NATURALIZATION AND CITIZENSHIP UPDATE

In an effort to reduce an increasing backlog of citizenship applications in New York City, INS officials there are processing applications by hand. Mary Ann Gantner, District Director for New York City, estimates that there were 120,000 citizenship applications pending from 1996 and 1997 at the Vermont Service Center. Most of these applications were lost as the INS switched from one computer system to another. Ms. Gantner has had staff at the New York City office have processed 19,000 of these applications in the past two months. Meanwhile, the Vermont Service Center has also begun hand-processing applications and has completed about 10,000. The total New York City backlog of citizenship applications is 307,000 as of the end of May.

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6,800 people took an oath of loyalty to the US at a naturalization ceremony in New York City on June 30. Most of those who were sworn in had waited for over two years for their applications to be processed.

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On June 30, the largest ever citizenship ceremony in Minnesota took place. In two separate ceremonies, over 1300 people from more than 100 different countries took the oath of citizenship.

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The son of Nikita Khrushchev, former leader of the Soviet Union, became a citizen of the United States on July 12, 1999. Sergei Khrushchev and his wife Valentina Golenko moved to the US in 1991, when he began teaching a course in Cold War history at Brown University in Rhode Island.

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