Remaking the INS
Immigrants aren’t “customers” and citizenship isn’t a “service.”

By John J. Miller, NR national political reporter
December 18, 2001 1:20 p.m.

he Bush administration's plan to restructure the Immigration and Naturalization Service contains many welcome ingredients — but also a significant flaw. A proposal released last month seeks to establish a separate Bureau of Immigration Services. Yet the document outlining the plan seems to forget that naturalization and citizenship are something more than "services" which the government must deliver to "customers."

Yet this is the bland language spoken by the 40-page document that describes the restructuring. John Fonte of the Hudson Institute has put it through the ringer: He counts 81 references to "services" and 24 to "customers" — but only 4 to "citizens" and none to "citizenship."

Nobody should regard the INS as a sister bureaucracy of the DMV, issuing citizenship papers as if they were drivers licenses. So it's disheartening to read a document that seems to discuss it in the pale terms of reinventing government rather than the vigorous ones of American patriotism. As Fonte writes: "Treating immigrants who hope to become American citizens with real respect means seeing them as future fellow citizens (i.e. as 'candidates for citizenship'), not as 'customers' waiting for the delivery of a 'service' or 'product' called 'American citizenship.' Every American knows — or should know — that being a 'candidate' for citizenship — for full and equal membership — in our democratic republic is a status of infinitely greater significance and dignity than being a 'customer' or, to use some of the other terms in this proposal, a 'client' or a 'stakeholder.'"

Instead of settling for a Bureau of Immigration Services, let us demand a Bureau of Americanization. Our country does not seek merely to serve immigrants, but to assimilate them — and specifically to Americanize them. It's time to recover this wonderful word that historically has been prized by everyone from Teddy Roosevelt to Barbara Jordan. In the aftermath of September 11, we should embrace it once more, and let its spirit animate our immigration agencies.