WASHINGTON: A top official in the Department of Homeland Security assured a group of business leaders on Sept. 21 that his agency will eliminate the backlog of immigration applications by the end of 2006, fulfilling a promise President Bush made in 2001.

Currently, almost two million immigration cases are snarled in a bureaucratic traffic jam that has some applicants waiting well over six months to receive an answer on their immigration request. Applicants range from refugees seeking political asylum in the United States and those applying for citizenship, to Americans seeking inter-country adoptions.

Eduardo Aguirre, director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services agency within DHS, boasted that he has made great inroads into this massive backlog of immigration requests since taking the job 15 months ago. “The progress of the last eight months has been nothing short of spectacular,” Aguirre said, comparing the reduction of the backlog to the agency’s Mount Everest as a goal to be conquered.

Aguirre reported that the backlog has been reduced from almost four million in January to less than two million today. Sixty percent of cases in 2003 were considered backlogged, or pending for more than six months. At the end of last year, the agency finally began to complete more applications than it received, he said.

In early 2001, President Bush vowed to reduce processing times to six months by 2006. After the Sept. 11 terror attacks that year, however, immigration officials began making more thorough background checks of aspiring immigrants, a development that worsened the backlog.

Despite the added difficulty, Aguirre said his agency would still meet Bush’s goal while, at the same time, never sacrificing security.

Aguirre attributed the progress to greater focus by the agency on tackling the problem, improved productivity by employees and improvements in technology.

The agency now accepts most applications over the Internet, and allows aspiring immigrants and others to check the status of their case online. As little as two years ago, all immigration applications required the filing of considerable paperwork.

The agency receives roughly six million applications a year. Out of that total, the agency grants citizenship to 500,000 applicants and awards one million green cards enabling aliens to live and work permanently in the United States, Aguirre said.

(By Permission, The New York Times)