U.S. Immigration Policy and National Security

MODERATOR: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Foreign Press Center. For this afternoon's briefing, we have Dr. Emilio Gonzalez, who is the Director of the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services. He's been in that position since December of 2005. I believe you all have his bio. I won't go through that. He'll start off with a short statement on CIS and then be happy to take your questions.

Dr. Gonzalez.

MR. GONZALEZ: Can you hear me okay? Thank you very much. I just wanted to start off with a couple of minutes of introductory remarks and I'll take your questions. I'm much better at this in a give and take than in prepared remarks, mainly because I'm kind of a dull person to begin with. But anyway, it's a real honor for me to be here and thank you for sharing your time with me.

I've actually been at USCIS since January, which is two months. The learning curve is huge; lots to do. It's an agency with 15,000 employees, offices around the world. At a time in our country's history where immigration is relevant and everything you see nowadays domestically, on the Hill, revolves in one way or another with immigration policy here in the United States. So I consider myself fortunate to have been selected for this position, to be at the best job in Washington at the best possible time.

From the minute I got here I set for myself four major goals that I'll share with you and then from then on we'll just take it as it comes. One is to complete the backlog in immigration benefits, which I'm sure you all know about. We're on track to do that. We hope to have it completed by October of this year.

The second thing is a transformation process within the agency. We're going to recreate the agency from the bottom up to include, not just how we look but where we operate and how we conduct our business.

The third aspect is to at least prepare ourselves intellectually for a temporary guest worker program, which may very well be coming out of Congress this year.

And lastly is to address our budget. Right now as a fee-based agency, we do not charge the cost of doing business. So as a result, my job is to avoid a budget deficit now as opposed to when one comes along, projected in a couple of years.

So those are the four major tasks that I've given myself and trying to make sure that they don't overlap on each other and that we can do them simultaneously, but be able to address each and every one in such a way that it adds to our mission within Homeland Security and that it adds to our other mission of conducting ourselves in an efficient, open and transparent manner. So that having been said, I'm all yours.

QUESTION: Jose Lopez from the Mexican news agency. As you know, there are many initiatives in Congress, not only about the temporary worker program but also a couple of them relating to the legalization of millions of immigrants in this country. I'm wondering can you tell us if -- what if these bills theoretically could pass Congress, could the USCIS be prepared to deal with potentially millions of people that would possibly be eligible to become citizens of the U.S.?

MR. GONZALEZ: Do you want the answer in Spanish or English?

QUESTION: Whatever.

MODERATOR: Let's do it in English so everyone understands.

MR. GONZALEZ: Right now there is no temporary worker program and I think that's important. It's being debated in Congress. There are ideas that have been put on the table, but at the end of the day there is no temporary worker program. That's not to say there won't be one, but there is not one now.

Due diligence tells me that more likely than not we will get something, therefore, we need to at least start preparing ourselves intellectually on how we would accomplish that. We have an excellent force of professional immigration officers, many of them were in service the last time where we had a large influx of applications for naturalization, for regularization, if you will. So we're looking at what went right, what went wrong, what we need to do to make it a streamlined, yet secure operation.

So to answer your question, there is no temporary worker program. Are we ready for it? I think we are. We would need some additional tools that would address things like procurement, like contracting. We would have to see how much would be outsourced; how much would we not. But I think that given the right set of tools and with an appropriate lead-in period, yes, yes, we are ready for it.

MODERATOR: We have a follow-up.

QUESTION: Yeah, hello. But I'm talking also about the possibility of realizing, not only temporarily, but permanently, these workers of the McCain-Kennedy bill proposes.

MR. GONZALEZ: Well, temporary -- illegal immigrants who fall under any kind of temporary guest worker program are by definition legal, whether that transfers over to some kind of a fast track to naturalization or to citizenship, I've not seen that, quite frankly. And I don't know whether that will be a component.

MODERATOR: Go to the third row here, please.

QUESTION: Thank you. I'm Hind from Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper. And my question was don't you think that our restriction towards Arabs are very much tougher than any other country? Why is that? Is that Arabs being terrorists, all of them, and how long do you think this will last?

MR. GONZALEZ: I'm not sure I understand the question -- restrictions against Arabs?

QUESTION: Yes. I mean, for example, an Arab who would even get a visa today in the United States gets up to two months just to do fingerprints, while any other place it could take up to two weeks.

MR. GONZALEZ: You're talking overseas or here?

QUESTION: Overseas and here -- the Arabs (inaudible) who's coming (inaudible).

MR. GONZALEZ: I can't speak for the State Department, but I can speak for my agency and nobody's been targeted. You can accuse us of certain inefficiencies because of the large universe of people that we deal with, but no one group or another has been targeted for extra time or extra scrutiny. Each case comes as it is on its own merit. And if there are delays, more often than not, I would tell you that it has to do with, at least from my agency, with the office that you applied to as opposed to what ethnic background you are. I can't speak to the State Department. I can't speak to visa issuances overseas, but I can certainly speak about the agency I'm responsible for.

MODERATOR: Any other questions? Yes, sir.

QUESTION: China News Service. As I know the green card process has been delayed for quite a long time, so what measures will you take to accelerate the process?

MR. GONZALEZ: You mean issuance of green cards?

QUESTION: Green cards, yes.

MR. GONZALEZ: The request for legal permanent residence, which is a green card, and the request for citizenship -- request for naturalization -- are the two permanent features of our immigration benefits services and as a result, we take great scrutiny in those. And if some are delayed more than others, I will tell you that I would err on the side of caution. I'm not going to sit here and say, you know, each individual case, but because those are the two most important and permanent of benefits that you can get, I've instructed my agency to make sure that before issuing those benefits that you do the right due diligence and that you make sure that these individuals who are applying are indeed worthy and eligible for those benefits. Sometimes it gets delayed; sometimes it doesn't.

I think it's important to note that we process so many people that about 85 percent to 95 percent of the people we process get their benefits in a timely manner. It's that remaining -- I would say 10 percent, some say it might even be 5 percent. But the universe is so big that one percent -- I'm sorry, that 10 percent could very well be 100,000 people. It could be 75,000 people. That's a large number but it's a small percentage. But that's a function of the fact that this is the largest immigration agency in the world.

So as a result, now -- hey, everybody wants to come here, and we understand that this is a very attractive place to come, but we also have limited personnel and we have a limited amount of time. So we're going to be extra careful on those benefits which have the longest terms. But I will tell you that as far as -- this is part of the backlog that we talked about. And by October, we expect to get most of those backlog cases done and be ready on time.

Yes, sir.

QUESTION: Can you tell me the usual waiting time for individual cases-- three years or five years? I mean the common waiting time, the usual waiting time.

MR. GONZALEZ: I'll give you an answer that's almost as confusing. It all depends on where you file, because there are some places -- I'll give you an example -- in New York, which is a very, very busy office, which is a large office but has a very, very large universe of applicants coming through, the wait has been unacceptably long. In some cases, it takes years, which is why we've undertaken this backlog elimination program. But there are some offices in the central part of the United States and the western part of the United States where you can file and it's a relatively painless process. And if you have all of your documentation and all of your background checks come back okay, you could be a citizen in six months. So it's a function of the office and it's a function of the backlog and it's a function of the universe of applicants in that particular region.

And because the offices have jurisdictions over the place -- I take that back -- each office has jurisdictional responsibility. So if you're from New York City, for example, you have to apply in New York City. You're not allowed to apply in Seattle or in Dallas or in Minneapolis, for example. So it is a function of the universe of clients that an office has, so it's hard to get an exact, you know, average month of how long it takes to process a naturalization or a green card. Because even if I gave you a month, it probably would be skewed based on the location.

MODERATOR: Let's go to the third row here.

QUESTION: Samuel Tesfaye from Sub-Saharan Informer. How long -- I'm going to ask the same question. Sometimes, you know, people would -- the variation of -- or the duration would be a year to three years.

MR. GONZALEZ: Correct.

QUESTION: Let's say if somebody applied for asylum and then if they want to change that to green card, the same applicants would get the green card maybe after three or five or six years, so what variation is there? Is it only because a personnel problem or is there another --

MR. GONZALEZ: The asylum cases come in -- people request asylum, if asylum is granted, you can then adjust to a permanent resident status after a certain amount of time. But again, a lot of it depends. And it isn't a personnel function; it's a volume function. And a lot of times, depending on the office you go into, you find that the wait is fairly significant. It's unacceptably significant and that's why we instituted a backlog elimination program, where over the last three years we have been putting manpower and resources and money into those offices that have these backlogs, shifting people from offices that don't have backlogs, for example, into offices that do, so they can adjudicate these cases more quickly with an end state of having everybody adjudicated within six months from the time of application. But again, that six-month period is premised on the fact that you have a fairly clean file, that you bring in all your paperwork, that there's no request for additional information, that we do a background and a fingerprint check and everything comes back okay. In that case it will be fairly smooth.

But that backlog elimination program will probably end sometime around October. The reason I say probably is because I've instructed our staff not to cut corners security-wise just to try and make the numbers. I think you can do good expeditious work and I think you can do security conscious work at the same time. At the time when those two no longer intersect, then you err on the side of security. And if it takes a little while, if it takes an extra month or two or three, so be it, but we're going to do that to make sure that the individual we have before us is, indeed, worthy and eligible for the benefits that they're asking for.

MODERATOR: We have a follow-up here and then we'll go to New York.

QUESTION: I've got here the fact sheet. Is this a quarter or -- I mean, it says we conducted 135,000 national security --

MR. GONZALEZ: That's not a quota. What it is, it's a snapshot of the kind of work that we do in one day. We run 135,000 name checks a day, 35 million a year -- that's huge. That's huge. That's just to give you -- and it's not a quota, that's just to give you an idea of what this agency does, on average, in one working day.

MODERATOR: We have a question in New York, please.

QUESTION: Yeah. Hi, my name is Ollie Herralla and I come from Helsinki-based Finnish Business Daily. I have a question like, why do you think it's important to offer these temporary work permits to millions of illegal immigrants? Why is that?

MR. GONZALEZ: Why do I think it's important?

QUESTION: Yeah.

MR. GONZALEZ: Well, very simple. This is an opportunity for us to address the obvious, and that is that we have a universe of about 11 to 12 million people living in this country illegally, but nevertheless play an integral part of our society. And I think we as a nation have to come together and find ways to regularize their status in a way where they come in from the shadows and we can account for each and every one of these individuals, see who they are, see what they look like, see where they live, see where they work. I consider this to be a national security issue, not an employment issue.

MODERATOR: This row here.

QUESTION: You partially answered the question about the 11 million --

MODERATOR: Please identify --

QUESTION: Okay. I'm sorry. Aziz Fahmy, Middle East Broadcasting Center.

MR. GONZALEZ: Yes, sir.

QUESTION: I said you partially answered my question about how many actually illegal immigrants are here.

MR. GONZALEZ: Well, we don't know how many. I mean, if we did, they wouldn't be illegal, right? So we don't know how many, but that's a generally accepted figure that is used today -- 11 million.

QUESTION: But would you say that this trend is increasing and how fast it is increasing and what is the overall strategy? Are you -- is your whole strategy is to observe all of them or to do exactly what?

MR. GONZALEZ: To absorb, you mean?

QUESTION: I mean to accept all of -- or to legalize all of them, rather.

MR. GONZALEZ: Well, remember that the plan, at least what's been proposed is to find a way to incorporate all of these people here that are living in the shadows, to account for them, to register them, to get their biometric information and their photographs and their addresses and their places of work. In a big picture, the plan is to match a willing worker with a willing employer. And once you bring the two of those together, then that worker is able to have many more rights than they have right now. They'll be required to be paid a minimum wage. They'll be allowed to be a legal and full member of our society and they don't have to walk around looking over their shoulder all the time. That's what a temporary guest worker program will do. As to the mechanics or the specifics of those programs, I don't know, because I haven't seen it. It's being debated right now on the Hill.

But the intent here is to account for everybody and to account for everybody in such a way where it's not considered a negative to apply for this, but seen as a positive. You're allowed to legalize your status and that of your family, if they are here. You're allowed to earn current wages. You're allowed to live your life the same way everybody else here lives their life, but for a finite period of time, as dictated by whatever congressional authorization.

MODERATOR: We have a follow-up.

QUESTION: Okay. Well, does this mean that everybody here is -- illegally, of course, is not paying taxes and is -- so the fact that if they become legal and they pay taxes, is that a factor of the strategy?

MR. GONZALEZ: I'm not sure I follow -- a lot of people here pay taxes. They just pay them with -- illegally. They pay them under false social security numbers or so forth and so on. If you're here illegally, under any guest worker program, you will have all of the responsibilities of everybody who lives here, which is to pay taxes. But you also have the added benefit of regularizing your status within the country, so that you're no longer considered illegal, as long as you're part of this program.

MODERATOR: Question in the back.

QUESTION: Thank you. Neisa Condemaita from Azteca America (In Spanish.)

MR. GONZALEZ: Well, just -- is it okay if I do it this way?

MODERATOR: Yeah.

MR. GONZALEZ: (In Spanish.)

MODERATOR: If I could ask you just to summarize the question and answer for our non-Spanish speaking --

MR. GONZALEZ: Sure. She just asked what I thought the cost would be of a temporary worker program. And I told her that it would be very difficult because we're a fee-based agency. So right now, we cost the taxpayers little if nothing because we generate our income based on the fees we charge for the services we offer. If there's a temporary worker program, there would obviously be a fee attached to that and we would hope to recover the cost of doing business in the fees that we charge the applicant. So until we know what the temporary worker program will look like, then we'll figure out what the actual fees will be that are charged and so forth. But we still operate under the assumption that we’ll continue to be a fee-based agency and will not cost Congress anything or, if anything, very little.

MODERATOR: Third row here.

QUESTION: According to a new -- the bill -- that's debated in the Congress, all illegal immigrants would be deported directly, not just like right now they were contained in the jail for a long time and then go to the courts to determine if he should be deported. And if this bill -- can the law, do you think -- is it possible to enforce it? If it cannot be enforced, do you think it's a good bill?

MR. GONZALEZ: Are you talking about the House bill?

QUESTION: Yeah. The House bill. Maybe the Senate bill --

MR. GONZALEZ: Yeah.

QUESTION: At this point --

MR. GONZALEZ: The House bill is what it is -- it's a House bill. And right now, the Senate is working on its version and they'll attempt to reconcile both bills in conference later on. I don't want to speculate what's going to happen or who would go where because, quite frankly, what we have right now is nothing. We don't have an immigration reform law. We have what we think -- or what the House has told us they would like to see in it. Right now, the Senate is working on what they want to see in it. And at some point, probably sometime this summer, both of those will be reconciled. If we keep our fingers crossed, we may have -- I have to say "may" -- we may have some immigration reform legislation before the end of the year.

MODERATOR: Any other questions? Okay. Time for two more.

QUESTION: Do you have an office which handles exceptional cases? And let me give you a scenario. Let's say a mom or a dad comes to the U.S. and they are (inaudible) with their son or daughter. And can you -- speed up in order to join the family (inaudible)?

MR. GONZALEZ: Is this personal? (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Just giving you a scenario.

MR. GONZALEZ: Yeah. You know, do we have a special office, the real answer is no. Okay. I get a lot of these cases personally where people will be send me e-mails and send me faxes and usually it's some awful dreadful case where a spouse has been separated from his family, from his wife and children. It could either be something that happened 20 years ago. Sometimes you find situations where spouses, an American spouse marries a foreigner and the foreigner didn't tell his his wife that he's illegal. And he's been living here happily for x-number of years and all of a sudden, our computers are now talking to each other and, boom, you get stopped for a parking ticket or an auto accident and you get deported. So those cases happen and they're brought to my attention sometimes.

This is -- you don't need to write this down, because I don't need my e-mail out there. But in some of the egregious cases, I actually do those personally and I have people that will help me. Sometimes members of Congress will call and say, hey, we have a particular case, like the one you just mentioned. So I guess to answer your question, the special office would probably be through their member of Congress that can have us look at a case, because if not, then everybody who's file is three days late or something, they start inundating my office and then my computer crashes.

MODERATOR: Time for one last one here.

QUESTION: Ouaffe Jaada from Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. After September 11th, the USCIS request for all illegal immigrants or even legal immigrants to register in the immigration offices, then after that, when they went to register, they deport, most of them, when they are not legal, or otherwise they take them to the jail and they arrest them for, like, years. After one year, they can see the judge. So that takes too long.

MR. GONZALEZ: Well, you have a lot of pieces to that. One, USCIS doesn't arrest anybody. We don't have arrest powers. Second --

QUESTION: ICE.

MR. GONZALEZ: ICE, that's the right church, wrong pew. Okay? But I can't really speak to that period in time, because I wasn't here then, so I'm not quite sure of the specifics. There may have been some instances where people were brought in or asked to come in to provide additional documentation and maybe the documentation wasn't there or it wasn't correct or it was fraudulent. And they were referred to ICE. Unless you give me some specifics, I don't think I can answer your question. But we don't arrest people.

QUESTION: Yes. But the request for them to go under and register after September 11, and there is so many students -- they went and they register in the immigration offices, then some of them they arrest them just like that, you know, because for being, like, they have expired I-20 or like some reasons like that.

MR. GONZALEZ: Yeah, again, I can't speak to that period of time other then to say that obviously everybody's sensitivities were raised after 9/11 and there may well have been a lot of people here with expired student visas, in which case maybe actions were taken to expedite getting them out of the country. But again, unless -- I'm not really familiar with that two months on the job, you know.

MODERATOR: We can maybe take your question --

MR. GONZALEZ: Sure, and get back to you.

MODERATOR: -- on the numbers of people from that -- from the period of time you're talking about because I think it's important to talk about the actual number.

Any other questions? Time for one last one. Okay, one last one there. Thank you.

QUESTION: Yes, my name is Jose Diaz with Reforma newspaper from Mexico. And other than the requested new resources for managing the verification system in case it is expanded, is there enough resources to address a guest worker program if it happens to pass both at the conference -- in the Senate and House?

MR. GONZALEZ: When I lived in Mexico I used to read Reforma, so I know your paper well.

You know, I can tell you right now that we are sufficiently organized. We have the supervisory personnel, we have the talent and we have the institutional memory to do this right. Whether we will need additional resources, be it an upfront authorization or whether we're going to need additional funding for equipment modernization, that's something that I can't talk to right now because I don't know what the law is going to be like.

I can tell you, for example, that right now we outsource a fair amount of what we do. We have application support centers that take fingerprints and take photographs and other biometric information. Those are all outsourced. We operate them. We provide the quality control and the program integrity and the supervision, but those are all outsourced. So that's not to say that those same stations couldn't be expanded, couldn't be multiplied, so there are any number of permutations out there that you can use.

But without seeing exactly two things -- one, the scope of the temporary worker program and also the length of the registration period -- it's very, very difficult to say, well, are you ready? Well, ready for what? Until we know what that "what" is, I can't really answer your question with any detail. But we are thinking about it. We are looking ahead. It would be wrong for us not to be sort of thinking about which direction, what if this, what if that, and we do that internally because we don't want to get caught off guard and be surprised by anything. But as far as taking that final step or that next step to say, okay, we're going to reorganize for a temporary guest worker program, no, we're not there yet.

MODERATOR: Thank you all very much.

MR. GONZALEZ: Thank you.