Citizenship

Business owners often have a tricky relationship with the idea of giving immigrant workers a path to citizenship. On the one hand, employers (usually) want to keep their workers happy and working hard, which often means seeing their families more than once a year. On the other hand, workers who have citizenship have less incentive to stay with one employer, and may leave tough, low-paying jobs for other work, leaving employers in the lurch. “If the guest workers did become citizens, some of them would probably stay, they enjoy the farm work, and like working outside,” said Rusty Barr, a farmer featured in a Sunday story about immigration reform.

Ricardo Sepida gets emotional when he sees his son-in-law in a Navy uniform. Even aircraft carriers make him misty-eyed. There is no better country than the United States, says Sepida, an immigrant from the Philippines. Yet despite possessing a green card for 40 years, Sepida has never become an American citizen. Life got in the way, as he raised two children, worked a full-time job as a biomedical technician and ran side businesses on the weekends. "I was so busy at work, I had so many things to do and I'd forget about it," said Sepida, 61, of Sylmar.

Hundreds of legal immigrants in Southern California who have been waiting years for citizenship will have their cases resolved as a result of a settlement with the federal government, attorneys announced Monday. The immigrants were stuck in lengthy delays as they waited for the FBI to complete their security name-checks and for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to approve their citizenship applications. The settlement, approved Friday in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, sets a six-month deadline for the government to decide on hundreds of citizenship applications from Los Angeles and surrounding counties.

Looking more like a student than a soldier, the young Indian in jeans and a T-shirt snapped his heels together and stood at attention in front of an American flag. He raised his right hand and pledged to defend the United States against all enemies. The enlistment ceremony earlier this month at a military center near Los Angeles International Airport took less than five minutes. With that, he became the 101st person in Los Angeles to join the Army under a program that significantly increases the number of immigrants eligible to serve.

Turkey's president Saturday endorsed a government decision to revoke the citizenship of a lawmaker who caused a stir by wearing an Islamic head scarf to Parliament. The government decided to strip Merve Kavakci of her citizenship because she concealed she had taken up U.S. citizenship March 5. By law, Turks are required to seek permission before taking the citizenship of another country.

Re: "Employers to be new targets of enforcement," May 1: I applaud the Obama administration's new policies on immigration enforcement that seek to criminally prosecute employers who hire illegal immigrants. However, I adamantly object to their long-range goal of rewarding the illegal immigrants who applied for these jobs with U.S. citizenship. I predict that the citizenship issue will continue to be the part of immigration reform that will anger most Americans. Donald E. Wiggins Yucca Valley

A federal judge in Cleveland restored the U.S. citizenship of John Demjanjuk, the retired auto worker cleared of being the Nazi death-camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible. Demjanjuk, 77, was stripped of his citizenship in 1981 and extradited to Israel in 1986. He was convicted of crimes against humanity in 1988 and sentenced to death. His conviction was overturned on appeal. In 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled he was not Ivan the Terrible and freed him.

The Marquis de Lafayette, who fought alongside George Washington and secured the aid of France during the Revolutionary War, on Tuesday became the sixth person to be conferred with honorary U.S. citizenship. President Bush signed legislation that bestowed the honor. The full name of the French aristocrat, who died in 1834, was Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier.

Martina Navratilova would like to clarify something: Not once has she thought about defecting from the United States to the Czech Republic. "I'm getting a dual citizenship," she said Monday at Roland Garros, where she's an analyst for the Tennis Channel. In an interview last week with a prominent Czech newspaper, Navratilova addressed -- but did not link -- two subjects, which the global chatter of the Internet subsequently linked for her.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service has not revoked the citizenship of any criminals improperly naturalized in Los Angeles this year because the agency is still trying to decide what procedures to use, according to Donald Neufeld, a Los Angeles-based INS official.