Cass Ballenger: “last Friday's Washington Times contained a front-page article which showed me just how far the President will go to win…”

“last Friday's Washington Times contained a front-page article which showed me just how far the President will go to win votes. The article claimed that the Clinton administration has pressured the Immigration and Naturalization Service to speed up the standards and background checks on applicants for citizenship and to ignore other requirements in order to naturalize as many immigrants as possible before the November elections. By taking such shortcuts, the President is putting in danger the naturalization of immigrants with criminal records and other immigrants not qualified for citizenship. In the past year 1.3 million people have become naturalized citizens, nearly three times the number of previous years. The reason for this is a Presidential initiative called Citizenship USA, which is supposed to help legal immigrants through the naturalization process. Instead, the program is being used as a campaign tool of the Clinton campaign in hopes of winning votes of these new citizens. Complying with the directives established by this program has some INS officials feeling like the campaign workers of INS. Becoming a U.S. citizen is a great honor, and I suspect the President will indeed receive the reward he has envisioned, but I believe that shameless hustling for votes is making a mockery of our immigration.”