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NATURALIZATION AND CITIZENSHIP UPDATE
During the first quarter of fiscal year 1999 (October 1, 1998 to December 31, 1998) 238,000 citizenship applications were processed nationwide.
Immigrants waiting for citizenship interviews in Minnesota should not have to wait much longer before interviews are scheduled. According to John Klow of the St. Paul district of the INS, about 300 people should be ready to be sworn in as citizens at the end of April. 
Twenty Congress members from Texas sent a letter to INS Commissioner Doris Meissner, complaining about the Service’s allocation of adjudicators. The Dallas-Houston area is receiving only 18 new positions. There are 164,000 citizenship applications pending in Texas, 55,000 in the Dallas area alone. As staggering as these numbers may seem, they are small compared with the numbers in Los Angeles, where there are 412, 558 citizenship applications pending. The Los Angeles office is getting 56 new adjudicators to deal with the backlog.
Just as the INS begins to make a dent in processing the backlog of almost 2 million citizenship applications, employees in the Miami office have been told the agency is out of money to pay them for overtime work. Throughout the Eastern Region there is a financial crunch, but hopefully the placement of new adjudicators across the country, which is appropriated in the current budget, will help to alleviate the current problems.