Editorial: Close, but no citizenship

Sunday, Dec. 2, 2007 | 1:15 a.m.

A Las Vegas woman who passed her citizenship test more than two years ago is still waiting for the day when she can attend a naturalization ceremony.

One last detail - a name check by the FBI - is the source of the holdup.

Rather than wait indefinitely for her name to clear the FBI's Central Records System, the woman, Dagmar Adiba Schiefer, filed a lawsuit in federal court, a route being chosen now by thousands of other people in similar situations.

Schiefer, 43, was born in Iraq while her German father was stationed there on business. He died when she was a child and her mother remarried an American citizen and moved here from South America in 1978.

Schiefer was content with her legal status as a permanent resident until meeting her future husband in 2003 while on a business trip to India. Citizenship would make the process for his joining her go much more quickly.

Name checks can reveal if a person has a criminal background or represents a threat to national security. They are required by dozens of federal agencies, including Citizenship and Immigration Services, and thousands of government and private employers across the country.

So delays are understandable, given the volume involved and that the individual checks themselves undergo several stages - primary and secondary checks plus checks on variations of the name. Additionally, in many cases, the names trace to paper files that have not yet been uploaded - files stored around the country that have to be manually pulled and transmitted.

Still, the FBI's Web site says the vast majority of requests are completed in fewer than 60 days. In our view, the thousands of people now affected by excessive delays are at least owed a written explanation, or, preferably, an expedited result of their name check.

They shouldn't have to go to court, and wait even more months, to get on with their lives.