The World

The Citizenship Quest
Involves Red Tape

DANIEL KURTZMAN
Special to The Jewish News

Oak Park's Kalmina Dashevskaya should
have become a citizen of the United
States well over a year ago .
She waited five years for the right to
apply, passed her citizenship test in April
of 1997, but has not yet been sworn in
because the Immigration and
Naturalization Service has failed to com-
plete her requisite criminal background
check. For the 71-year-old Jewish
refugee from Ukraine, the bureaucratic
process has become exasperating. The
INS has taken her fingerprints on five
separate occasions and either rejected,
lost or failed to process them each time.
"I feel very frustrated, very unhappy,"
Dashevskaya, who lives in subsidized
housing, said in a telephone interview
through an interpreter.
But it's more than just frustration. It's
a matter of having enough food to eat.
Last year, she lost her access to food
stamps as a result of the 1996 welfare
reform law, which denied certain bene-
fits to refugees who had been in the
country more than five years and were
not citizens.
Since then she and her husband, who
applied for citizenship at the same time
but was sworn in a year and a half ago,
have been struggling to subsist on his
food stamps alone.
Dashevskaya is one of tens of thou-
sands of Jewish immigrants — and one
of more than 2 million people total —
caught up in a massive backlog of peo-
ple waiting to become citizens of the
United States. The backlog is the largest
since the federal government began
keeping records at the turn of the centu-

.

APPAREL. ACCESSORIES * NOVELTIES

inside Orchard tali
()pen sundays 12,5

<248) 851-1260

BUY ONE
GET ONE FREE!*

Buy one pair of Women's or Children's
Shoes or Sandals at the Sale Price and
Get the Other Pair at the Same
Sale Price or Less for FREE!!

*Table & Rack Shoes & Sandals only. All sales final.
No refunds or exchanges. All previous sales excluded.

D r eg

ORCHARD MALL
Orchard Lake Rd. • N. of Maple
W. Bloomfield • 248-851-5566

SHOES

"Serving the community for over 40 years"

ngmmuart.

• ••

.-ma

.....

7 /24
1998

40 Detroit Jewish News

....

rY.

"These are legal immigrants, people
who are making positive contributions
to our society and who have played by
the rules," said Leonard Glickman, exec-
utive vice president of the Hebrew
Immigrant Aid Society.
"We just think it's outrageous for
someone who has made the kind of per-
sonal and profound decision to become
a citizen of another country to have that
impeded by bureaucratic obstacles," said
Glickman, whose organization has
helped process nearly 189,000 Jews
from the former Soviet Union between
1989 and 1993.
The normal waiting time — which
averaged six months before the backlog
increased in 1996 — is now 18 months,
and as long as two years in cities such as

Daniel Kurtzman is a writer for the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco,
Miami and Chicago.
The backlog stems from a surge. in
citizenship applications dating back to
1993. Driven by changes to federal
immigration and welfare laws, applica-
tions have soared from 342,000 six years
ago to a record 1.5 million last year.
Close to 2 million more applications are
expected this year.
The "stampede," according to Diana
Aviv, director of the Washington office
of the Council of Jewish Federations,
has been caused by "the sense that
immigrants have that if they're not citi-
zens they won't be adequately protected
in this society."
The problem has been exacerbated
by reform measures mandated by
Congress. The reforms require two INS
officials and a supervisor to go over the
same citizenship application.
The INS has also been trying to shift
from an antiquated, paper-based filing
system to computers, computerized fin-
gerprinting machines and other techno-
logical innovations.
Jewish refugees caught up in the wait
are among the most vulnerable, Jewish
organizational officials say, because
many are elderly or disabled and in dire
need of gaining access to the social ser-
vice programs that come with citizen-
ship.
Reducing the backlog has become a
major focus for Jewish immigrant advo-
cacy groups, which are are urging
Congress to appropriate the more than
$100 million the INS estimates it needs
to reduce the wait by the end of 1999.
Indeed, most observers believe that
the source of many of the immigration
service's problems stem from its dual
role as an agency that must both keep
illegal immigrants out of the country
and help legal immigrants become citi-
zens.
In pressing the issue, advocates find
themselves in the middle of a battle rag-
ing between Congress and the INS over
how best to run the agency.
Some congressional Republicans, cit-
ing a report conducted last year by a
bipartisan commission that concluded
the INS was suffering from "mission
overload," have suggested abolishing the
agency and dispersing many of its
responsibilities among the State, Justice
and Labor departments.
INS Commissioner Doris Meissner
has defended her agency against con-
gressional threats of a breakup, promis-
ing a drastic reorganization.
A spokeswoman for the INS said the
immigration service has been working
to reduce the backlog by assigning more

,

