Citizenship on hold for many Illegal Immigrants

In Washington, President Bush made a budget proposal asking Congress to spend money to help root out illegal workers from businesses, but he did not request more money to help legal immigrants become American citizens more quickly. In his budget proposal issued this week, Bush asked for $100 million to expand E-Verify, the system employers use to check whether they are hiring documented workers. He didn’t ask Congress to allocate money to chip away at millions of citizenship and other immigration applications that flooded the government last summer, before an increase in the agency’s filing fees. Instead, Citizenship and Immigration Services will rely on $468 million in fees to pay for reducing the backlog by 2010. That money is a portion of the total fees that came in with the applications this summer (AP). 7.7 million applications for various immigration benefits were submitted to Citizenship and Immigration Services in this year, that’s 1.4 million more than last year (AP). This is a little surprising to me, as a nation that many people dream of coming to for a better life, we are doing very little to help them actually acquire their citizenship. Almost everyone that is considered an American was, at some point in their family’s history, an immigrant that came here hoping for the same things that our ancestry did, and yet we do nothing to help them get documented correctly. In my opinion, I believe that no one should be allowed to be here without U.S. citizenship or a passport/visa and for companies to hire the illegal immigrants is only making the situation worse. On the other hand, everyone should be given an opportunity after all, America is the land of opportunity but to be privileged to this one should be “legal”. (words: 295)

MSNBC Article