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CASES FROM THE BOARD OF IMMIGRATION APPEALS
In re Kanga 
In this case the Board reversed an Immigration Judge’s (IJ) ruling denying the respondent the opportunity to apply for a waiver of inadmissibility under section 212(h) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), and remanded the case to allow her to seek the waiver.
The respondent, a citizen of Sierra Leone, came to the US as a student in 1986.  After 1993 she failed to maintain her student status.  She married a US citizen and has three US citizen children.  She also was convicted of numerous criminal offenses, including larceny, forgery and writing bad checks.  The INS placed her in removal proceedings on the grounds that she was deportable both because she had been convicted of an aggravated felony and because she had been convicted of two or more crimes involving moral turpitude.  While in proceedings, her husband filed an immigrant petition on her behalf, which was approved.  She would be eligible to adjust status (because she legally entered the US and was married to a US citizen), except she was rendered inadmissible because of her convictions of crimes involving moral turpitude.  (Interestingly, conviction of an aggravated felony, while a ground for removal, is not a ground for inadmissibility.)  In order to adjust status, she required a waiver of this ground of inadmissibility.
Before the IJ, the INS argued that there would be no point in granting a waiver, because Kanga would still remain inadmissible because she was “ineligible to citizenship,” a ground of inadmissibility that cannot be waived.  The IJ agreed, and refused to allow Kanga to pursue the waiver.  Kanga appealed to the Board, which reversed the IJ’s decision.
The INS’s argument was INA section 212(a)(8), which makes people who are “ineligible to citizenship” inadmissible as immigrants, applied to Kanga because she was convicted of an aggravated felony.  It reached this conclusion by the following logic:  to naturalize, a person must show good moral character; the INA prohibits people convicted of aggravated felonies from showing good moral character; therefore, a person convicted of an aggravated felony cannot be naturalized, and is “ineligible to citizenship.”  The INA applies the phrase “ineligible to citizenship” to “an individual who is, or was at any time, permanently debarred from becoming a citizens of the United States under (two sections of the Selective Service Act), or under any section of this Act.”  Under the INS interpretation, the underlined phrase includes people ineligible to naturalize because of an aggravated felony conviction.
Kanga argued that the phrase “ineligible to citizenship” applies only in situations involving evasion of military service.  Reviewing legislative history and judicial interpretations, the Board agreed that the phrase applied only in the military service context.  Moreover, were the Board to adopt the INS interpretation, it would render many provisions of the INA relating to waivers of inadmissibility for aggravated felons meaningless, because they would remain inadmissible.  Therefore, conviction of an aggravated felony does not render a person inadmissible because “ineligible to citizenship.”  The Board returned the case to the IJ to allow Kanga to pursue a waiver of inadmissibility.