Do someting, like other minorities do

It does not matter where you live, what administration or government is in charge or what promises are made by politicians. In every government system in the world, the now-fully accepted terminology of ìbureaucracyî constitutes a routine part of that system.

We, Iranians, complain about unnecessary bureaucracy in Iran and we, Iranian-Americans, complain about the same beau racy in the United States. The point to make about the U.S. bureaucracy is the recent backlog and immense delays in the processing of immigration petitions with an increased fee and official promises to expedite them and remove the backlogs.

But, as you know it from your personal experience and I know it from my nationwide immigration practice, there has not been a slight and better change yet. A deluge of immigration applications in the months preceding a filing fee increase last year should have been foreseen, lawmakers told Bush administration officials recently.

Previous increases in immigration application fees have been preceded by spikes in applications, said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. Application increases have also been seen in years before elections because people want to vote, she said.

Some 1.4 million people applied for naturalization in the 2007 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30. The USCIS approximately receives between 300,000 to 400,000 applications on monthly basis for several benefits.

More than half of the naturalization applications were submitted in the summer months, just before Citizenship and Immigration Services, a Homeland Security Department agency, and significantly increased applications fees to $675.00. The flood of applications means people who applied after June 1, 2007 to become citizens won’t naturalize in time to vote in the November’ 2008 elections.

“This should not have been a surprise. It was totally predictable,” Lofgren said after presiding over a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the applications backlog.

Emilio Gonzalez, Citizenship and Immigration Services director, said his agency did anticipate an increase in applications and the increase was manageable. “What we did not anticipate, and I’ll be honest with you, is a 350 percent increase in one month,” Gonzalez told the subcommittee.

Members of immigration groups said they warned Citizenship and Immigration Services as early as November 2006, about likely application increases. The groups raised the issue because they were launching a national campaign to help eligible immigrants in the U.S. become citizens and eventually register to vote.

With the fee increases announced, with the kind of debate this nation was having on the role of immigrants, and the thirst of applicants to become naturalized citizens, this surge in applications should have seen by the bureaucracy and people who run it. It seems that the agency was expecting increases to be confined to California.

Gonzalez said the agency will soon conduct six classes of 48 students each to train workers to deal with the increased workload. Also, the agency is hiring an additional 1,500 workers, about half of whom will be trained to adjudicate files. The agency has asked the White House for permission to transfer money between accounts to address the backlog, Lofgren said. But the agency faces the challenge of a backlog of FBI name checks that slow down application processing. What is the solution?

Whether to grant benefits to the applicants before their names are cleared or wait long delays and then grant the benefits. There is no easy answer to this question. Expensive litigations in Federal Courts have proven costly but necessarily productive.

However, We, Iranian-Americans, have to pressure our officially elected representatives and pursue the matter with them. We should not stand by and watch what other minorities do. The stand-by train has long left the station and we must proactively get engaged in pursuit of justice, liberty and happiness.

James S. Irani, Attorney at Law, The Voice of Iranian-Americans, 1170 Broadway, Suite 510, New York, New York 10001, Tel: (212) 683-7700.

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