Conquering the Maze of Citizenship

We've all heard the arguments about illegal immigration. Some argue that the money is the important cost; U.S. citizens wallets are being sucked dry through taxes to pay for the cost of illegal immigration. Others argue that it is a human cost the world suffers if we prevent those seeking a better life from doing so. Some even argue that immigration should not happen at all. They want the borders sealed in an East/West Germany style. No matter what the argument, there is a difficulty that remains; the bureaucratic maze of muck that must be waded through to become a citizen of the United States.

Even I have been guilty of the argument, "I don't mind people immigrating, just do it legally". So in order to see just how difficult immigrating legally would be, I visited the Immigration and Naturalization website, www.uscis.gov.

OK. Let's do this together, shall we? For arguments sake, let's assume I'm a Mexican National attempting to legally immigrate to the U.S. I hop online to check out USCIS.GOV.

First, are you seeing what I'm seeing? No Spanish translation. I type in Spanish into the search engine and find all kinds of documents printed in Spanish, but no directions in Spanish as to how to get to those documents. I'm all set to take that little customer service quiz to the right and click on "this document was not helpful", but since I can't read English yet...

I decide to check out the site map to see if I can't find where they are hiding their translated pages. No dice. Not even French. I slap you with my white glove, USCIS.GOV.

I guess if I am to continue, I have to assume I have a friend who knows English. "Thank you", Maria.

Maria says I should click on "Citizenship". Click. Hmmm. Well, I wasn't born in the U.S., so Maria says to click on "Naturalization". The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) says I have to what?