The American Spectator

p> MEISSNER’S SHOP br> In his capacity as a senior White House official in the Clinton administration, now-Rep. Rahm Emanuel actively participated in putting together a strategy to fast-track legal and illegal immigrants through any means possible for citizenship so that they could vote for the Democratic Party. This, according to a scathing, but long-forgotten report out of the Department of Justice. /p>

As debate rages about Democratic intentions on the immigration legislation, it would be useful for all to turn to a July 2000 Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General report entitled “An Investigation of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Citizenship USA Initiative.”

The report was an indictment not only of Clinton White House interference in the Immigration and Naturalization process, but also of White House interference in the INS’s Citizenship USA (CUSA) initiative of 1996.

CUSA outsourced some INS citizenship requirement programs (English language testing, for example), and was designed to speed up citizenship opportunities so that newly minted citizens could vote for the Democratic Party, if not in 1996, then in 1998 and 2000.

p>According to the report: br> /p>

Beginning in 1993, the demand for naturalization began to increase at a staggering rate and application backlogs developed at INS offices throughout the country. By June 1995, INS was receiving applications for naturalization at a rate twice as high as it had the previous year. INS projected that without a serious effort to reduce this application backlog, by the summer of 1996 an eligible applicant would have to wait three years from the date of application to be naturalized as a U.S. citizen.

On August 31, 1995, INS Commissioner Doris M. Meissner announced “Citizenship USA” (CUSA), an initiative to reduce the backlog of pending naturalization applications to the point where an eligible applicant would be naturalized within six months of application. The goal of the initiative was to reach this level of processing “currency” within one year. The effort focused on the workload in the five districts in the country — dubbed “Key Cities” for CUSA — which then had the largest application backlogs: Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Miami, and Chicago. To reach the CUSA goal, INS dramatically increased its naturalization workforce in the Key Cities, opened new offices dedicated to naturalization adjudication, and engaged new processing strategies in an effort to “streamline” the naturalization process.

br> Meissner drew the White House into the mix via a working group she co-chaired with Carol Rasco