Citizenship delayed

When Emilio Gonzalez steps down next month as director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, he will leave an agency as flawed as he found it. Citizenship application processing is mired in backlogs, disenfranchising legal residents who try to follow the rules and offering a new incentive for others to ignore them.

The agency’s inefficiencies, of course, predated Gonzalez’s arrival in December 2005. Only days before his Senate confirmation, a federal judge called the agency’s structure “byzantine” and ordered immigration officials to issue green cards to thousands of legal permanent residents it had left in citizenship limbo, in some cases for years. Nevertheless, if he couldn’t fix past transgressions, Gonzalez could have prevented new ones. The agency was warned that it would be deluged with applications as legal residents sought to avoid the 66% fee increase that went into effect in July, and it was. More than 1.4 million applications had been received by the end of last year, twice as many as in 2006.

Recently, Gonzalez announced some good news: The agency will complete 930,000 applications by Sept. 30, and the time frame for processing will drop to 14 months, down from 16 to 18 months. This certainly is an improvement, if nowhere near the six to seven months that was once standard.

So this is not the moment to blame Gonzalez, but rather to lament the pileup of applications that remains and to hope his successor will be able to quicken the pace. Streamlining the citizenship application process is the single largest issue affecting legal immigrants in the U.S. -- but the current state of affairs encourages illegal immigration too, teaching that queuing up for U.S. citizenship is arduous and possibly futile.

Furthermore, these delays have consequences. Beyond being unable to vote, legal residents cannot obtain certain jobs and benefits, can travel abroad only with great difficulty and cannot begin the family reunification process. Anger is building. In August, the Service Employees International Union sued the government over the increase in application fees, and in December, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit over lengthy waits for FBI background checks. Earlier this month, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund sued the U.S. on behalf of Latinos, charging that the government failed to fulfill a core responsibility and grant citizenship to legal applicants.

The broader issue of how to reform our broken immigration system is complicated, and we may debate the fate of millions of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. for months and years to come. But there are aspects of the system that can be fixed right away, and the immigration service’s backlog is one of them.