cross posted from Sancho Press. http://sanchopress.com/
In 2002 President Bush signed a bill to put citezenship applications of non US citizens who serve in the military on “the fast track”. In addition, fees for citizenship are waived.
Like many other promises made to military personnel this one is not being kept. This may not be the most important issue regarding failures to meet what military members have earned, promised and deserved but just another example of bureacratic snafus, incompetence and poor management.
Some are waiting months and even years after meeting all requirements for citizenship and filing all necessary paperwork.
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02…
Unfortunatly many who have served our nation bravely with a promise of having their citizenship “fast tracked” just is not happening.
“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.”
It is taking nearly triple the time to process citzenship paperwork than it was taking last year. Additionally, in July 2007, there was a 66% increase in fees for filing. Fees are not supposed to apply to military personnel.
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.
President Bush signed an executive order allowing noncitizens on active duty to file for citizenship right away, instead of having to first complete three years in the military.
The federal government has steps including training military officers to help service members fill out forms, assigning special teams to handle the paperwork, and allowing citizenship tests, interviews and ceremonies to take place overseas.
Because we have a shortage of military personnel in an all volunteer military, requirements for enlistment have been lowered, bonuses to re-up have increased and this policy has been implemented. Our military is being decimated and forced to do two, three and four tours. Every tour increases exponentially the chances for PTSD and TBI.
Although from 2002 to 2007 31,200 military members were sworn in as citizens, immigration doesn’t keep track of military personnel processing times so this can not be determined. I doubt evem those of us who closely follow military issues realized there were over 30,000 non-citizens serving in our military forces with the promise of speedy citizenship.
Some who have served our nation have been killed while awaiting their paperwork to be “fast tracked” while other have submitted theirs as many as five times in order to finally get it done.
Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York has drafted a bill to create a special clearinghouse to ensure that applications from active and returning members of the military are processed quickly and smoothly
“These are men and women who are risking their lives for us,” Mr. Schumer said in a telephone interview. “They’ve met all the requirements for citizenship, they have certainly proved their commitment to our country, and yet they could lose their lives while waiting for a bureaucratic snafu to untangle.”
Although this does not rank up there with some of the other issues our military face such as poor diagnosis and treatment of PTSD and TBI, it is another example of items deserved not being provided.
Like most of the other issues it is due to a shortage of personnel to process claims, lost paperwork, incompetence and governement red tape. With the additional numbers of personnel needed in every area of the government regarding the military, one has to wonder why we have ANY unemployment in our nation. Unskilled, uneducated and quickly untrained people could not do any worse than what the current personnel are doing.
But some cases drag on much longer because of background-check delays or because applications are misplaced, or notices are mailed to stateside addresses after an applicant has been deployed, causing appointments to be missed. “What it boils down to are bureaucratic snafus.”
Government snafus. How often do we hear this as the cause of problems for our troops and vets? How many of the 816K+ claims for disability that are backed up are do to government snafus?
Feyad Mohammed, an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago who lives with his parents in Richmond Hill, Queens, was naturalized last month – four years after he filed the first of four citizenship applications, and six months after his honorable discharge from the Army as a sergeant.
Mr. Mohammed first applied in 2004, after he returned from the first of his two tours in Iraq. But the application seemed to have been lost; when he checked after a few months, he said, no one at the immigration service could tell him where it was or even if it had been received. He filed again in 2005, but missed his interview several months later; it had been scheduled in Iraq, during his second combat tour, but he was home on leave on the appointed day.
After he was discharged in July 2007, Mr. Mohammed filed another application. The paperwork was returned because he had not included a check covering the processing fee, he said, ignoring a Bush administration initiative that exempts combat veterans from application fees for up to a year after discharge. It was then that Mr. Mohammed reached out to Senator Schumer’s office, which helped him file a fourth, and final, time.
When he was sworn in Jan. 25 at the federal courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, Mr. Mohammed said, he felt “relieved.”
“I was a citizen,” he said. “I could finally move on with my life.”
But Sergeant Frederick, a 21-year-old immigrant from Trinidad, would be awarded citizenship only posthumously, on the day of his burial. He is one of more than 90 immigrant service members to be naturalized after losing their lives in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Sergeant Frederick’s mother, Michelle Murphy, said that he had filed his citizenship application a year before he was deployed to Iraq in 2005, but that his application was sent back to her Maryland home three times – once because of incomplete biographical information, again because he had left a box unchecked, and once more because he had not paid the fee.
Finally, Ms. Murphy said, Sergeant Frederick received a letter saying that the fingerprints he had included with his application could not be read and that he needed to submit new ones. She contacted immigration officials, who arranged for him to submit a new set of fingerprints on Oct. 19, 2005, near his base in Tikrit. On the way back from the appointment, his convoy hit a roadside bomb.
“If somebody is fighting for a country, if he’s deployed, if he’s in the middle of a war, it shouldn’t be that hard for them to become a citizen,” Ms. Murphy, 42, said in a telephone interview.
After his death, the immigration service began accepting enlistment fingerprints with service members’ citizenship applications, provided applicants authorized the military to share their files with immigration officials. A bill to make such sharing automatic has been passed by the House and is pending a final Senate vote
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This is ridiculous. I don’t care if they are non-citizens, they were promised a “fast track” and it probably had some to do with their enlisting. You can bet some recruiter used this information to help sway their decision. They risked their lives for a nation they were not even citizens of and some multiple tours in the war in the Middle East.
Another promise to our brave men and women of the armed forces that hollow promises like so many others.
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