Citizenship Process Is Streamlined, but Applications Decrease

From Los Angeles to New York, Miami to Seattle, thousands of immigrants are taking the oath of citizenship this week to coincide with July 4, the holiday that most embodies the nation’s civic identity.

As they do, the citizenship process, so fundamental for generations of converts to the American way, is itself in the midst of a revolution: Service has improved, the wait to become a citizen has become much shorter and widely publicized problems with criminal background checks appear to have been fixed.

At the same time, the number of applications has declined more than 60% since 1997, in part, some advocates say, because immigrants feel less under threat, but also because of fee increases and other proposals that some fear may discourage people from applying.

“This is a critical juncture for citizenship.” said Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, a Latino think tank that issued a recent study criticizing proposed changes in the citizenship process.

For those becoming new Americans, taking the oath remains an emotional experience.

“Now I really feel like an American,” Amor Dizon, a 50-year-old native of the Philippines, said Tuesday after a ceremony at the county fairgrounds in Pomona in which more than 3,000 swore their allegiance. “I’ve got the same rights as everyone else.”

Santosh Verma, a 71-year-old native of India, hopes her citizenship status will ensure public medical benefits and enable her to petition for two sons back home. “I’m now really part of the land of the free,” she said, clutching her naturalization certificate.

But for the federal officials who administer the system, the 1990s were a period of almost nonstop flux. In 1996, an unprecedented 1.1 million people took the oath, more than doubling the previous record. At the time, many immigrants were seeking protection from a backlash that spread from California across the nation amid a wave of large-scale immigration.

During the 1990s, 5 million new citizens were naturalized, exceeding the total of the previous three decades. The rapid pace of naturalizations led to charges by Republicans that the Clinton administration was seeking to gather up recruits to the Democratic fold like Tammany Hall hacks soliciting greenhorns at the New York docks. Critics pointed to examples of people sworn in as citizens despite criminal records as well as to widespread administrative problems.

Administration officials denied any political motive but acknowledged that a system designed for a smaller workload was ill-prepared for the flood of new applications.

“We saw the overwhelming of the process when millions of people began to apply, in part because of anti-immigrant developments,” said T. Alexander Aleinikoff, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and a former executive associate commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

In response to the criticisms, authorities clamped down. The reaction was predictable: Backlogs swelled as people continued to apply. About 2 million people were stranded in the queue in early 1999.

Many had to wait three years or more just to have their paperwork reviewed, if it wasn’t lost completely. Former INS Commissioner Doris Meissner, on a visit to Los Angeles in 1998, lamented that thousands of applications had disappeared into “a black hole.”

“The program almost came to a halt while we reinvented it,” said Thomas J. Schiltgen, INS district director in Los Angeles, which leads the nation in citizenship cases.

Now, however, that process of reinvention appears to have worked.

Since the late 1990s, authorities have imposed several layers of procedures to ensure prompt and accurate criminal background checks by the FBI.

Meanwhile, new computer software tracks applications as the paperwork winds its way through the sometimes labyrinthine system. The INS has taken over the fingerprinting that was once performed by beauty salons and other storefront operators. Testing of English and civics was returned to the agency.

The embarrassing backlog has been cut by two-thirds, to fewer than 700,000. Waiting periods nationally are now less than a year, according to government figures.

“It’s definitely working better,” said Angelica Salas, executive director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

Some problems remain: Many older cases are still stalled in the backlog. In Los Angeles, for instance, although most new cases proceed through the system in less than a year, more than 6,000 are still pending from three years ago.

Immigrant advocates are also concerned that some proposed changes may be discouraging would-be citizens, particularly low-income immigrants.

Fees have been rising; the cost of applying for citizenship more than doubled to $225 in January 1998. Applicants must pay $25 more for fingerprints. Another increase is widely expected, since the law mandates that the INS meet the costs of granting citizenship and other programs through its fee system.

Some worry that the negative public attention focused on the citizenship process--combined with a diminishing of anti-immigrant fervor--may have lessened the urgency that some immigrants felt to become citizens.

The citizenship enthusiasm in the community “has abated a bit,” said Rosalind Gold, who directs policy, research and advocacy for the National Assn. of Latino Elected Officials.

Whatever the reason, new applications have declined dramatically--from 1.4 million in fiscal 1997 to just under 500,000 in the last full fiscal year.

More changes are on the way. One proposal is to screen and test applicants before they can even apply. Testing for language and civics would be done at the initial stage, instead of after the application is submitted, as is currently the case. Critics fear that move would discourage immigrants from coming forward.

“The kind of system being discussed requires the kind of bureaucratic coping skills that most applicants for citizenship may not have,” said Louis DeSipio, an associate professor at the University of Illinois and a co-author of the study by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute.

Federal officials say no decisions have been made about future changes. The Bush administration is on record only as favoring a division of the INS into two branches--one to handle services such as naturalization and the other to handle the Border Patrol and other law enforcement activities.

“We’re trying to be as inclusive as possible,” said Ann Palmer, a senior INS official. “We would want to avoid any changes to the process that would discourage people.”