country in the world that has technology like the United States. Why can’t they cut the process to get a green card?”

Mr. Russell found it hard to believe the system would improve with any new initiative.

“They’ve been launching programs ever since our grandparents were on this planet,” he said.

On the third-floor at midday, more than 30 people scheduled for immigration interviews were in a waiting room with one officer assigned to process them. A security guard, who told immigrants he was not supposed to help, assisted with the computer provided for InfoPass scheduling.

“Sometimes I think they think you have nothing else to do,” Alison Diamond, a marketing strategist from Britain who applied for a green card years ago, said. She had been waiting an hour to provide her fingerprints for the second time. “It’s not bad,” she said. “My husband was here four hours.”