Caught in the Citizenship Backlog

By Suman Raghunathan, Feet in 2 Worlds. Posted September 22, 2008.

As Feet in 2 Worlds has reported recently, the candidates haven't been talking much about immigration policy. But according to a couple of new reports released this week in honor of National Citizenship Day (September 17), immigration and naturalization are very much on the minds of the nation's newcomers -- whether they can vote or not.

According to a new fact sheet [here's the pdf file] issued this week by the Immigration Policy Center, nearly 1.4 million naturalization applications were filed in fiscal year 2007 -- almost double the number filed in 2006.

What's more, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS, the processing arm of the Department of Homeland Security), the number of people caught in the immigration processing backlog at the end of 2007 soared to 1.1 million people -- a nearly 250% increase from the previous year. Though USCIS promises to process naturalization applications within 10 to 12 months of their filing, according to a recent report [pdf here] from the Office of Immigration Statistics, it's doubtful all the immigrants waiting to become citizens will actually achieve citizenship in time to vote in this year's election.

Processing times vary in different regions: the longest wait, USCIS says, is in Charlotte, NC, where by the end of this month it will take 14.9 months to process citizenship applications. Processing in Los Angeles and Miami is expected to take roughly one year; these two cities together accounted for nearly 20 per cent of new naturalized U.S. citizens last year.

The shortest processing time is five months, projected in 17 regions nationwide.

This means that someone in Charlotte who applied to become a U.S. citizen in July 2007 would probably not be able to do so by the end of this month, meaning they would not have been able to vote in the local primary elections last week. It's also unlikely they would become a citizen in time to vote in the general election, as voter registration deadlines in some states are at least one month before the actual election. (Locally, a New York Immigration Coalition report says that nearly 60,000 immigrants in New York's immigration backlog will be able to vote in November if USCIS keeps to its initial promise of a six-month processing time. The report goes on to say that New York has 126,000 cases mired in the immigration backlog.)

In a close election -- the most recent New York Times poll puts McCain and Obama in a statistical dead heat -- a few thousand voters can make or break a candidate's chances -- particularly in battleground states in the Southwest and South such as Nevada, Colorado or Virginia, which have seen record numbers of new voters signing up in this election.

The McCain campaign clearly feels those new citizens -- specifically, Latinos and their families -- are crucial swing voters and is going after them big-time. One of its latest attack ads in Spanish, released at the end of last week in Colorado, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico, questions whether Obama is "on our side" and accuses him of opposing comprehensive immigration reform in 2007.

See more stories tagged with: immigrants, citizenship, registering voters

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