Los Angeles Times on citizenship: When Emilio Gonzalez steps down next month as director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, he will leave an agency as flawed as he found it. Citizenship application processing is mired in backlogs, disenfranchising legal residents who try to follow the rules and offering a new incentive for others to ignore them. The agency’s inefficiencies, of course, predated Gonzalez’s arrival in December 2005.