An immigration balancing act

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It's usually thought of as the kinder, gentler arm of immigration, but U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services helps nab an average of five criminals a day, including the occasional murder suspect -- a point that agency Director Emilio Gonzalez underscores when he discusses the USCIS role in the Homeland Security Department.

A little more than a year ago, Mr. Gonzalez took over the agency in charge of granting citizenship, green cards signifying a legal permanent immigrant and visas for work or study. In that year, he has started a pilot program to test a new naturalized citizenship exam, finished off a backlog of millions of benefit applications and created several offices that would put national security first at the agency.

But those who interact most with USCIS say Mr. Gonzalez's tenure will succeed or fail on his latest proposal to increase fees an average of more than 60 percent in order to finish the transformation from a much-maligned 20th-century paper-based bureaucracy into 21st-century streamlined, self-sufficient, services-based enterprise.

"All those people that are out there complaining about long waits, dingy buildings, poorly trained personnel, this is an opportunity for us to take those into account and fix it," Mr. Gonzalez said last week from his office overlooking Massachusetts Avenue and Union Station.

"We have been woefully underfunded, even under the days of [the former Immigration and Naturalization Service] and the Justice Department," he said in defending the proposed new fees. "There's absolutely no way I could in good conscience continue to head an agency that's treading water. We're coasting. And when you're coasting, you're going backwards; nobody ever coasted uphill."

It's a touchy issue that goes straight to the heart of legal immigration and who should pick up the tab for applying.

His proposal is already meeting resistance on Capitol Hill, where some Democrats called on him to rethink how the agency does business.

"Many in the immigrant community see the increase for what it is -- increasing the cost of the American dream, telling those least fortunate among us they probably need not apply," said Rep. John Conyers Jr., Michigan Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

But as a Cuban-born immigrant whose parents brought him to the U.S. as a child, Mr. Gonzalez considers himself an advocate for the immigrant community and says he hopes "to convey that immigration, done properly, works."

And as a former Army officer, he is fond of saying there is a reason that his agency is part of Homeland Security. He takes pride in the fact that his agency turns over an average of five names a day to law-enforcement agencies -- for everything up to and including those being sought on murder charges.