INS citizenship drive not political, but poorly run

A new report from the Justice Department's internal watchdog clears the Immigration and Naturalization Service of politically-motivated wrongdoing involving its 1996 Citizenship USA initiative, instead painting the picture of a poorly managed program hurled into chaotic overdrive by a desire to eliminate backlogs in immigration cases.

DOJ's inspector general conducted an investigation of the program following media speculation, and subsequent accusations by congressional Republicans, that the Clinton administration had pressured INS to hastily clear 1 million naturalization applicants in time for the 1996 election, assuming that these new Americans would vote predominantly for Democrats.

Thickening the plot was the involvement of Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review in the "reinvention" of INS processes to meet the lofty goal.

The 684-page report, the result of a three-year probe that included a search of more than 80,000 pages of documents and 1,829 interviews, describes an overburdened bureaucracy unequipped to handle a boom in naturalization filings. Ironically, the surge was due, in part, to INS Commissioner Doris M. Meissner's active efforts to encourage permanent residents to apply for naturalization.

What began as a policy objective soon turned into a crisis for INS, where the backload of naturalization requests swelled from 135,565 in 1992 to 481,580 in mid-1995. Without immediate action, the agency determined, the average period of time from application to completion would balloon to three years.

The IG report concluded that the Citizenship USA effort to bring the waiting period down to six months and naturalize 1 million new citizens created serious problems in an already flawed citizenship process.

"The principle of increased productivity was pursued at the expense of accuracy in the determination of applicant eligibility," according to the investigators, "and a process previously regraded as lacking safeguards became even more vulnerable."

Temporary workers brought in to speed up application processing were chronically undertrained, interviews of perspective citizens were rushed and evaluated under spotty standards and, in the most egregious cases, naturalization was approved for at least 369 individuals who were patently ineligible, usually because of past criminal histories.

"The assumption was this: ... We have been doing it this way for years and years and years and things need to improve," Meissner told IG investigators. "But ... we are not going to create an entirely new system in a flash, and so we will do the best we can with what we have."

In a statement released Tuesday, INS officials said the agency had "successfully ensured the integrity of the naturalization system" in the wake of the crisis and were on track to restore the historically recommended six-month processing time for applications.

While investigators dismissed the notion that the political goal of nauralizing 1 million potential Democratic voters drove Citizenship USA, they strongly criticized INS officials' evasiveness in responding to congressional inquiries on the matter. The report urged the agency to "continue to enhance the integrity not only of its naturalization processing but also of its relationship with Congress."