Checking Citizenship Online

During his remarks this afternoon following a meeting with congressional leaders to discuss immigration, President Obama announced a new initiative that will allow applicants for U.S. citizenship to check their application status online:

Today I'm pleased to announce a new collaboration between my chief information officer, my chief performance officer, my chief technologies officer and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Office to make the agency much more efficient, much more transparent, much more user-friendly than it has been in the past.

In the next 90 days, USCIS will launch a vastly improved Web site that will, for the first time ever, allow applicants to get updates on their status of their applications via e-mail and text message and online. And anybody who's dealt with families who are trying to deal with -- navigate the immigration system, this is going to save them huge amounts of time standing in line, waiting around, making phone calls, being put on hold. It's an example of some things that we can do administratively even as we're working through difficult issues surrounding comprehensive immigration.

And the idea is very simple here: We're going to leverage cutting-edge technology to reduce the unnecessary paperwork, backlogs and the lack of transparency that's caused so many people so much heartache.

While the battle over comprehensive immigration reform is sure to be long and heated, this is one move that should prove popular with folks looking to apply for citizenship. The 90-day deadline means USCIS will be under the gun to deliver results by this fall. The agency did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday. We'll be keeping an eye on this project going forward.