NY Times hits USCIS director, but he fires back
By the Editorial Staff
www.ImmigrationNewsman.com
We need to present both sides. First The New York Times’ March 19 editorial titled “Citizenship, Thwarted” and excerpts from the reply of USCIS Director Emilio Gonzales:
Here’s the NYT editorial:
The director of the federal Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, Emilio Gonzalez, is stepping down next month, leaving behind a gummed-up bureaucracy and perhaps a million empty promises. That’s about how many people are stuck waiting to have their citizenship petitions approved by the agency, which was swamped last summer by a flood of applications that it failed to predict or prepare for.
The disaster erupted when the agency jacked up the price of its services by an average of 66 percent, a nasty bite for the immigrant families whose fees provide nearly all the money that keeps the rickety system going. Mr. Gonzalez justified the increases by promising that they would lead to better service and shorter waits.
The agency expected that the new fees would spur only a negligible increase in citizenship applications. But applications spiked 350 percent last June and July over the same period in 2006. More than three million applications of all types flooded in last summer. The five-month wait for citizenship that Mr. Gonzalez promised is now 14 months to 16 months. Many immigrants who had dearly hoped to vote in 2008 will have to sit the election out.
Those who know the citizenship system say it’s dumbfounding that Mr. Gonzalez did not foresee the surge, not only because the fees went way up, but also because 2008 is a presidential election year — always a time when would-be citizens hurry to get their papers in. …
The processing delays mock America’s respect for those who “play by the rules” and “get in line.” For millions who want to work but have no one to sponsor them and no specialized skills, there is no line to get into: no realistic hope of a visa and no functioning guest-worker program. As for the others who have gone the route of patience and paperwork, they are the ones whose expectations Mr. Gonzalez raised and crushed. …
Mr. Gonzalez will soon have time to reflect on a dismal monument to his tenure: the dreams of thousands of rule-following, line-waiting, would-be Americans, signed, sealed in envelopes with large checks and money orders, delivered by truckloads, waiting in shrink-wrapped pallets, unopened.
And here’s the Gonzales piece, aptly titled “Fit to Print?”:
The Times got it wrong again. I feel compelled to set the record straight for 17,000 employees who work late nights and weekends to welcome lawful immigrants into our society. I will not stand idly by as the New York Times insults the dedicated and professional services they provide.
If the Times seeks to add legitimacy to its editorial, they should first get the facts straight. USCIS received more than 600,000 applications for citizenship in June and July of 2007 – a 350 percent increase from the same time the year before. While this surge was substantial, it isn’t close to the “perhaps a million empty promises” the Times suggests.
Further, all applications received during that time have been opened, issued receipts, and entered into our processing queue. The idea that there are “envelopes with large checks and money orders, delivered by truckloads, waiting in shrink-wrapped pallets, unopened” at any USCIS facility, is an outright fabrication, hastily conceived by an imaginative writer.
What the writer failed to mention, and what I personally conveyed to the Times, is that more than half of all the citizenship applications received in June and July will be completed by September 30. Further, many of the applicants who filed for citizenship after July 2007 have already been naturalized. The writer also omitted that not withstanding our challenges, in 2008 we will process some 20-25 percent more citizenship applications than in 2007, while maintaining the integrity of the immigration system and the security of the process. …
My posting today demonstrates to the more than 700,000 newly naturalized citizens that this country embraces free and open debate. It is a shame, however that a newspaper like the New York Times – which boasts with each paper that it contains all the news that’s fit to print – only values its version of a story and leaves no room for that debate or for the facts.
The Great Immigration Debate of 1621
By the Editorial Staff
www.ImmigrationNewsman.com
Here’s a funny way to look at the immigration debate:
Green Card Blues
Wondering why it’s taking too long for you to get your green card? Here’s what The New York Times said in its Feb. 17 editorial:
CITIZENSHIP BLUES
Three bits of news from the first two months of 2008 highlight the galling inconsistency and inadequacy of the federal government’s system for turning immigrants into citizens.
The first is that the wait for citizenship and green cards is up — way up. Citizenship and Immigration Services reported in January that the average time to process a citizenship application had risen to 18 months, from seven, and that green cards would now take a year, instead of six months or less.
It was a sorry moment for the agency, which jacked up its fees last year with a promise to use the new money to end vast paperwork backlogs. The opposite happened: the agency is drowning in applications from people who filed before the increase to avoid being gouged.
The second was the news last week that the agency had finally taken a baby step toward clearing its green-card backlogs by easing a rule on background checks by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The F.B.I. will still do full checks on every applicant, comparing fingerprints against a criminal database and names against lists of criminals and terrorists. It’s just that those who have had to wait more than six months for a green card because of one last, unfinished piece of an application — a “name check” of people who have ever been mentioned in criminal investigations, even peripherally — will get their cards.
The move is sensible, and long overdue. The understaffed agency has faced mounting pressure to act. An increasing number of immigrants, after waiting years for name checks, have sued and won, with federal judges ordering the government to do its job.
The third development is the surge in businesses using E-Verify, the federal system for checking employees’ immigration status. As more states and localities have adopted harsh campaigns to purge undocumented immigrants, E-Verify has taken on a larger role, with 52,000 employers now using it, compared with 14,000 a year ago. President Bush’s new budget includes $100 million to expand E-Verify, which the citizenship agency calls “a cornerstone” of “long-term immigration reform.”
You can tell a country’s priorities from what works and where the money goes. With billions for border and workplace enforcement, the government has been rushing to impose ever more sophisticated and intrusive means to keep immigrants out. Yet it continues to tolerate a creaky, corrosively inept system for welcoming immigrants in — an underperforming bureaucracy that takes their money and makes them wait, with a chronic indolence that is just another form of hostility.
