By Debbie McGoldrick

THINGS certainly seem to be looking up for customers of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), formerly known as the INS.

USCIS is on a serious mission to streamline the process of receiving U.S. immigration-related benefits such as citizenship and permanent residency. To this end, the agency introduced a “Backlog Elimination Plan” to Congress last week which aims to achieve three goals, which we’ll repeat verbatim — achieve a high-level of performance by establishing clear, concrete milestones and actively monitoring progress towards these milestones;

Transform business practices by implementing significant information technology improvements and identifying processing improvements to transform the current way of doing business; 

Ensure integrity by instituting comprehensive quality assurance measures.

So what does all that mean? The immediate aim of USCIS is to reduce the backlog of applications it needs to deal with. It’s not unusual, as many readers will know, to have to wait several years for a permanent resident application to be processed, which really is unacceptable.

On September 30, 2003, which marked the close of fiscal year 2003, there were 3.7 million cases on file with USCIS waiting to be dealt with. According to the agency, it receives six million new applications a year. Since December of last year, 360,000 cases have been cleared from the backlog.

By the end of fiscal year 2006, USCIS is pledging to have all the backlogged cases completed, and promises that new applications will take six months from start to finish to complete. This will be done in several different ways, including through updated information technology methods and various USCIS proposals such as increasing the validity of employment authorization documents from one year to five.

President Bush has requested $500 million in extra funding for USCIS to achieve its sensible goals. Obviously for those in need of USCIS services, that would be money well spent.