INS Budget for FY1999 and New INS Naturalization Procedures
Prior to May 1998

The Fiscal Year 1999 budget request for the Immigration and Naturalization Service totals $4.2 billion, a 10 percent increase over the Fiscal Year 1998 funding level. With this budget proposal, the Administration will have asked for a 179 percent increase in INS funding over FY 1993. The FY1999 budget includes $413.4 million in funding for new initiatives. The budget will add a total of 2,609 new staff positions, which, if approved by Congress, will allow INS to grow to almost 31,600 positions by the end of FY 1999-an 84 percent increase since 1993.

Specifically, the thrust of INS' FY 1999 budget is to control the international borders by deterring illegal crossers while facilitating legal commerce. INS intends to implement its multi-year strategy to: effectively regulate the border, both at and between the ports of entry; deter illegal employment in the interior of the United States; combat and punish smuggling as well as other immigration-related crimes; and remove expeditiously ever-greater numbers of criminal aliens and other deportable aliens.

Included in this budget are requests for the staff and other resources necessary to achieve its objectives. While it is important to protect our borders, it is equally if not more important for the INS to focus on providing customer service support and strengthening its "service" in the term Immigration and Naturalization SERVICE. This is particularly troubling because the wait for naturalizations has increased to approximately 2 years in many jurisdictions and could keep increasing!

The accounting firms KPMG Peat Marwick and Coopers & Lybrand released separate reports on the Immigration and Naturalization Service's naturalization procedures that document past problems due to prior procedures, and propose new systems that promise both integrity and timeliness. The KPMG report showed that of the 569,822 people naturalized last year, only 368 were naturalized improperly. The Coopers & Lybrand report proposed new technologies that would upgrade the naturalization process and improve the procedure for the increasing number of immigrants who apply for citizenship each year.

In 1997, 1.6 million applications for naturalization were received, but only 569,822 were approved, leaving over one million applications for naturalization pending. Experts estimate that the backlog will cause current citizenship applicants to wait over two years for their paperwork to be processed.

We hope that these measures will result in improved services to intending citizens of the U.S. and others who have contributed in ever increasing fees for immigration related services.