Say Anything Blog

These people served our country, now the simple act of becoming a citizen of the country they served is proving nearly impossible.

We owe them more than this.

About 7,200 service members or people who have been recently discharged have citizenship applications pending, but neither the Department of Defense nor Citizenship and Immigration Services keeps track of how long they have been waiting. Immigration lawyers and politicians say they have received a significant number of complaints about delays because of background checks, misplaced paperwork, confusion about deployments and other problems.

“I’ve pretty much given up on finding out where my paperwork is, what’s gone wrong, what happened to it,” said Abdool Habibullah, 27, a Guyanese immigrant who first applied for citizenship in 2005 upon returning from a tour in Iraq and was honorably discharged from the Marines as a sergeant. “If what I’ve done for this country isn’t enough for me to be a citizen, then I don’t know what is.”

The long waits are part of a broader problem plaguing the immigration service, which was flooded with 2.5 million applications for citizenship and visas last summer—twice as many as the previous year—in the face of 66 percent fee increases that took effect July 30. Officials have estimated that it will take an average of 18 months to process citizenship applications from legal immigrants through 2010, up from seven months last year.

Overall, the process for becoming a legal citizen of this country is far too slow and terribly bogged down with red tape.  I should think that it’s rather hard for us to go around complaining about illegal immigrants when becoming a legal immigrant is such an long, arduous, soul-sucking task.  Which isn’t to say that we should tolerate illegals but rather to suggest that perhaps we’d have fewer illegals if we made it easier to become legal.

Also, for all the Democrat rhetoric about how terrible Americans have it, people from other countries are sure knocking down our doors trying to get in.  Does any other nation in the world have this problem to this scale?  And if the answer to that is “no,” does that not prove that we are at the very pinnacle in terms of societal affluence and that liberal Democrat rhetoric to the contrary is little more than partisan carping?