- Welfare recipients in San Jose, California will soon be employed by the INS to help process the massive backlog in citizenship applications. Up to 10 welfare recipients will be employed to open mail and for data entry. This will mean a doubling of the staff in this area. The workers' salaries, expected to be around $25,000, will be paid by Santa Clara, County, not the INS. The INS is in negotiation with cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and New York. Waiting times for citizenship interview in San Jose have grown from six months to two years. Santa Clara County has also agreed to provide nine county employees to the INS to help reduce the naturalization backlog.

- The former head of the INS' Sacramento office claims he was transferred because his staff was approving too many citizenship applications. Lionel Nurse, was recently reassigned from the position of Officer in Charge of the Sacramento INS office to the Border Patrol in Sacramento. Nurse, a black who was born in Panama, claims the transfer was racially motivated. He also claims that he received several warnings from superiors that he needed to cut down on approvals.

- In an illustration of the problems with the INS fingerprint policy as well as plain old bureaucratic idiocy, the Washington Post recently reported a case of a 26-year-old British man whose naturalization application was delayed for 15 months because he was unable to supply a full set of fingerprints. Tal Klement was born with shortened arms and only has three fingers on his right hand and two on his left. Klement, a Yale law school student, submitted two sets of fingerprint in mid-1997, but they were rejected because they were not a full set of 10 fingers. INS policy requires fingerprints be rejected twice before asking the FBI to run a name check to verify a person's identity. Klement's lawyer has filed a complaint with the Justice Department claiming the INS fingerprint policy violates the 1989 Rehabilitation Act. That law requires federal agencies to provide reasonable accommodations to disabled people. The INS has stated that it is reconsidering its fingerprint policy in light of this case.

- INS Commissioner Doris Meissner recently visited the Los Angeles INS office and announced that that office is making substantial progress in reducing the backlog of naturalization cases. The LA office is now scheduling 1,300 naturalization interviews per day, twice the figure of just a couple of months ago. Meissner credits the improvement to additional funding that has allowed the agency to pay more than $1 million in overtime and to hire 24 new staffers to conduct interviews. The LA office has been under fire in recent years as naturalization applicants have been waiting up to three years or more to be sworn in. And INS policy requires all of those people to be re-fingerprinted since the prints are more than 15 months old. The INS Commissioner has set the goal of six months for the turnaround time on naturalization applications. 410,000 applications are still pending in LA, representing 25% of the national backlog.

- Recently, I had the opportunity to interview an INS Officer in Charge of an INS field office about problems with the naturalization backlogs. The officer asked to remain anonymous. We were told that the increase in the number of applications filed is not the main reason naturalization backlogs are increasing around the country. According to this OIC, the real crisis is in the hiring system - there are simply not enough officers and a very large number of positions around the country remain unfilled because the INS has an incredibly inefficient system for filling positions. The system involves a field office making the request with its District Headquarter office that office in turn notifying the INS headquarters in DC. Headquarters must approve the positions and then will place the positions in a central job database. Someone interested in a position would have to look for a position through the headquarters and then hope to find a position in their city or they would have to indicate an interest to re-locate. After an individual is selected, they have to go through a cumbersome and long interview and background checking process. The process can take many months (possibly even more than a year) and, of course, once the position is finally offered, the candidate still must be available. If not, the process must start all over again. Consequently, positions go unfilled and backlogs get longer and longer. According to this official, until the INS re-engineers its hiring process, the backlog problems will not be resolved.