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A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online

washingtonpost.com

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Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online

#71

Post by eonwe »

kawera wrote: post #7
ilamont wrote: post #5

The amount of repetitive paperwork and needless bureaucratic steps for immigration-related matters is utterly ridiculous. The closest approximation I can make to dealing with immigration-related paperwork is filing taxes without the aid of software and being forced to complete and mail in one section (and have it approved) before moving onto the next.

"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." -- Oscar Wilde

"The most familiar quotations are the most likely to be misquoted...Some have settled down to false versions that have obscured the true ones. They have passed over from literature into speech." -- Carl Van Doren (maybe)

Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online

#73

Post by CWuestefeld »

Someone1234 wrote: post #34
kchoudhu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I filed: * A permanent residency application based on my marriage. * An application to remove conditions on said permanent residency * An expedited naturalization application We didn't bother getting a lawyer: the paperwork was easy. The problem isn't that the paperwork is hard. The problem is that there is so much paperwork to file.

I think you're overstating it slightly. "Easy" is not the word I'd choose to use. I too decided not to get a lawyer. It went fine. But it was not "easy" it was long, painful, and trivial to make an error (the paperwork is extremely poorly designed, we used online guides instead of the official instructions to avoid tons of gotchas, in particular with the financials). People just need to be extremely careful without a…

I agree completely, having gone through this with my wife. It's easy to see how someone for whom English isn't their first language could have the best of intentions, yet still accidentally wind up on the wrong side of the law.

Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online

#74

Post by _delirium »

jimrandomh wrote: post #58

The most important point: > the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM So IBM accepted a pile of money for the project and didn't get it done. The blame lies solely on them. Sure, there were bureaucratic obstacles, and government officials who didn't do things necessary for the project, but that's no excuse; IBM was responsible for making it happen. I keep hearing people talk about government inefficie…

Contracting seems to be a big part of it. The justification for contracting these kinds of jobs out rather than just doing them in-house is that private-sector competition through a bidding process will lower costs, ultimately making the government more efficient. But in many cases I wonder if it wouldn't be cheaper to just hire some in-house developers, rather than bleeding all this money to the likes of IBM, Oracle, etc.

Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online

#75

Post by dragonwriter »

jimrandomh wrote: post #58

The most important point: > the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM So IBM accepted a pile of money for the project and didn't get it done. The blame lies solely on them. Sure, there were bureaucratic obstacles, and government officials who didn't do things necessary for the project, but that's no excuse; IBM was responsible for making it happen. I keep hearing people talk about government inefficie…

> I keep hearing people talk about government inefficiency as though it were actual government employees who were failing. But it's usually like this: a failure of the bidding process and of accountability, where a large corporation (it's always one of the same few) collects money for a job and doesn't do it.

"The bidding process and accountability" is a function performed by actual government employees, so its failure is a failure of actual government employees, even if that failure is visible through the failure of a government contractor.

A big problem is that government often does not have staff that understand enough about IT projects to effectively execute them, so it hires other people to do them: but the same skills that they lack that motivate outsourcing means they also don't understand IT projects well enough to do any of (1) effectively specify what it is that the contractor is supposed to do to allow contractors to bid properly, (2) effectively evaluate potential contractors, or (3) effectively oversee the contractor once one is selected.

Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online

#76

Post by jpmc »

kchoudhu wrote: post #16
ralfruns wrote: post #3

I went through the green card process last year. From my experience, it is nearly impossible without a lawyer. I wonder how much of the delay can be attributed to lobbying from the immigration lawyers that profit from the complicated, paper based process.

I filed: * A permanent residency application based on my marriage. * An application to remove conditions on said permanent residency * An expedited naturalization application We didn't bother getting a lawyer: the paperwork was easy. The problem isn't that the paperwork is hard. The problem is that there is so much paperwork to file.

Went through the same thing years ago. We weighed all the paperwork submitted and it was just shy of 5 pounds.

Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online

#77

Post by CWuestefeld »

tvanantwerp wrote: post #6
ralfruns wrote: post #3

I went through the green card process last year. From my experience, it is nearly impossible without a lawyer. I wonder how much of the delay can be attributed to lobbying from the immigration lawyers that profit from the complicated, paper based process.

I remember taking my wife for her medical exam as part of her green card process. What a joke! The doctor--who he has to select as someone on a small approved list--was basically retired and using his position on that list as a way to make extra money. I don't think he did a thing to examine her. He just chatted and told us stories about when he was fighting in Korea and accidentally stepped in a kimchi pot. Very nic…

We had a similarly absurd experience with fingerprints.

Would you believe that the NY State Police aren't a certified fingerprinting service for INS? (or at least they weren't 20 years ago)

My wife had her prints done by the state police, but Immigration rejected them on that basis. Instead, we had to drive an hour to a camera shop that had the appropriate certification, where the clerk - an Indian immigrant himself, by appearance - took her fingerprints.

It boggles the mind that they'd prefer a clerk in a camera store rather than the state police. It seems clear that the goal isn't proper documentation or security or anything like that, but more along the lines of collecting certification fees and perpetuating the bureacracy.

Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online

#78

Post by codecamper »

cs702 wrote: post #20

The root problem is not government. The same thing happens in the private sector. Large corporations routinely spend gazillions on software projects that end up working poorly or not at all. Everyone who has worked in Corporate America knows this all too well. The root problem is not bureaucracy either. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have fairly large bureaucracies yet they routinely successfully comple…

In the early 2000s I worked for a big government contract company that had a contract with the CDC to make a website with.. wait for it... forms. Yes it was basically big complex, single page forms that wrote data into a... wait for it. Oracle database. These were the days of J2EE. They had about 30 programmers on the case. There were the architects, a lead architect, and many programmers. The contract was for about 100 million USD.

Their interview process was: "can you write computer code?.. OK great, you are hired. Come on in." I should have known something may be amiss..

The dev server took about 5 minutes to start on a souped up computer. That and several static variables hiding up high in an uber base class. These variables were of course designed to hold per session data. I tried submitting a form twice simultaneously. This crashed the server.

I left that and years later the project was I believe cancelled.

I wonder why the government does't just use a forms as a service thing?

Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online

#79

Post by mjcohen »

jimrandomh wrote: post #58

The most important point: > the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM So IBM accepted a pile of money for the project and didn't get it done. The blame lies solely on them. Sure, there were bureaucratic obstacles, and government officials who didn't do things necessary for the project, but that's no excuse; IBM was responsible for making it happen. I keep hearing people talk about government inefficie…

The problem here, as in most large government contracts (aerospace is a prime example) is that all the bidders know that an honest bid will never win. So, to win, all the bidders knowingly underbid, and hope that they can get adequate funds as an add-on, when the project as bid begins to obviously fail.

The only way to stop this would be to punish the contractors of the failing projects in some extreme way.But that, of course, will never happen.

Anybody want an F-35?

Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online

#80

Post by maehwasu »

Retric wrote: post #70
CWuestefeld wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a US citizen, it doesn't matter if you move anywhere in the world, the IRS will take part of your income regardless.

You can renounce US citizenship, as long as you have paid all your taxes up to that point. The point is it's a proactive action. http://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal-consideratio... Persons intending to renounce U.S. citizenship should be aware that, unless they already possess a foreign nationality, they may be rendered stateless and, thus, lack the protection of any government. There are also a lot of ex…

As someone who has looked heavily into this option, I can say that you are drastically understating the simplicity of this option.

Getting a second passport takes significant time and investment in most cases.

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