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A Longer Wait for Citizenship and the Ballot in New York
June 11, 2004
By NINA BERNSTEIN
New York, long the doorway for immigrants seeking entry
into American society, now has one of the nation's longest
backlogs of newcomers awaiting answers to their citizenship
applications. It now typically takes triple the time to
become a United States citizen in New York as in San
Antonio - a year and a half compared with six months.
The backlog of pending citizenship cases in New York
exceeds 100,000, more than in any other district in the
country. The waiting list is likely to prevent a large
number of would-be citizens from voting in the November
election, frustrating voter registration drives and raising
questions among advocates about why federal offices in some
cities have fallen so far behind others in processing
applications.
"There are many people who should be able to vote now, but
because of the backlog, they're stuck, they won't be able
to register," said Dan Smulian, training and legal services
director for the New York Immigration Coalition, an
umbrella advocacy group for more than 200 groups that work
with newcomers.
Immigrants eligible to apply for citizenship are heavily
concentrated in six voter-rich states: California, New
York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey and Illinois. A growing
number live in states like Arizona and Washington whose
immigrant populations soared in the 1990's. Yet while
application delays are shrinking in Seattle, Phoenix, El
Paso and even in Los Angeles, government figures show, New
York is one of many areas where deep backlogs rule.
Applications in West Palm Beach take 19 months to handle,
more than twice as long as the seven months in Seattle,
unpublicized government figures obtained by The New York
Times show. Applications in Detroit take more than two and
a half times as long as they do in Phoenix. The longest
wait is in Cleveland: more than three years from
application to oath of allegiance.
Such are the new mysteries of a federal battle against a
growing naturalization backlog, one that President Bush
pledged to eliminate in the last campaign.
Federal immigration officials say they are making headway
in meeting the president's promise, to cut naturalization
paperwork to six months or less. But current figures and
long-term trends show the effort being outpaced by rising
demand from a growing pool of 11.5 million eligible
noncitizens, more of them now prompted to naturalize by a
mix of insecurity and allegiance.
The sharp disparities among districts defy easy
explanation, but theories abound. Some experts point to the
special registration program for thousands of Muslim and
Arab men after Sept. 11, 2001, which pushed districts with
many such immigrants, like New York, to shift more workers
from naturalization to background checks. Some advocates,
like Celeste Douglas, the New York citizenship coordinator
for the health care workers union, suggest that the Bush
administration might be slower to give the vote to
immigrants in New York, presumably Democratic-leaning, than
to Hispanics in Texas.
Federal officials said that high-volume districts were just
lagging smaller ones in instituting better business
practices, but that assertion was not supported by agency
data. A Feb. 28 agency document calculating backlogs showed
28 months in low-volume Detroit, 11 months in Phoenix, 9
months in Baltimore, 21 months in Miami and 13 months in
Los Angeles, which handles the largest caseload in the
nation.
"There is absolutely, positively no connection between the
amount of time it takes for someone to naturalize and any
voter registration system," said Christopher Bentley, a
spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, now
part of the Department of Homeland Security.
Norine Han, one of his superiors, declined to provide a
breakdown of the workload, resources and performance of the
nation's 83 districts, part of a required progress report
being prepared for Congress later this year. She ended an
interview when this reporter sought more information to
explain disparities.
Many would-be citizens have been waiting years without
information, including Margaret Marsden, 74, the wife of a
former Navy serviceman. Ms. Marsden said her first
application was lost in the early 1990's when she lived in
New York. She reapplied in 1998 when she moved to West Palm
Beach and has supplied her fingerprints to immigration
authorities three times.
"All I did was to work all my life and pay my taxes," said
Ms. Marsden, who came to the United States from Trinidad in
1970. "We all want that sense of belonging."
In another case, a letter summoning Errol Taylor to be
sworn in as a citizen on May 14 arrived at his Flatbush
home more than a year after his interview and two years
after he had applied for citizenship. But it was too late
for Mr. Taylor, a hospital worker who had lived and worked
in Brooklyn for decades after leaving Trinidad in 1975. He
died in March at 60.
Several experts rejected the notion that the disparities
could reflect political calculation, including Doris
Meissner, who was commissioner of Immigration and
Naturalization in the Clinton administration at a time when
Republicans accused the administration of playing politics
with naturalization by trying to speed up the process. A
Justice Department investigation ultimately found no
wrongdoing.
"It's pretty impossible to me to imagine that there could
really be a conscious slowing down, a freezing in some
states and not in other states," said Ms. Meissner, now a
senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a research
organization. "That being said, it is not defensible in my
opinion to have such incredible ranges of different times
to do the same thing around the country when it is the same
process."
An explanation for some of the most startling extremes was
offered by lawyers at the American Immigration Lawyers
Association: higher backlogs in districts with
disproportionately large Middle Eastern and Muslim
populations like Washington, Detroit and Cleveland. In such
districts, said Crystal Williams, head of government
liaison for the association, many more immigration officers
had to be shifted from citizenship cases to registering
thousands of Arab and Muslim men, a program that proved all
but useless in finding terrorists and that was eventually
dropped by Homeland Security.
"Offices that had a high number of special registrations
are the ones having the hardest time recovering," she said.
"A number of offices have given a very high priority to
catching up on their naturalization backlog, sometimes to
the detriment of other areas."
Some immigrant advocates in New York, like Myriam
Rodriguez, deputy director of the Immigration Center at
Hostos Community College in the Bronx, report that just the
wait for the first appointment to provide fingerprints is
stretching beyond seven months, much longer than a year
ago.
In contrast, Wafa Abdin, the head of legal immigration
services for Catholic Charities in Houston, spoke of a
dynamic improvement, with processing cut from up to three
years to as little as five months.
Ms. Abdin credited a new director of the federal district
office in Houston and a high priority placed on
naturalization. But the contrast with New York awakened
deep suspicions in Ms. Douglas of the health care workers
union, 1199/S.E.I.U.
"I'm wondering how political that is," Ms. Douglas said.
"What is the difference in Texas? Does it have anything to
do with Mexican immigrants, and assumptions about the
Latino vote? Are there assumptions about immigrants in New
York and how they're going to vote?"
All would-be citizens in the post-9/11 era face delays from
centralized fingerprint and background checks and shifts of
immigration personnel into enforcement, government
officials and immigration advocates agree.
"We have to wait on the F.B.I.," said Shaconia
Burden-Norton, a federal community relations officer in the
New York district immigration office. "The F.B.I. will just
say `pending.' And we can't push them."
Many waiting have lived in the United States much longer
than the five years usually required. Some were part of a
post-9/11 surge in applications attributed by officials to
a mix of patriotism and insecurity.
Another nationwide spike in applications occurred in March
- up 65 percent, to 77,000, compared with a year ago - and
may reflect a one-time scramble to beat an April fee
increase, federal officials say. They still project about
half a million applications in the fiscal year ending in
September, fewer than in 2002.
But scholars of immigration say the pool of those eligible
for naturalization will grow in the next year or two,
shadowing a rise in legal entries from 1999 to 2001. The
proportion that applies for citizenship has been growing
since the mid-1990's, said Jeffrey Passel, a researcher on
immigration at the Urban Institute, in part because of
anti-immigrant measures that made even longtime holders of
green cards feel vulnerable.
Eugenia Claxton, 68, of Brooklyn, is one of many who had
been satisfied with a green card for decades. By the time
she applied for citizenship in December 2001, she had
already made America her home the hard way.
Bit by bit over 40 years, working as a live-in maid, then
as an aide in New York city nursing homes, she sent
children to college, paid off a mortgage and saved for her
retirement, which began the week the World Trade Center
fell. That is when Ms. Claxton said she finally realized
she was not going back to live in her native Costa Rica.
"All my children are here, all my grandchildren," she
recalled of her decision. "I said to myself, it's
worthwhile for me to vote."
But two and a half years later, Ms. Claxton is still
waiting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/nyregion/11CITI.html?ex=1088234284&ei=1&en=f9ead8777e7c3c59
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