Once I became a US Citizen, I in now way missed having to deal with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or whatever it is called now that its in the Department of Homeland Security. In my mind, its still the paragon of bearocratic time wasting and horrendous customer service, order-of-magnitude worse than dealing with the DMV. One solution to undocumented immigration would be to streamline getting the required documentation. I doubt theres any political will to do so, since the process is slow, difficult, and takes a long time to bear fruit. Its much easier to have a photo-opp fence building or other such measures, but in the long-term I don’t see how we can ignore it. The NY times has a short piece today: Citizenship Blues:
The first is that the wait for citizenship and green cards is up — way up. Citizenship and Immigration Services reported in January that the average time to process a citizenship application had risen to 18 months, from seven, and that green cards would now take a year, instead of six months or less.
It was a sorry moment for the agency, which jacked up its fees last year with a promise to use the new money to end vast paperwork backlogs. The opposite happened: the agency is drowning in applications from people who filed before the increase to avoid being gouged.
Hat Tip: ImmigrationProf Blog