Lincoln service center growth may be lost in immigration debate

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BY ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star

Just about any way you measure it, immigration services add up to big business in Lincoln.

An annual report scheduled for release today will provide these details on the local work accomplishments during fiscal year 2007 by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services:

* Action on 919,966 applications for immigration benefits.

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Lourdes Gouveia, Associate Professor on Sociology at UNO.

Lourdes Gouveia, Associate Professor on Sociology at UNO.

* 42,785 approvals of employment-based visas sought by people seeking permanent status in the United States. That’s more than triple the total for the previous fiscal year.

* 7,800 reviews of applications for citizenship from military personnel serving overseas. That brings the total in that category, which Lincoln handles for the entire United States, to more than 50,000 since the program began in 2001.

In highlighting the numbers, Jerry Heinauer, director of the Nebraska Service Center, offered more testimony to the impact on the Lincoln economy.

He said he had the green light as of Wednesday to hire 94 more people for permanent staff in 2008 and perhaps another 103 beyond that.

His present staff totals about 1,000, either as government employees or under contract, at the service center near Lincoln Municipal Airport or downtown at the Star Building.

Seen from Heinauer’s vantage point, the cause of validating legal immigration “employs a lot of people,” and finishing a year’s work on hundreds of thousands of immigration cases is “a little bit telling.”

But Heinauer and his staff might be waiting a long time for a pat on the back.

That’s because the service center results emerge at a time when illegal immigration is a hugely divisive issue in Nebraska and elsewhere and when Congress has a long record of failure on immigration reform.

A year ago Wednesday, those differences of opinion were readily apparent as the enforcement arm of the federal government’s vast immigration bureaucracy descended on six Swift meatpacking plants, including Grand Island, and made almost 1,300 arrests.

Lourdes Gouveia, director of Latino/Latin American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, isn’t very happy with the immigration picture in December 2007.

And apart from all the accomplishments in Lincoln on what she regards as “the good side” of federal immigration regulation, Gouveia, also a UNO sociologist, is especially unhappy with the performance of presidential candidates from both the Republican and Democratic parties as they try to satisfy voter concerns about people sneaking across the Mexican border.

“Obviously, any academic or any individual involved seriously in analysis and understanding of the immigration issue has to be terribly disappointed with what’s going on,” she said.

In the presidential realm, “it’s really embarrassing to see how all of them, Democrats and Republicans, for whom we’re all supposed to be enthused about voting in the next election, are totally pandering to a shrill minority.”

National news stories suggest immigration advocates might actually be in the minority on such subjects as issuing driver’s licenses to people who can’t prove legal status.

Heinauer isn’t going to get caught up in that debate. Nor does he see a paradox in circumstances in which he’s reporting on success in furthering the cause of legal immigration in Lincoln even as the country loudly disagrees on how to adjust the immigration rules to let more people in or keep more people out.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Our responsibility is pretty clear, our goals and expectations are pretty clear, as a center, in terms of processing times, in terms of identifying cases where an applicant is not eligible for a benefit.”

Sought out later Wednesday in Minneapolis, spokesman Tim Counts said the federal government’s immigration enforcement officials aren’t ready to release their report on Fiscal Year 2007 yet.

But Counts said total deportations nationally for the fiscal year were about 232,500. That’s up from about 204,300 last fiscal year and from 177,500 in 2005.

For the five-state area that includes Nebraska, the 2007 total was 3,466, up almost 350 from a year ago.

As of March 1, 649 of the 1,297 people arrested a year ago Wednesday at the six Swift plants had been deported.

Reach Art Hovey at 523-4949 or at ahovey@alltel.net