Booming economy causes immigration backlog

Tuesday, July 4, 2000 | 10:50 a.m.

A skyrocketing number of international arrivals is overwhelming the Las Vegas office of the INS.

Since 1995, the number of staff serving the nation's fastest-growing boomtown has stayed flat.

Naturalization and permanent residency applications, however, have more than doubled, making the waiting times for some documents four times longer than what they were.

Naturalization applicants wait 390 to 450 days for their paperwork to be processed in Las Vegas, an April survey by the American Immigration Lawyers Association found.

The typical wait in Phoenix was 90 to 120 days. In Los Angeles, it was from 30 to 90 days.

"It's growth probably more than anything, the growth of Nevada and job opportunities," Karen Dorman, the officer in charge of the Las Vegas office, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Applications for permanent residency and for permission to leave the United States also are frequently delayed, officials said.

The long waits are keeping immigrants in limbo, stressing marriages and preventing applicants from seeing relatives outside the United States because international travel requires INS permission.

"The people change, but the lines never change," said Edwin Prud'homme, chairman of the law association's Nevada chapter. "Some days I come home frustrated with a stomach ache."

Immigrants nationwide face unprecedented delays in winning U.S. residency.

The INS has approximately 1.35 million pending naturalization cases and 1 million outstanding permanent residency applications.

The agency is swamped by record backlogs of applications mostly because of a series of Congressional mandates offering amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, INS officials said.

"These are historically the highest levels that these backlogs have ever been at, and they are far higher than the norm," INS spokesman Russ Bergeron said.