Pilot program streamlines green card application process

By Michelle Mittelstadt

The Dallas Morning News

(MCT)

WASHINGTON - Green card application backlogs may compromise national security, a Homeland Security ombudsman says, because thousands of foreigners are being given work permits even though they're ineligible for legal permanent residence.

But a Dallas pilot program to weed out ineligible green card applicants has proven so successful that an influential senator is asking Citizenship and Immigration Services if it can be expanded nationwide.

"Unauthorized aliens who get temporary work authorizations are a serious threat to the integrity of our immigration system and may pose a risk to our national security," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote CIS director Emilio Gonzalez this week.

Even though the agency eventually rejects as many as one in five green card applicants, it is required by law to hand out work permits if the paperwork isn't processed within 90 days. The wait time nationally for a green card averages eight to nine months.

Work permit in hand, foreigners can get Social Security cards and driver's licenses - which cement their ability to remain in the U.S., legally or not. "Once an unauthorized alien gets an interim benefit, what will ensure that we ever see them again," Grassley asked, expressing concern that increasingly people may be gaming the system to gain work permits.

Under the 2-year-old Dallas Office Rapid Adjustment program, immigration officials have slashed green card processing times and the number of ineligible applicants.

Green-card applicants in Dallas undergo on-the-spot interviews when they submit their paperwork, meaning that most ineligible foreigners are immediately ruled out and their applications are never filed. Elsewhere, applicants aren't summoned for interviews until well after their paperwork and background checks are underway.

In Dallas, about 2.5 percent of green card applications are denied - compared to 17 percent nationally. In some cities, the rate can be far higher. In New York in 2003, for example, nearly 48 percent of green card applications were rejected.

If the Dallas program were implemented nationally, CIS could achieve tremendous savings, CIS ombudsman Prakash Khatri wrote in an annual report on the agency.

"It is unclear why USCIS has failed to recognize the success of the program," he wrote in the June 29 report, noting that the distribution of work permits to ineligible applicants could be "virtually eliminated."

As many as 46,000 foreigners now holding work permits are ineligible for green cards, he said.

CIS spokesman Chris Bentley said the agency is carefully evaluating the pilot program. Though the Dallas program has two years of results under its belt, he said, "the last thing we want to do is take an operational decision like this and make it in a hasty way."

He rejected the ombudsman's suggestion that the agency may have an institutional reason to not embrace the Dallas model: Its near-total reliance on fees for its operating budget. Khatri estimated the agency could lose $350 million or more in fees if it increases efficiency.

Budget implications "are not a hindrance to a good idea," Bentley said.

He noted that foreigners who receive interim work permits first undergo background checks. "We are not granting anything without making sure people are eligible to receive it," he said.

Still, he added, "Is that something we would like to eliminate? Absolutely. We want to process those cards as fast as we can."

The immigration service is in the midst of a half-billion-dollar push to reduce huge case backlogs. The green card backlog, which reached a high of 3.8 million cases in January 2004, is now down to 202,000, he said. The estimate, however, omits nearly 1 million cases reclassified because of quota caps and other reasons.

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