Huge Backlogs, Delays Feared Under Senate Immigration Plan

Arturo Zavala, who worked on mushroom farms, got his green card in 1986 as part of an amnesty program for illegal immigrants. His application to bring the rest of his family to the United States was delayed for 14 years. (By Barbara L. Johnston For The Washington Post)

Citizenship and immigration bureau officials, however, said they would need much more time and more staff to register millions of applications. Director Emilio T. Gonzalez said it would take six to nine months just to register a group the size the Senate bill contemplates.

Michael Aytes, the agency's associate director for domestic operations, added: "We can't approach anything like legalization on the scale being discussed in a traditional way. We would have to grow too far, too fast."

The Senate bill would set up complex rules for how illegal immigrants can apply for legal status, depending upon how long they have been here. The legislation also says immigrants would have to prove their U.S. work history with at least two documents. Many would not have pay stubs or tax records, so the law provides for sworn affidavits from employers. The rules and use of affidavits would open the process to fraud, experts said.

"The document of choice inevitably will be an awful lot of legal statements saying, 'Yes, I employed this guy.' Well, once you move to affidavits, then you basically have next to nothing," said former Immigration and Naturalization Services commissioner Doris Meissner. "How do you design an affidavit system that has integrity?"

Skeptics of the Senate proposal cite a provision of the 1986 amnesty law that targeted agricultural workers. Congress expected 200,000 to 400,000 people to apply. Instead, 1.3 million people came forward -- twice as many people as were employed on farms in some states, according to labor statistics -- taking advantage of shorter residency requirements and low burdens of proof. Many then disappeared to take non-farming jobs. By 1989, federal officials placed nearly 400,000 applications on hold and made hundreds of arrests for fake documents. Some applicants are still in limbo.

"Legalization got a bad rap because of (the agricultural program). That was the leaky sieve. And that was because the legislation was written in a way you could drive a truck through" the regulations, said Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.

The citizenship and immigration bureau currently faces a backlog of pending cases and security checks, as well as antiquated technology and a shortage of skilled personnel.

The Bush administration has set aside $560 million over five years to reduce a backlog that numbered 3.8 million cases in 2003 -- there were 276,000 as of June 2006, not counting 1 million cases that await actions by applicants, other government agencies or openings in quota-based programs. The Government Accountability Office says the citizenship and immigration bureau is unlikely to meet a six-month processing target by September as it had promised.

In 2004, the agency submitted 1.9 million sets of fingerprints and 1.5 million names to the FBI, numbers that would grow tremendously if the Senate bill became law, according to the GAO. As of now, 113,000 FBI name checks have been pending more than six months, and 40,000 more than two years, officials said.

"The hidden chokepoint here is going to be the security background checks," Meissner said. "The FBI is not set up to handle the volume that the immigration agencies are generating."

In Tallahassee, Aman Kapoor, a computer programmer who is in the final stages of obtaining his green card, has been called for fingerprinting five times. "Next time if they call me, I am just going to leave my fingers there," said Kapoor, one of the founders of Immigration Voice, a group that advocates for legal immigrants. "Give me back my fingers once you are done."

New technology is supposed to help. The Senate bill would require that by October 2007 all permanent immigration documents be machine readable, fraud resistant and linked to biometric indicators, such as fingerprints, and that Homeland Security and FBI automated fingerprint systems be compatible. All U.S. employers would have to adopt an electronic system to verify the eligibility of workers within six years.

But that would be costly. The Congressional Budget Office said the Senate bill would require $800 million to pay one-time costs for facilities and computers.

Officials hope to transform the $2 billion-a-year, 15,000-worker citizenship and immigration bureau through new technology and the expanded use of contractors, paid for by its share of billions in new fees, Aytes said.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Congress must not micromanage eligibility rules, or else even new computer systems won't be able to handle the workload. "The more documents you have . . . the more fraud you have -- that's the lesson from 1986," Chertoff said.