Bombing Suspect’s Route to Citizenship Reveals Limitations (ZT)

When Faisal Shahzad took his oath of citizenship a year ago, swearing to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies,” he seemed the model of a legal immigrant success story. Moving from one coveted visa to the next over a decade, he had acquired an M.B.A., a decent job, a wife and two children and a fine suburban home.

Now that he has admitted driving a car bomb into Times Square, every step of his path to citizenship is under fresh scrutiny. One key question is when Mr. Shahzad turned against his adopted country. The answer could determine whether the unraveling of his immigrant success story ends with the revocation of his American citizenship.

The typical grounds for denaturalization, immigration officials say, are fraud or misrepresentation in the reams of immigration forms that Mr. Shahzad filled out over the years, including accounting for every trip he made outside the country. But even if he never lied in his applications, an obscure anti-Communist statute enacted half a century ago could be used to revoke his citizenship, said Donald Kerwin, a vice president at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, a research organization in Washington.

The law states that within five years of naturalization, any affiliation that would have precluded citizenship — like membership in a terrorist organization — is prima facie evidence that the person “was not attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States and was not well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States at the time of naturalization.” In the absence of countervailing evidence, the statute says, that affiliation is enough to authorize revocation.

“It doesn’t happen very often, but you’re obviously not attached to the principles of the Constitution if you’re being trained in bomb-making in Waziristan when you take the oath,” Mr. Kerwin said.

The narrative that has emerged suggests that after signs of financial stress and a turn to religion within the past year or two, Mr. Shahzad quit his job and flew to Pakistan. Law enforcement officials say he has admitted to training with terrorists there in December or January.

Mr. Kerwin said that such a sequence provides the prima facie evidence described in the statute, but that it is unclear whether the federal government would bother with revocation if Mr. Shahzad was headed for a long prison sentence anyway.

The Department of Justice declined to discuss the matter.

In Washington, the more pressing question seems to be how he became a citizen in the first place. Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has demanded to see Mr. Shahzad’s full immigration file.

Experts on both sides of the nation’s immigration debate said the case points to the limitations of a screening apparatus increasingly burdened with national security expectations.

Immigration lawyers in Connecticut said Mr. Shahzad followed a typical trajectory, though his path seemed more smooth than many others, especially men from Muslim countries, who can be stuck in security checks for years.

Mr. Shahzad’s name had long been listed in the Treasury Enforcement Communication System, known as TECS, which helps the federal government track potential law violators entering the country, an administration official said.

He probably landed on the huge list because he entered the country on several occasions carrying large amounts of cash, declaring the totals on his customs entry forms as required. But for a Pakistani-American who traveled frequently between the two countries, that was neither unusual nor necessarily an indication of any illicit activity, added the official, who would discuss the confidential records only on condition of anonymity.

He arrived at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut in January 1999 on a foreign student visa approved by the State Department in Pakistan. It allowed for a year of job training after graduation, and a temp agency placed him at Elizabeth Arden, the cosmetics company. Because he performed well as an account analyst there, a former manager said, the company applied to the Labor Department for one of the limited number of three-year H-1B visas available for foreigners with special skills. Critics of the H-1B visa system, like Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, say it is a source of cheap, captive labor, fed by mediocre schools.

“All we’re hearing is that these visas are for the best and brightest,” said Mr. Krikorian, whose Washington-based group advocates sharp reductions in immigration. “This guy, both from his grades and his incompetent bomb-making skills, wasn’t the best and brightest of anything.”

But lawyers who handle such cases said Mr. Shahzad probably had skills that were in short supply at the time, because the H-1B visa process is expensive and difficult for employers to pursue. “You can’t expect people to dump thousands of dollars in the schooling system and then not have a chance to work here,” noted one lawyer, Nandita Ruchandani.

In July 2003, Elizabeth Arden petitioned for an employment-based green card on Mr. Shahzad’s behalf, a Labor Department official said. By the next year, he did not need it: he had married Huma Mian, who was born in Colorado. Based on her February 2005 petition, he was granted a green card in January 2006.

To get it, he had to open his life to the government, supply his fingerprints for an F.B.I. background check and submit to an interview about whether his marriage was bona fide.

As a citizen’s husband, he was entitled to petition for naturalization two years and nine months later. He did so in October 2008, and underwent another full security check and interview and a citizenship test, covering American civics, history and spoken English.

“You can do all the checks in the world; there’s no way to know what’s in their heart or head,” said Crystal Williams, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “People rarely go to their interview and say they think it would be a great idea to plant a bomb in Times Square.”

Even Mr. Krikorian did not blame the immigration system, noting that Mr. Shahzad did not enter the country illegally and seems to have had a genuine marriage. “Maybe there was nothing for them to find,” he said. “He may have been radicalized after he went through all this.”

Or maybe not. “Was it his plan all along? I don’t know,” said Christopher Bentley, a spokesman for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.

“It’s important to realize that all the background checks are just a snapshot in time.”