U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service employees were offered financial incentives to push immigration applications through the system quickly and eliminate a backlog of nearly 4 million such applications in time to meet a presidential deadline, the Daily Bulletin has learned. Employees and internal documents also reveal that the backlog is not actually gone, but that millions of applications in process have been reclassified to fall outside the backlog definition and help the agency meet an October deadline set by President Bush in 2003. The pressure to reduce the backlog, combined with the promise of bonuses for faster work, led to...