Like her fellow teens, Viviane Cortez enjoys going out with friends to movies, shopping and school events at Seminole High School, where she is a senior. But she wasn’t at school last Friday. Instead, she was taking part in a true-tolife civics lesson, becoming a proud citizen of the United States.
Because she has been in the States for nine years, brought over from Colombia by her dad, she doesn’t think her new status will change her as a person. “I consider myself a regular teenager. I do the same things as any other U.S. citizen,” she said, just prior to the naturalization ceremony.
While Viviane admitted the occasion stirred a mix of nervousness and jubilation, it was her dad who was the most excited of all. “It is a great day,” said Julio Cortez. He had come to the United States in 1993 for a visit, but stayed for the opportunity. Now his daughter has the same. As a U.S. citizen, Viviane will be eligible for college scholarship that otherwise wouldn’t be available to her. This will help her realize her dream of next year attending the University of Central Florida.
Also, she is already planning a visit next summer to her native country and to her large family of relatives, whom she hasn’t seen for six years. Under her previous resident status, if she had risked going to Colombia, Viviane may not have been allowed to return to the States. Now she is a citizen of the world. For the 29 children who became newly ordained Americans — ranging in age from 8-18 and from 11 different countries —it was a day of opportunity for all, and a time of celebration.
The children, some of them adopted from other countries, hail from Colombia, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, Panama, Philippines, Trinidad, Venezuela, and Vietnam. And the naturalization ceremony was special for another reason. This was also the grand-opening event of Orlando’s new U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field office in Orlando, located on Lee Vista Boulevard.
The new full-service USCIS office is part of a nationwide effort to centralize operations to reduce the backlog of legalization and citizenship requests. In the next three years, USCIS, a part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, will open 36 new or renovated facilities across the country Among these will be six in Florida, including four in Miami, a testament to the Sunshine State’s continued standing as a main port of entry for immigrants.
Presiding over the dual naturalization and ribbon-cutting ceremonies was Jonathan “Jock” Scharfen, USCIS national director, who explained the need for the new facilities. “We want to provide better service, and you can’t do that in the older buildings,” he said. The new field office in East Orlando will consolidate and streamline customer services, responding to the challenge of keeping up with the millions who come knocking on America’s door.
USCIS receives up to 8 million applications and petitions every year. In fiscal year 2007, the U.S. received an unprecedented number of naturalization applications. These 1.4 million immigrants, double the number of the previous year, included more than 20,000 adoptions. This created a huge backlog of cases and long delays in the naturalization process, Scharfen said. Currently, on average, it takes more than nine months for this process to be completed in the Orlando office, and up to a full year across the country.
Reducing these processing times is of critical importance to immigrants, whose lives are on hold until a determination on their request has been issued, he said. Scharfen anticipates that the new Orlando field office, which can handle 450 applications a day, will be able to further cut down this processing period to five months.
Moreover, the time needed for an adjustment of status will be even less, he said. “We’re the greatest immigration nation in the world and we should have the greatest immigration service,” he said. The new Orlando field office, housed in a 37,000-square-foot modern edifice, also has doubled its number of employees in the last four years, up to 66. Besides being good for customer service and employee comfort, the building also is a friend of the earth.
Earning a Silver LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification, the building boasts furniture made from recycled materials (including sunflower seeds), energy-efficient systems (electrical lighting that automatically supplements natural light) and better workplace design. To help pay for the expanded USCIS and its new facilities, the cost of U.S. citizenship has significantly been increased. Since 9/11, the naturalization application fee has gone from $410 to $675.
Scharfen concedes that when Lady Liberty invites foreign lands to “give me your tired, your poor,” the added cost to immigrants is not without regret. “We understand that this is not an insignificant amount, but it is needed for us to become a modern, efficient service. Otherwise, we would not be able to reduce our backlog, which has really bedeviled this agency,” he said.
Ana Santiago of the USCIS regional office explained that it had been decades since a cost analysis of the naturalization application process had been conducted. As a result, the USCIS had been operating at a loss for years. Because the USCIS cannot, by law, use taxpayer money, it became necessary to have the agency do a more realistic job of paying for itself. The new fee, she said, reflects the actual cost of the application process.
In conjunction with the higher costs, Santiago added that the USCIS has expanded the number of application fees that are waived due to extraordinary circumstances, such as human trafficking, abused women, etc. But for many like Viviane Cortez, you cannot put a price on freedom. “I’m a citizen of the best country in the world,” she said.
