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US eases immigration laws

Arthur J Pais in New York

For the millions of legal residents across America, who have been worried about an unprecedented backlog of citizenship applications over the last year, there is some good news.

The Immigration and Naturalisation Service, which has been facing a barrage of criticism from lawyers and members of the Congress, has announced measures to cut by half the time immigrants must wait to become US citizens.

About two million applicants are waiting to become citizens.

"Given the fact that there is increasing anti-immigrant sentiments across America, it makes a lot of sense to become a citizen," says attorney Cyrus Mehta, "Immigrants pay considerable amount of taxes, and now teethed with voting rights, we can demand respect and fair play."

Over 200 officials are going to be added to INS offices in key cities such as Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Chicago and Miami, which have large foreign population.

INS is also increasing the filing fee -- from $ 95 to $ 225.

INS Commissioner Doris Meissner said much of the money would be used to send expert teams to work in the five cities that have the highest number of pending citizenship cases. Los Angeles leads the list with 420,000 cases, followed by New York (more than 300,000), San Francisco (220,000), Miami(185,000) and Chicago (100,000).

An estimated 100,000 Indians with green cards are waiting to become citizens. Since the Congress started slashing aid programmes for those who are not citizens, President Bill Clinton made a strong plea to legally resident foreigners to become citizens. This was more than a year ago. But the INS bureaucracy wasn't moving fast enough, critics of the agency complained.

INS says it will employ 500 more people to answer routine questions about immigration services.

The newly announced measures range from creating a national customer service office to help improve INS's performance to asking Congress for $171 million to hire 200 new employees and increase overtime hours.

It is not just the would-be citizens and their lawyers who have criticised the INS. Many members of the Congress, too, have criticised it for rushing to naturalise people without proper background checks. Many Republicans have said that Clinton and the Democrats want speedier resolution of immigration status because immigrants usually tend to vote for the Democrats.

In some parts of the country, applicants must wait more than two years to become citizens, said an INS spokesman in Washington.

Just two years ago, the waiting time was six months. With the new plan, officials expect that a year from now, immigrants will have to wait only 10 months to a year to become citizens.

Except for the request for money, which would require congressional approval, the measures would begin to be implemented immediately. Officials said the request was likely to be approved because the money was already part of the budget for the justice department, which oversees the INS.

The agency's lawyers and advocates for immigrants reacted to the announcement with caution.

"Money is not going to help the situation," said Jesus Pena, an immigration lawyer in Queens. "Immigration has already lost sight of its mission, and you can't bring that back by throwing money at an agency."

Pena pointed to his most recent experience with the immigration agency as the reason for his lack of optimism. He said in an interview with The New York Times that he went to the immigration office in Garden City, New Jersey to find out why his client, Luz Galindo, had not heard from the agency. She had applied for citizenship two years ago. He was told that, inexplicably, her file was in Detroit.

"How much money, how much sophistication, does it take to bring a file from Detroit to New Jersey?" Pena asked.

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