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NALEO La casa de la esperanza descuida la vista del momento en que se rompe el sistema de financiamiento del servicio de inmigración
The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund released the following statement regarding today’s House Subcom-mittee Oversight Hearing on “Funding for Immigration in the President’s 2005 Budget”. “The NALEO Educational Fund hopes that today’s hearing will bring much-needed attention to one of the critical challenges facing our nation – our broken system for financing immigration services. As a result of the system’s flaws, immigrants are paying exorbitant costs without see-ing sufficient improvement in services. The premise behind this system is that applicants should pay a reasonable fee for application processing. However, Congress and the USCIS have not managed this system properly, and the reliance on fee revenue to fund immigration services has now created significant problems for the USCIS and the immigrants it serves. The USCIS’ proposed increases in immigrant application fees demonstrates just how badly flawed the system has become. Under the proposal, the cost of U.S. citizenship will jump from $310 to $390, a 26% increase. The USCIS partly justifies this huge fee hike by the need to sup-port a variety of costs that are not directly associated with processing the applications of the im-migrants who are paying the fees. These costs include: funding for the newly created Office of Citizenship; improvements in the services provided to refugees; application processing for those military personnel who are now exempt from the naturalization fee; and costs associated with the agency’s litigation settlements. While some of the foregoing activities will greatly benefit our nation, they should not be funded through applicant fees. For example, Congress should appropriate monies for refugee services and the Office of Citizenship – we should not require immigrants to shoulder these costs. It is particularly outrageous for the USCIS to use litigation settlement expenses as a justification for the fee increase. The agency incurs these expenses when it cannot effectively resolve disputes over its actions, and in some cases, because it has improperly handled a matter affecting individ-ual immigrants. In a cruel twist, the USCIS is asking for fees from immigrants to cover the costs of settling lawsuits brought by other immigrants. The USCIS must ask for Congressional appropriations to restore fairness to our system of financ-ing immigration services, and Congress must approve this funding. While the President’s budget calls for $160 million in FY 2005 to address immigration service backlogs, it is not sufficient to address the current challenges the USCIS faces with application processing. The President’s proposed funding is intended to supplement the fifth year of an initiative to eliminate application backlogs and bring processing times down to six months. However, in the last four years, while there has been some improvement in the backlog for naturalization applicants, the backlog for other immigration services has increased dramatically. At the end of FY 2000, the number of pending immigrant applications was 2.9 million; by the end of FY 2004, the number had nearly doubled to 5.5 million, an 88% increase. In recent statements, President Bush has emphasized his desire to make naturalization a mean-ingful opportunity for newcomers to learn about our country’s values. But our nation’s misman-agement of immigration services sends immigrants the wrong message by placing unfair and nearly insurmountable obstacles in their paths. We call on Congress and the USCIS to use the opportunity afforded by today’s hearing to ad-dress the problem of exorbitant fees and poor service, and a good starting point would be the ap-propriation of monies for activities that the USCIS currently proposes to support through appli-cant fees. Immigrants who apply for U.S. citizenship are eager to demonstrate their commitment to this country by becoming full participants in our nation’s civic life. But President Bush’s vi-sion of a truly meaningful naturalization process will never be realized if our newcomers cannot afford the unfair price his Administration wants to impose.” About the NALEO Educational Fund The NALEO Educational Fund is the leading organization that empowers Latinos to participate fully in the American political process, from citizenship to public service. The NALEO Educational Fund is a national non-profit, non-partisan organization whose constituency includes the more than 6,000 Latino elected and appointed officials nationwide.
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