INS Sees Safeguards Causing Sharp Drop in New Citizens

Even as demand for citizenship soars to new heights, federal authorities say time-consuming safeguards imposed in response to congressional criticism will result in more than one-third fewer new Americans taking the oath in the Los Angeles area this year.

“The reality is that the process does take a little longer than it did last year,” said Rosemary Melville, deputy chief of the Immigration and Naturalization Service office in Los Angeles, which covers a seven-county region that is the nation’s largest source of new citizens.

The agency now anticipates that 150,000 immigrants in the Los Angeles region will become citizens in 1997, down from a record 240,000 last year.

Waiting periods for would-be citizens have been edging up for some time--the process from initial application until the oath now takes about 12 months in Los Angeles, double the time required last fall.

But INS projections that swearings-in here would plummet 37.5% is the most definitive illustration to date of the braking effect of new safety procedures. The guidelines were imposed in response to revelations that tens of thousands of applicants were naturalized without mandated criminal background checks.

Because of the growing backlog, the INS has canceled one mass naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles, while officials failed to fill to capacity a session at the Convention Center last week.

The slowdown dates to November, when the INS issued sweeping safeguards designed to ensure that no application would be approved without the confirmed results of a full FBI criminal background screening, including a fingerprint check. Under long-standing practice, officials said, examiners waited only 60 days to hear from the FBI, then assumed applicants had no disqualifying criminal past.

While applauding the guarantee of criminal checks, activists in the immigrant community have charged that officials in Congress and elsewhere are using the changes as a backdoor means to thwart the growing political potency of new citizens.

“This is nothing short of a major disaster for Los Angeles immigrant communities,” said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Assn. of Latino Elected Officials, one of many groups promoting citizenship sign-ups.

“I think the process has been pretty effectively derailed by political forces who have second thoughts about people being enfranchised,” he said.

Congressional representatives and federal officials respond that the delays emanate from well-intentioned efforts to ensure the system’s “integrity,”--not out of any desire to raise the bars for eligible applicants.

Still unclear, authorities say, is whether the safeguards--including supervisory review of every application with a criminal past--will raise the rate of denial, now about 17% of applications nationwide.

“We have pledged to do everything we can to make sure there is timely process, with integrity,” said Eric Andrus, an INS spokesman in Washington.

Delays are mounting throughout the nation, Andrus said, with the backlog of applicants now standing at about 1 million, a quarter of them in Southern California. Applications in the Los Angeles area are streaming in at a pace of about 30,000 per month.

Overall, the INS anticipates receiving 1.8 million citizenship applications this year, almost 40% more than last year and a sixfold increase from five years ago. The agency has bolstered staffing, increased funding and employed more automation to meet the demand.

Today’s unprecedented surge of citizenship-seekers is linked in part to new laws targeting immigrants, such as last year’s sweeping welfare overhaul. That statute made noncitizens ineligible for many federal benefits, including food stamps and disability payments, the first such broad ban for legal immigrants.

Seeking to avert the specter of tens of thousands of elderly and infirm noncitizens losing their primary means of support, Los Angeles County officials have embarked upon one of the nation’s largest citizen sign-up campaigns. According to estimates, 99,000 mostly elderly and disabled residents in the county will lose federal disability payments starting Aug. 1, and another 105,000 noncitizens will be removed from the food stamp rolls.

“The county is extremely concerned about delays in the naturalization process, which will prevent eligible immigrants from securing citizenship and retaining their subsidence benefits,” said Phil Ansell, welfare reform strategist for Los Angeles County. “No legal immigrant who has a pending citizenship application should lose their subsistence benefits as a result of delays in the naturalization process.”