They sucked before, but they suck even worse now. And lest you request a cite, here’s one (free registration required):
“Backlog of Immigrant Paperwork Growing”
WASHINGTON — Four years ago, as a presidential candidate hoping to draw Latino votes, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush vowed to slash the backlog of applications for legal immigration. No one would have to wait longer than six months, he promised.
Despite that resolve, the opposite has happened — more people than ever are facing longer-than-ever delays.
Green cards that would have taken 14 months to process in 2001 are now averaging 33 months. The number of pending applications for such things as replacing a lost green card and obtaining citizenship has shot up nearly 60%, to about 6.2 million. Cases more than 6 months old have increased by 89% since 2000, from 1.8 million to 3.4 million, according to the government.
The main reason for the delays is the increased security checks since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the Bush administration. But congressional investigators and other critics say insufficient funding, lack of personnel and other shortfalls are also to blame.
[snip]
Annual levels of immigration have held steady since the terrorist attacks. Now the growing backlog raises questions about the ability of the system to handle the additional load that would be created by the president’s proposed guest worker program. As many as 8 million to 12 million illegal immigrants could file for legal status.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the arm of the Department of Homeland Security that inherited the work from the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, is the agency struggling with the effect of the increased security checks and scarce resources. …The agency will soon send Congress a backlog elimination plan that is expected to promise that Bush’s six-month goal can still be met — but not until 2006. …[snip] Immigration is performing full checks on 7 million applicants a year, compared with 2.5 million before the attacks, Yates said. Out of 4,500 officers who handle immigration applications, 1,000 have been relegated to do nothing but security checks.”
They’ve increased the workload, they’ve increased fees and are about to do so again, but the service just gets worse and worse, and less and less logical.
Just this month, I had a family’s green card applications erroneously transferred from Texas to California, although they moved to Washington, which is in the jurisdiction of Nebraska. (Do you have a headache yet?) I had to file extensions of their travel and employment authorizations, to which they are entitled for as long as their green card applications are pending (which is going on 3 years now). Since Texas had send me a notice that the file had been transferred to California, I filed the extensions there. They were rejected for lack of jurisdiction, in spite of my including a copy of the transfer notice. So I filed them again in Nebraska, where the damn file is supposed to be: Nebraska accepted the employment authorization extensions, but rejected the travel authorization applications, because – get this – they don’t have the file, which is apparently in a black hole somewhere.
This is why my job drives me insane, and I’m not even the one directly affected; you can bet Homeland Security would be all over my poor Pakistani electrical engineer client if he worked a day past the expiration of his current employment authorization, even if it was because the same goddamn agency can’t figure out where his file is, even though they are the ones who moved it to the wrong office, so they can process the timely filed extension applications!
Hey, I suppose I should just consider it job security. It was amusing, though, that in the process of rejecting the travel authorizations, they managed to separate the youngest child’s from the rest of the family’s. The poor kid is named Usama. I thought for a while there that I would have to tell Homeland Security where to find Usama.
Eva Luna, Immigration Paralegal.