There are fewer immigrants applying for US citizenship, yet the line is not getting shorter as a consequence. There have been fewer applications for naturalization in 2018 so far, with the first three months of the year seeing 70,000 fewer than in 2017, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services data.
Despite the decrease in applications for US citizenship, the number of cases pending is still increasing, with the figure rising by over 20,000 in the first three months of the year, compared to the last quarter of 2017. The increase in the backlog of applications for US citizenship is part of a broader and long-running pattern in the immigration system of the US that affects everything from processing times for some US visas to immigration court dockets.
The increase in the number of immigration cases pending predates the election of the often-controversial President Donald Trump. Numbers have ballooned from less than 300,000 in 2013 to over 520,000 in 2016, with applications outpacing US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) ability to cope with them.
Michael Bars, a spokesman for USCIS, says that the agency is handling the naturalization of citizens at the same pace it always has, in spite of more time spent screening cases for fraud, as per the President’s orders. Bars said that the agency naturalized over 716,000 immigrants last year, and is on course to beat its five-year output levels as of 2018’s first two quarters.