- This years marks the 30th anniversary of the Clinton administration’s Citizenship USA scandal. CUSA is a cautionary tale, a case study in what can happen when an agency goes all in on pushing through the adjudications mill a staggering number of applications by a politically set deadline that cannot possibly be achieved without mass rubber-stamping. It is a case study in what can happen when an agency believes its “customers” to be the aliens seeking valuable immigration benefits such as naturalization for which they must qualify, rather than the American people, and the prospect of an infusion of new and reputedly favorably disposed voters is dangled in front of the party in power. We will never know how many criminal and other ineligible aliens were wrongly naturalized during CUSA and have been voting in our elections to this day.
- The Immigration and Naturalization Service launched CUSA in the summer of 1995 in response to a rapidly growing backlog in naturalization applications. The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General concluded that “INS failed to address known system weaknesses before implementing a program that they knew would tax that system as it never had been taxed before” and that given its “lack of commitment to repair the deficiencies, the promise of backlog reduction within one year also meant a certain recklessness about the quality of the resulting adjudications”.
- The OIG began an investigation after reports surfaced “that some INS offices were naturalizing applicants so quickly that applicant criminal history reports … were arriving in INS offices only after the applicant had been sworn in as a United States citizen … suggest[ing] that INS had sacrificed naturalization processing integrity in the name of processing applicants more quickly”.
- Advocacy groups had promised the Clinton administration that faster naturalizations would mean more Democratic voters in the upcoming 1996 election, including for the Clinton-Gore ticket. Following complaints that CUSA wasn’t producing more citizens fast enough, Vice President Al Gore told his “reinventing government” office (the National Performance Review) to intervene. The goal of one NPR official leading the effort was to “produce a million new citizens before election day”. The OIG concluded that “the White House and NPR attention to and involvement with CUSA did add pressure on INS officials to increase production and make good on INS’ previously announced ambitious goals”.
- What were the consequences? In March 1997, DOJ reported that of the 1,049,867 naturalizations between August 31, 1995, and September 30, 1996, the FBI had returned the proffered fingerprint cards in 124,111 cases as not suitable for comparison and the FBI had no record of conducting any fingerprint checks in 61,366 additional cases. The OIG’s conclusion: “[F]or 18 percent of those persons naturalized during CUSA, INS had not conducted a complete criminal history background check.” As a result, more than 6,000 cases were referred to INS for possible denaturalization proceedings. Of course, only a handful of former criminal aliens were ever denaturalized.
- The OIG concluded that it was “unable to make any conclusive determination whether White House officials sought to use the CUSA program as a means of increasing Democratic turnout in the 1996 general election”. But the OIG did concede that “it is certainly true that the prospect of an impending general election was present in the thinking of a number of White House officials who pressed INS to accelerate its naturalization efforts”. You can draw your own conclusions.
- I have no illusions that a sorry episode like this cannot happen again.
“Citizenship USA”
As the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) described:
Beginning in 1993, the demand for naturalization began to increase at a staggering rate and application backlogs developed at INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] offices throughout the country. By June 1995, INS was receiving applications for naturalization at a rate twice as high as it had the previous year. INS projected that without a serious effort to reduce this application backlog, by the summer of 1996 an eligible applicant would have to wait three years from the date of application to be naturalized as a U.S. citizen.
The surge in applications was not a surprise to INS. As then Center for Immigration Studies Senior Fellow, and now Policy Director for the Immigration Accountability Project, Rosemary Jenks testified before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims on April 30, 1997, “INS expected a surge in new applications because of a combination of factors, including the 2.7 million beneficiaries of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act … amnesty becoming eligible” to naturalize.
This backlog begat “Citizenship USA” (CUSA). The OIG explained that:
On August 31, 1995, INS Commissioner Doris M. Meissner announced … an initiative to reduce the backlog of pending naturalization applications to the point where an eligible applicant would be naturalized within six months of application. The goal of the initiative was to reach this level of processing “currency” within one year. … To reach the CUSA goal, INS dramatically increased its naturalization workforce in the Key Cities [Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and San Francisco], opened new offices dedicated to naturalization adjudication, and engaged new processing strategies in an effort to “streamline” the naturalization process.
And then Vice President Al Gore and the White House got involved. The OIG stated that:
In a written response to an OIG question, the Vice President [Al Gore] specifically states that it was his decision to involve [The National Performance Review of the Office of the Vice President] NPR in the CUSA program. Elaine Kamarck, Policy Advisor to the Vice President, told the OIG that the Vice President personally asked her — as the person on the Vice President’s staff to whom the Director of NPR reported — to have NPR examine the CUSA program.
You can readily surmise what happened next. The OIG wrote that “[i]n the spring of 1996 … media reports began to question the integrity of INS naturalization processing”, elaborating that:
In May 1996, The Washington Times published an article about INS employees who criticized the acceleration of naturalization processing … [and] questioned the motives of CUSA. [NPR] had targeted CUSA for “reinvention”… . This link between the naturalization initiative and the Vice President’s Office during an election year fueled speculation and media stories that the rush to naturalize approximately one million applicants during fiscal year 1996 was an attempt to swell voting rolls with new citizens who were anticipated to vote for Democratic candidates, including President Clinton and Vice President Gore.
The OIG explained that at subsequent congressional hearings, “INS employees … testified to the extraordinary rush imposed on naturalization adjudications during CUSA[ that,] according to these witnesses, meant that INS had naturalized people without ensuring that they were eligible.”
Of particular concern, the OIG noted that:
[R]eports [surfaced] that some INS offices were naturalizing applicants so quickly that applicant criminal history reports — generated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after INS submitted applicant fingerprint cards for analysis — were arriving in INS offices only after the applicant had been sworn in as a United States citizen. These and other allegations of flaws in naturalization processing suggested that INS had sacrificed naturalization processing integrity in the name of processing applicants more quickly. [Emphasis in original.]
On March 5, 1997, the Washington Post published an extraordinary editorial, writing that:
Six months ago, Republicans were accusing [the Clinton administration] of trying to make political use of the [INS]. The charge was that the White House had put the arm on the INS to speed up and cut corners in the naturalization process, the theory being that new citizens would more likely vote Democratic than Republican, and therefore the more of them, the merrier.
The editorial noted the Clinton administration’s defense — “there was no way it would do a thing like that, manipulate the citizenship process for political gain” — and concluded that “folks believed it”. In fact, “We ourselves wrote sympathetically that … [‘]the administration replies that there are good and innocent reasons …’.”
Then came the extraordinary part. The Post concluded that the Clinton administration had been duping all the folks who had foolishly believed it (including, presumably, the Post):
So now, guess what? It turns out the White House was in fact leaning on the INS to hasten the process, in part in hopes of creating new Democratic voters. There are documents that amply show as much.
The Democratic defense — the current version — is that some of this [the INS naturalizing applicants with criminal records who should have been barred] may indeed have occurred, but not because of political interference. Rather, it was the result of simple bungling. You are told now that you shouldn’t take the political meddling … seriously not because it didn’t happen but because it was ineffectual. Now there’s a comfort.
Small comfort, indeed.
In April 1997, DOJ Inspector General Michael Bromwich announced the initiation of an OIG investigation into CUSA.
Of course, there is nothing new under the sun regarding an administration perverting the naturalization process for political gain. On May 3, 1798, almost two hundred years earlier, U.S. Representative John Allen (Federalist-Conn.) “alluded to the vast number of naturalizations which lately took place in [Washington, D.C.] to support a particular party in a particular election” during the U.S. House of Representatives’ floor debate on the Naturalization Act of June 18, 1798.
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