Featured News 2013 Government Takes a Close Look at Denaturalization

Government Takes a Close Look at Denaturalization

Immigrants who become citizens in the United States can only obtain this privilege through the act of naturalization. In most cases, naturalization is contingent. This means that if a person commits a national security offense after being naturalized into the United States, he or she can lose his or her citizenship. Foreign immigrants who want to remain in good standing with America must act as upstanding citizens and fulfill the vows that they make when they are naturalized. Unfortunately, not all citizens are able to do this. Instead, there are many immigrants who get in trouble with the law and are at risk to deportation as a result.

Typically, there are crimes that the government regards as more serious and worthy of denaturalization. These include terrorism, theft of classified information, and espionage among others. While many people who commit these crimes are sent back to their homelands in short order, there are times that the criminals are allowed to stay in the United States after they are released from prison. This is often because of the denaturalization process. It can be long and complicated to denaturalize an immigrant, and this will cause the government to save themselves time and instead allow the citizen to continue living in the United States.

The Center for Immigration Studies is calling for a faster process to denaturalize criminals in the United States. The current process of denaturalizing a citizen involves the federal court system. A federal court prosecutor has to bring charges against the convicted naturalized citizen on a case-by-case basis. This is time consuming, and many cases get neglecting because the federal prosecutors don’t have the ability to take all of them on. The Center for Immigration Studies believes that if they worked at it, the government could create a more effective process by which dangerous criminals could be deported back to their country of origin.

The Director of policy studies at CIS, Jessica Vaughn, says that the government needs to go through and revamp the strategy in a systematic basis. She says that it is surprisingly difficult to denaturalize citizens. She argues that if the government is not going to do a better job at screening immigrants before allowing them to undergo naturalization, then it needs to make an easier and faster process that will enable them to denaturalized in short order. According to Fox News, over 6.5 million people have been naturalized in the last decade. With so many people becoming legal citizens every single year, the process to denaturalize offenders has gotten backed up and almost slowed to a stop.

Despite the fact that the CIS thinks that naturalization is too easy and that screenings are too lenient, many foreigners argue the opposite. In fact, many immigrants say that the naturalization process in the United States is already too onerous and more restrictions would prohibit people who want to become U.S. citizens from fulfilling their goal. Some advocates for Muslim immigrants say that men and women from the Middle East have had an especially hard time become naturalized citizens since the 2001 Twin Towers attack.

These advocates fear that an easier denaturalization process could make it difficult for these people to obtain citizenship. There are some political activists who argue that the easing process of denaturalization would lead to discrimination and abuse from government officials. Some argue that if a person goes through the long and arduous journey to become a citizen in the United States, then that person shouldn’t have the threat of an easy revocation hanging over his or her head. If you need more information about this then contact an immigration attorney today. If you think you are at risk to denaturalization, you may need a hardworking and dedicated immigration attorney on your side to use this directory to locate a lawyer near you!

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