Mario Ortiz says an overseas assignment has helped shape his leadership of the Denver district of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Ortiz was appointed to head the office, which oversees Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, in January 2004. He said CIS is focused on benefits and customer service, in addition to homeland security.

Before that, Ortiz served as the immigration attache in the American Embassy in Singapore, overseeing immigration matters in a five-country area. During that time, he interviewed potential refugees for resettlement.

Ortiz, a Texas native, said "when you grow up as a Texan, you feel like the world revolves around the state of Texas. . . . Until we as Americans are able to live overseas and become a foreigner in someone else's country, we can't learn to understand the challenges of learning a new language or being in a new culture.

"My grandfather was a naturalized citizen" from Mexico, he said. "Seeing that naturalization certificate on the wall, what an honor it was for me to be able to live overseas and gain that type of insight, and to know and appreciate every single day that the piece of paper I hand over is the same piece of paper my grandfather had."

His office's most common duties regard naturalization and permanent residence. In the past fiscal year, about 3,200 new citizens were naturalized in Utah, said Allan Speirs, officer-in-charge of the CIS Salt Lake sub-office.

In Utah, the top nations of origin for new citizens were Mexico, Bosnia, Vietnam, Canada and China, Speirs said. He noted that two-thirds of new citizens are from countries other than those in Latin America.

CIS is a new agency, which used to be known as Immigration and Naturalization Services. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the agency was reorganized and placed under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The enforcement end of the former INS is now a separate agency.

Speirs, who has worked in immigration since 1971, described the split as "exciting times," since now he can focus more on customer service. Over the past year and a half, his office has gone from four to nine adjudicators.

"We're able to concentrate on our job, on giving the right decisions to the right people at the right time," he said. "We don't want fraud and we don't want people to be in the U.S. if they have national security or criminal background problems. . . .

"It's nice to finally be getting enough personnel to really do the job we've wanted to do all along," Speirs said.

Some of the new initiatives, since the creation of CIS, include:

• An online scheduling system, InfoPass at www.uscis.gov, was created last fall to alleviate notoriously long lines of people waiting to meet with immigration officers. It's available in 12 languages.