< back
INS ANNOUNCES PROGRESS IN PROCESSING APPLICATIONS
The INS has announced that it is on its way to meeting its goals for processing immigration applications.  The latest report, which covers the second quarter of fiscal year 2000 (January 1, 2000 – March 31, 2000), shows that processing times for many important applications have dropped significantly over recent months. 
Naturalization applications, which recently were taking almost three years to process, are now taking a national average of about 12 months.  Because this is a national average, there are still some offices where the processing time is well over a year.  During the second quarter, 289,014 naturalization applications were processed.  This is up 29% from the same quarter in 1999, and a 10% increase from the first quarter of fiscal year 2000.  After the second quarter, there were 1,170,233 naturalization applications pending, the smallest number since April 1997.  The INS hopes to have processing times for naturalization applications down to six months by the end of fiscal year 2000, though many observers say this is not realistic. 
The INS has also reported improvements in processing adjustment of status applications.  The agency adjudicated 74% more adjustment applications in the second quarter of 2000 than the second quarter of 1999.  The number of applications processed during the second quarter was 137,916.  There are still 1,003,931 adjustment applications pending.  The average processing time has decreased from a high of 36 months to around 22 months.  
Improvements in the processing of applications of green card renewals have also been made, going from about one year to five months processing times.  The INS also announced that it is planning to move green card renewal processing to INS Application Support Centers, and hopes to have the processing time down to 90 days by the end of the year.