USCIS Trying To Speed Up While Immigrant Cases Remain Bogged Down

A few days ago, Ur Mendoza Jaddou, the Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) was put on the spot and had to defend her agency’s efforts to reduce enormous visa backlogs. As she spoke to an audience at UCLA’s School of Law, where she was once a student, students walked out in protest. This cold reception reflected their frustration, and that of many others across the country, about how the lead federal agency is handling the processing of immigration applications. While the Director has only been in her position for one year, so far her public statements about changes being made to the system have not yet yielded much in the way of tangible results. To be fair, her agency is not the only government body responsible for delays—consular offices are also backlogged with immigration matters, for example.

But why are people so agitated about processing?

Efficient Processing Is Important

The reason that efficient and speedy processing is so crucial in immigration applications is that there are pernicious costs associated with delays. People’s lives are directly affected. What is more, their lives change over time – sometimes overnight. When that happens, one application turns into two or sometimes even three as it has to be corrected. Everyone then has to work two or three times as hard to make sure the same application is up to date. After all, if your application has one small error in it, the whole thing can get tossed and you have to start over. This erodes confidence in the system and breeds cynicism.

Delays mount pressure on those working on the files to get the job done as soon as possible. That can open the door to possible corruption as people try to surmount the obvious stupidity of it all. There is also the tendency if workers cannot produce to try to justify delays. That can lead to more rules and senseless procedures. Take for example the H1-B program. The U.S. tells successful, talented people that America wants them. But in practice, with the H1B visa program, the arcane procedures make it seem quite the opposite. The process and bureaucracy strangle hope and make immigration seem improbable. What useful purpose does that serve?

Why Do We Have This Problem With Processing?

Shortly after former President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, the federal government implemented a broad hiring freeze on all nonmilitary employees for several months. This was coupled with the departure of some 500 senior consular officials in the State Department who decided it was time to leave or retire. In February 2020, the Trump administration directly froze the hiring of all non asylum USCIS employees. Although the furlough was resolved by August after Congress added more funding to the USCIS budget, many agency employees left worrying that permanent layoffs could be not far behind.

There was also a government-wide reduced processing capacity because bureaucrats were working from home due to the pandemic while others were getting ill. International airline problems, such as pilots and flight attendants reporting sick due to Covid, and unprecedented global events like the war in Ukraine also contributed to the problems. It was no different in other countries.

All these developments left government agencies working on immigration cases on the ropes trying to recover. Today the demand for immigration services is far exceeding the capacity of the USCIS to respond. With the decline of the menace of the pandemic, there is an unprecedented surge of Americans wanting to travel. After being locked up for two years due to the Covid pandemic and the international travel restrictions and border closures it caused, the general public is eager to get out and do some travelling. New immigration cases are therefore piling up on the existing backlog.

But people do not want to hear all this. What they want is action on their applications. Period. So they are turning to outside help.

Outside Help

A report published by Syracuse University finds that by the end of FY 2022 in September, over 6,000 lawsuits will have been filed against the federal government in the last year to compel action from U.S. immigration authorities. This is a 50 percent increase in lawsuits compared to the previous fiscal year.

People are also increasingly turning to their political representatives to get help with processing cases. Congressional offices in Washington have been inundated with inquiries from constituents to the point where immigrant processing has become the main issue in many offices on Capitol Hill today. Particularly acute problems are delays in issuing work permits leaving applicants desperate to start jobs, the stress of separated spouses and the incapability of employers to hire skilled workers.

So How Do We Break Through The Bottleneck?

It seems that something more is needed to break through this bottleneck. And there are organizations that know how to do it. How does FedEx, for example, track every single package in their system and know exactly where it is at any given moment and tell you when it will be delivered when the USCIS call center has trouble doing the same with your immigration application? How does Amazon deal with millions of packages daily, packaging them and getting them out to us within days but the USCIS takes months to issue employment authorizations? Why cannot Washington adopt the philosophy of The Toyota Way to streamline its operations? It would be wise for Washington leaders to consult with these experts to get the job done.