A shorter path to citizenship, but not for all
Until recently, the glut of pending cases was so large that President Bush’s vow in 2001 to cut the standard wait to six months or less nationwide seemed unreachable. Now immigration officials say they have more than met that goal, shrinking the average wait to five months for a citizenship decision. And no district shows more dramatic improvement than New York, where the wait has officially shrunk to 2.8 months.But the numbers are not quite as rosy as they seem. To accomplish their mission, officials at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services explain, they identified and stopped counting thousands of backlogged cases that they now define as outside the agency’s control, mostly those delayed by unexplained lags in standard security clearances by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. NINA BERNSTEIN in the New York Times.