The AP reports on an interesting aspect of becoming a citizen in the United States. Apparently, a "name check"—a requirement to moving along the naturalization application—takes over six months for around 150,000 people:
The FBI completes about 62,000 name checks every week, with close to 27,000 new requests coming from USCIS alone on a weekly basis, said Trent Pedersen, a spokesman with the bureau's Salt Lake City office. (...)
The wait may get worse before it gets better, warns Audrey Singer, an immigration fellow with the Brookings Institute. As lawmakers grapple over the best ways to ensure a secure nation - creating stricter laws on everything from green cards to passports to citizenship applications - agencies such as the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are bound to get more bogged down, she said.
Lawsuits are becoming more common, and would-be citizens in several states including Utah, California, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Idaho have sued in the hope of speeding up the process.
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