Remember the rush for U.S. citizenship in 2007, just before the fees increased? Since then, new applications for naturalization have fallen way down and are still very low, according to U.S. Citizenship and Naturalization Services.

To give you an idea, follow the blue line in the chart below. That shows the applications spiking in July of 2007, then dropping way down and staying pretty flat through January of this year. The red line shows the backlog in pending cases, gradually dropping over the same period.

I wrote in The Journal News yesterday about how the $675 fee and the bad economy seem to be prolonging the lull. I heard this morning that Southern Westchester BOCES is seeing about half the usual demand for its citizenship classes, which help people prepare for the exam. (Update: The agency checked its statistics and found that the decline was smaller than previously thought. Last year at this time, the program had 278 students, said Maria Morgan, Director of Adult and Community Services. The current number is 242, down 36 students, or about 9%. Information about the classes is available here.)

In Rockland, the Haitian-American Cultural and Social Organization has seen people put off citizenship because of the fee, Executive Director Rose Leandre told me today. Her organization has helped eight senior citizens by paying the amount of the increase, about $265, she said. HACSO had a state grant that allowed them to wave the $50 fee for citizenship assistance. It used another grant, originally for computer literacy classes, to help individuals with the fee payment.

The lull is both good and bad news for USCIS: It has given the agency time to clear the backlog, which generated a lot of criticism. But it means less revenue at a time when there are big plans to modernize the agency.

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act has been reintroduced in Congress, the advocacy group America’s Voice reports. This has long been considered one of the most compelling legalization bills, because it would help young high school graduates who came to the United States before they were 16 and who attend college or enlist in the military for two years. But the legislation was narrowly defeated last time. This web site is keeping tabs on the yeas and nays. The Citizen Orange blog is making a passionate argument for its passage.

Introducing the bill, according to America’s Voice, were Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) and U.S. Representatives Howard Berman (D-CA) and Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL). In the House, co-sponsors are Representatives Lucile Roybal-Allard (D-CA), Devin Nunes (R-CA), Anh “Joseph” Cao (R-LA), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Jared Polis (D-CO), John Conyers (D-MI) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).

(Photo: Ricky Flores/The Journal News)

Univision visited the vacant encampment in Southeast and had this report. It shows the belongings left behind, among them forks, empty beer cans, toothpaste, and an American flag. Mariana Boneo of the Hispanic Resource Center in Mamaroneck comments that these camps are a result of poverty, not immigration.

We’ve had periodic stories in The Journal News about day laborer encampments in the woods around Brewster and Southeast — immigrant men living outdoors with campfires, tents, food and toiletry supplies. The latest story had several strange twists. Assemblyman Greg Ball led a media tour of a camp in Southeast on Friday. His office advised one of our reporters to “please wear boots, as their (sic) is human waste, etc.” We did not attend, but a News12 reporter interviewed the men. Ball says he tried to chat in Spanish and told the men that his best friend was from Guatemala City. He issued a press release decrying exploitation of such workers.

Shortly thereafter, the men were arrested by the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office, charged with trespass and questioned by ICE.

Some in Southeast were pleased to hear about another camp being shut down, with its hazards of fire and death from exposure. But the publicity stunt did not sit well with immigrant advocates. Pat Young wrote a blog entry exploring the ironies.

While Ball assumes a Dickensian pose of exposing the presumed exploitation of immigrants, his only solution to their precarious situation is to remove their meager possessions and deport them. But of course, Assemblyman Ball’s purpose is not to help the downtrodden, but to join in their exploitation, not for financial gain but for political advantage.

One odd detail: Ball’s press release included a link to photos supposedly taken from the tour. They were actually taken earlier, some during the warm-weather months and others by Councilman Dwight Yee on Thursday (one is posted above). Yee had contacted the Sheriff’s Office about the encampment on Tuesday.

Yee and Supervisor Michael Rights were part of the “Save Our Southeast” ticket whose political campaigns focused on illegal immigration — circulating mug shots of Hispanic criminal suspects and claiming (without proof) that the violent MS13 gang had come to town.

The whole encampment drama seems to play out many elements of the immigration debate. Poverty, exploitation, local outrage, federal inaction, and lots of politics.

Ball is considering a run for Congress, and changed his tune recently when discussing federal immigration policy. At the local level, he’s for cracking down further on illegal immigrants. At the federal level, he supports a legalization plan for the undocumented. I asked whether legalization should happen in concert with comprehensive reform or, as Sen. McCain had proposed, only after the southern border is more heavily secured. He described a position more like President Obama’s.

We absolutely need to secure the border, but we can contemporaneously open our doors to legal immigrants while cracking down on the black-market economy and inviting those illegal aliens who are currently within our borders to become American citizens, pay taxes and learn the language. All that can and should be done as a national priority, immediately.

Ball says this is not a departure, that his immigration position has been misunderstood.

Perhaps part of the confusion comes from his involvement with State Legislators for Legal Immigration, which opposes amnesty, birthright citizenship and the “Illegal Alien Invasion.”

Immigration reform advocates are thinking positive this week after statements by President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and two Arizona congressman, all promising to work immigration into the legislative priority list. Ali Noorani of the National Immigration Forum calls the developments “a tip-off to a whole new ball game.”

But Obama’s choice for a Justice Department post upset some groups because a pro-immigration reform advocate was passed over.

Also in the news:

AP reports that the Obama administration is looking to shift ICE resources from conducting workplace raids to fighting drug-related violence at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is calling for temporary protected status for Haitians. A letter from Cardinal Francis George of Chicago cited four hurricanes and tropical storms in 2008 that led to food shortages and political unrest in Haiti. TPS, the humanitarian provision that currently protects certain immigrants from seven countries (Burundi, El Salvador, Honduras, Liberia, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan) from deportation.

About 3,600 Liberians are hoping for an extension before their status runs out at the end of the month. (Update: The policy has been extended another year.)

(Photo: AP)

I spoke to a number of Salvadoran immigrants yesterday to hear their reaction to the election of an FMLN candidate to the presidency in El Salvador. The party’s supporters said it was an emotional day for them, much like Obama’s election. As writer Roberto Lovato told Amy Goodman, it wasn’t merely the first FMLN victory since the 1992 peace agreement. “This is the defeat of Ronald Reagan, nothing less,” he said.

I called FMLN’s New York office in Hempstead to hear their commentary on the election, hoping to reach the people who did some campaigning this year in Port Chester. Naturally, just about everyone had gone home to vote. Anyway, here were some of the local reactions yesterday:

Salvadoran immigrants are absorbing the news of a new political era at home, where voters elected a president from the leftist FMLN party.
Mauricio Funes’ election Sunday marks a shift in power for the first time since the end of El Salvador’s civil war in 1992. Immigrants here say they are watching to see what that will mean for the country’s most urgent problems of crime and poverty, and for relations between the United States and El Salvador.
For supporters of the FMLN party — political successor to the rebel group Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front — it was a long-awaited victory.
“I couldn’t believe it. So many times, we were hoping that it was going to happen,” said Carlos Orellana, a Salvadoran immigrant who is running for a Common Council seat in Yonkers.
Walter Argueta, a theater director in Stamford, Conn., said he was thinking of those who died during the war and those who were killed just for protesting.
“Finally. Finally we made it,” he said. “We couldn’t make it with weapons and bullets, but we made it with the election, which is more sweet.”

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I plan to follow up tomorrow on the presidential election in El Salvador, where the leftist FMLN party might win the presidency for the first time and defeat the ruling ARENA party. With returns from most polling stations, FMLN’s Mauricio Funes is ahead of ARENA’s Rodrigo Avila tonight, Reuters and AP report. From Hempstead to Port Chester to Piermont, these results will be closely watched in the Salvadoran immigrant community. Here are some photos from El Salvador.

(Photos: AP)

For a detailed profile of the immigrant detention system, read this Associated Press story. The article looks at the data on the 32,000 people (that’s an exact count) held on the evening of Jan. 25.

The data show that 18,690 immigrants had no criminal conviction, not even for illegal entry or low-level crimes like trespassing. More than 400 of those with no criminal record had been incarcerated for at least a year. A dozen had been held for three years or more; one man from China had been locked up for more than five years.

Electronic monitoring has been shown to be effective at making sure people show up for immigration court, AP says, and that alternative is being advocated by the Migration Policy Institute for those with no criminal record. I imagine we’ll hear a lot more about this, given that the new administration is reviewing the policies at DHS. As for the current cost of detention:

Based on the amount budgeted for this fiscal year, U.S. taxpayers will pay about $141 a night — the equivalent of a decent hotel room — for each immigrant detained, even though paroling them on ankle monitors — at a budgeted average daily cost of $13 — has an almost perfect compliance rate, according to ICE’s own stats.

The New York Times has a fascinating map on its web site showing the places where certain immigrant groups have settled around the country over time.

You can move a slider anywhere between 1880 and 2000, choose a nationality, and see where those immigrants lived at that point in history. You can slide forward and see the numbers rise and fall. (Click on “number of residents” on the right side.)

So I checked out where the Irish settled in the late 1800s and where the Italians were living in the 1920s — both groups had the Northeast and Great Lakes regions pretty well covered. I learned that African immigrants are dispersed across the country, as are many Asian groups. Another interesting visual was the shift in the Mexican population between 1990 and 2000; the growth is striking, particularly on the East Coast.

For a look at the way the U.S. immigration laws changed over the century, check out our own interactive timeline on the history of immigration.

The Supreme Court’s voting rights decision this week dealt with a situation very different from Port Chester’s, but the village’s attorney is calling attention to a few lines within the opinion that he thinks have local implications.

Port Chester has already been found in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Essentially, the judge ruled that the deck is stacked against village board candidates who are favored by Hispanic voters; the at-large system diminishes their political clout. So the village is only awaiting a ruling on how its village trustee elections should be remedied. As Randolph McLaughlin, attorney for one of the plaintiffs, told me yesterday, “It’s a dead issue. The only issue before this court right now is whether to create districts or not.”

But as we reported, the Republican challenger for mayor is talking about a possible appeal if the village is ordered to create single-member districts. And this week, attorneys Aldo Vitagliano and Anthony Piscionere, who represent the village, contacted us and said the Supreme Court decision cast doubt on the local ruling.

Piscionere pointed to an aside in the written decision by Justice Kennedy. It has to do with bloc voting by the white majority.

One of the things that the Justice Department had to prove in Port Chester was that the white majority was voting sufficiently as a bloc to defeat the candidates preferred by minorities — Hispanics, in this case.

In the North Carolina case that went to the Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy raised questions about whether the bloc-voting requirement had been met: ”(We are skeptical that the bloc-voting test could be satisfied here, for example, where minority voters in District 18 cannot elect their candidate of choice without support from almost 20 percent of white voters….”

Piscionere pointed to evidence that Hispanic-preferred candidates in Port Chester, such as Cesar Ruiz, gained more than 30 percent of the white vote under the old system. He said, “This is the first case that I’ve ever seen (from the Supreme Court, he clarified) that has quantified the level of white bloc voting that should be looked at.” Piscionere had not yet decided whether to raise the issue with U.S. District Judge Stephen Robinson. Here was his formal comment:

The Supreme Court today decided a Voting Rights case which has implications for the Port Chester Voting Rights case. The Court decision casts serious doubt on a key element of the Government’s case and the Court’s decision on liability. The government contended and the Court found the presence of white bloc voting in Port Chester and decided the third Gingles prong against the Village.

Today’s Supreme Court decision questions how a plaintiff could satisfy the third Gingles prong when a minority preferred candidate of choice had support from almost 20% of white voters. In the Port Chester case, Cesar Ruiz and other minority preferred candidates received support from well in excess of 33% of white Port Chester voters.

McLaughlin, who is representing plaintiff Ruiz, said he wouldn’t hang his hat on that argument:

This case (USA vs. Port Chester) asked the question, ‘Has the white community historically over time voted in such a fashion as to defeat minority-preferred candidates?’ The answer to that question is yes, yes and yes.

(Photo: Tom Nycz/The Journal News)