Immigrants to U.S. face delays posed by culture of 'No'.

In America, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told Republican Convention delegates, "You can achieve anything."

You can if you are patient. Very, very patient. More patient than Schwarzenegger and his fellow immigrants of 1968 had to be.

Even before the attacks of Sept. 11, the most benign of immigrants were waiting months for a change in visa status or a work permit that used to be approved in a matter of days.

In the decades since Schwarzenegger arrived, presidents and Congress have forced unfounded immigration mandates on the system. The process became increasingly convoluted, the bureaucracy understaffed, Kafkaesque in its roles and awash in documents that often never find their way to the right hands at the right time.

A lengthy review process now doesn't signal that special care is being used, as the world learned three years ago when hijackers violated U.S. immigration rules without being detected.

The biggest embarrassment to what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service came six months later. The Florida flight school where two hijackers learned to fly received letters from officials approving their student visas.

After that, the agency developed a "culture of 'No,'" said Paul Zulkie, a Chicago immigration lawyer who is president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

The already excruciatingly long process has been extended by underfunded and understaffed post-Sept. 11 security checks. Likewise, a reorganization that split the INS into three agencies within the newly established Department of Homeland Security caused delays.

So now, a Rwandan woman has been waiting seven years for U.S. asylum after she witnessed the torture and murder of her parents and siblings and fled her homeland, Zulkie told Congress.

A Canadian working in this country as an international sales manager for a major Canadian pharmaceutical company can't travel beyond U.S. borders, though his job requires it, because immigration officials are taking five or six months to process travel requests, said his lawyer, Dale Schwartz of Atlanta.

A quarry in North Carolina halted operations in January, temporarily laying off 12 workers, because its German-born manager wasn't allowed back into the U.S. after a trip to his homeland. Immigration officials failed to approve a travel request he filed eight months earlier, according to his lawyer, Robert Banta of Atlanta. At the same time, immigration officials were sending the manager a request for a document he had already submitted.

Zeal in the war on terror at the expense of immigrants led to the prosecutorial misconduct now acknowledged by the Justice Department in the convictions on terrorism charges of two Moroccan men living in Detroit. The judge recently dismissed those convictions, which Attorney General John Ashcroft originally muted as a victory in the war on terror.

Given all this, is there no irony in Schwarzenegger's pitch?

Ann Woolner is a columnist with Bloomberg News.