June 16, 2007	Saturday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 30, 1428

WASHINGTON, June 15: Muslims who qualify to become US citizens often have to wait for years to get the citizenship as government agencies subject their applications to an indefinite series of security checks, says a report released on Thursday. The Council on American Islamic Relations also reported a significant increase -- from 19.22 to 36.32 per cent – in Muslims’ complaints against US government agencies in 2006, mainly because of immigration and citizenship delays.

Such delays “affect hundreds of thousands of people in America today,” the report said.

The depth of the citizenship delay problem was recently highlighted by the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law. The NYU report stated that, “Delays in the citizenship process implicate discrimination on grounds that are prohibited under international law.”

The NYU report also observed that the government was illegally delaying the naturalisation applications of immigrants by profiling individuals it perceives to be Muslim and subjecting them to an indefinite series of security checks.

“Discriminatory profiling is illegal under international law and is a poor substitute for real intelligence work,” said Jayne Huckerby, CHRGJ research director at NYU. “Taking years to identify individuals who are security threats does not make us safer. Ensuring timely and good faith completions of background checks will help the US advance its national security goals,” she said.

The CAIR report also quoted from a recent New York Times report which said that American citizens have also been victims of overzealous governmental actions in regard to border crossings and terrorism ‘watch lists’. According to The New York Times, in response to American Muslim citizens desire to see an efficient system, many Americans “…want increased Congressional oversight of the terrorist watch list system to insure that the [government] is not abusing the basic civil rights of United States citizens at the borders.”

Also in 2006, several key polls indicated that the level of Islamophobia continues to rise in American society.

The CAIR report recalled an August 2006 USA Today/Gallup poll which showed that 39 per cent of Americans felt at least some prejudice against Muslims. The same percentage favoured requiring Muslims, including American citizens, to carry a special ID “as a means of preventing terrorist attacks in the United States.” Most surprising was the fact that 22 per cent of those polled for the USA Today/Gallup survey said they would not want American Muslims as neighbours.

“We hope that federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and both houses of Congress will come to understand the full scope of anti-Muslim discrimination and rising Islamophobia in our nation today,” the CAIR report added.

“Just as anti-Semitic and anti-African American hate crimes and discrimination cases are vigorously investigated and prosecuted; it is also equally important for federal law enforcement agencies to continue to focus on protecting the civil rights of American Muslims, Arab and South Asian Americans.”

The report reminded Americans that the Muslim community will continue to be a growing and vibrant segment of the social fabric of America for generations to come and will “help to continue to be a central voice on the status of American civil rights.”

CAIR also reported a 25 per cent increase in the total number of complaints of anti-Muslim bias from 2005 to 2006, with citizenship delays being the major issue.

The report outlines 2,467 incidents and experiences of anti-Muslim violence, discrimination and harassment in 2006, the highest number of civil rights cases ever recorded in the Washington-based group's report.

According to the study, called "Presumption of Guilt," that total is a 25.1 per cent increase over the preceding year's total of 1,972 cases.

CAIR also received 167 reports of anti-Muslim hate crime complaints, a 9.2 per cent increase from the 153 complaints received in 2005.