The economy appears to be pinching the work flow for almost 1,000 employees assigned to Lincoln's regional Immigration and Citizenship Services Center.

Director Jerry Heinauer isn't sure how much of a decline in receipts to attribute to the economy and to a corresponding decline in the number of people who want to move to the United States.

But the numbers for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 show, for example, that applications for employment authorization dropped to 250,000 from 376,000 in fiscal 2008.

And total volume for the 19 different types of applications processed in Lincoln - one of four regional centers in the nation - has fallen to the 600,000 range from the more typical 750,000.

That carries job security implications for some 650 federal employees and another 300 contract workers. It also leaves lingering questions about the extent to which Nebraska and other states may have ceased to be an economic beacon for people entering the country both legally and illegally.

Heinauer said Monday he felt close to being able to announce some good news about new responsibilities for the Lincoln work force that "can be as many as 500,000 cases a year."

As matters stood at the end of the fiscal year, the average monthly flow of 80,000 from previous years is off substantially.

"This year, we're closer to 50,000," he said.

His bosses compensated for that by temporarily rerouting other types of processing chores to Lincoln from a service center in Vermont. The pending developments he alluded to on Monday could mean a more permanent reassignment of work flow to Lincoln from one or more service settings.

On the broader question of a downward trend in immigration patterns, Heinauer would say only that it makes sense the economy is one factor.

But other factors, including "a visa blizzard" in fiscal 2008, make that difficult to assess.

The blizzard and the spike in the Lincoln work load resulted from federal efforts to ensure that all of the approximately 140,000 visas available to people who had job offers in the United States that year got used.

For that and other reasons, it's difficult to draw solid conclusions about one year's immigration traffic patterns even though the Lincoln office could be regarded as a major crossroads.

But there are other clues to the connection between the service center's results and the extent to which the image of the United States may be fading as an immigration destination for the time being.

• In a July update, analysts at the Pew Hispanic Center said census data showed the inflow of immigrants into the United States from Mexico was lower between March 2008 and March 2009 "than at any point during the decade." Those same analysts cited information gathered by Mexico's National Survey of Employment and Occupation as indication that border crossings had fallen to 636,000 a year from more than 1 million in two years.

• For Nebraska, census analysis at the University of Nebraska at Omaha shows the annual rate of increase in the state's Hispanic population has been slowing in the second half of the decade.

• The U.S. Border Patrol reported 724,000 apprehensions in fiscal 2008. The Pew analysis said that was the lowest total since 1973. Meanwhile, the regional office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said its deportation numbers for the year that ended Sept. 30 were at 6,317, up from 5,309 the previous year.

The region includes Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas.

Hendrik Van Den Berg, an economics professor and immigration researcher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said there's not much more than anecdotal information, at this point, about the numbers of U.S. residents returning to Mexico and other countries of origin.

"It would be very interesting to note that, during the Great Depression, we actually had more people leaving the country than entering the country," Van Den Berg said.

Reach Art Hovey at 473-7223 or ahovey@journalstar.com.