Monday, February 18, 2008
The N.Y. Times on "Citizenship Blues"
We have been writing regularly about the delays in the naturalzaition process and the long backlogs of petitions. Here is the N.Y. Times' two centavos:
You can tell a country’s priorities from what works and where the money goes. With billions for border and workplace enforcement, the government has been rushing to impose ever more sophisticated and intrusive means to keep immigrants out. Yet it continues to tolerate a creaky, corrosively inept system for welcoming immigrants in — an underperforming bureaucracy that takes their money and makes them wait, with a chronic indolence that is just another form of hostility."
KJ
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2008/02/the-ny-times--1.html
The lack of the NYT's fairness in its reporting is one of the reasons rags like this are losing readership. For example, what would a study of the reasons behind the current run on naturalization applications really tell us? Would we find that millions of immigrants who've been elligible for a decade just deciding to apply just doing so to save a few bucks in the face of impending fee increases, and not because they wanted to be full participents in the "American Dream" that includes dutiful participation in the electoral process? We won't see such a study because such an outcome would embarrass the liberal biassed media's and immigration lawyers who've made assertions that immigrants are just as advertised on Emma Lazarus' poem of the Statue of Liberty. Are these immigrants just as complacent as the rest of we lowly citizens in permitting a handful of voters to determine this country's fate? Would Hispanics bother to apply if the illegal immigration issue were not on the ballot. After all, they hold nearly every right of the citizen, except of that to vote, so why should they really be concerned about rushing to that end? And then, when they put an extraordinary burden on our government's resources that makes it impossible for swift compliance, we hear the rants of protest and demonization of government officials. Anyone who's bothered to understand the constraints that our government agencies work within, would know that such mobilizations are difficult at best. You just don't go out and hire and train new personnel by the thousands and have them ready to act on their own within a couple of months. These complaints are essentially the venting of immigration lawyers and unscrupulous ethnocentric advocates, who, holding grudges against enforcement agencies, take every opportunity to snipe at them, regardless of whether their demands are reasonable or not.
When it comes down to it, it's not the Exectutive Branch that votes the money to establish the size of our immigration bureaucracy, but Congress. Maybe Congress, recognizing the competition for scarce tax dollars feels that it more important to spend the money for protecting the citizens before the interests of those who are not. Shouldn't that be a priority over immigration, since it is declared so in the Constitution of the U.S. as one of the functions of the federal government. It would seem that the NYT fails to understand this or doesn't care. While it's too bad that immigrants have to wait, but I don't recall anything in the Constitution about expediting naturalization services for immigrants.
Posted by: Horace | Feb 18, 2008 9:50:31 AM