21–30 of 98 posts
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 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…
Is there a way technology could help here? Perhaps not by involving the US Government directly, but would it be possible to set up a service that allows you to enter your information online, makes sure you have everything correct and consistent, then prints and ships the paper forms to you to sign?
Its not really any easy problem. Its about 6 million applications per year.
What we should really do is make an open source app or website (perhaps p2p, perhaps run on donated servers) and completely eliminate any part of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services related to processing applications, as well as all of the relevant laws. The laws are too complicated, and the bureaucracy of USCIS uses a very large budget of more than 3 billion dollars. A short (probably 100-1000x shorter) set of streamlined replacement laws can be designed by experienced lawyers within a few months.
We can make a contest that provides 5 million dollars for the best 3 designs for protocols and schemas for a common data exchange system, then another 5 million for the best 3 apps that allow people to process data. This will spend 30 million. We can use 100 million to buy off the politicians or companies that try to stop us. That should leave hundreds of millions left to donate to poor immigrant families and/or unemployed federal workers.
The app or site can be staffed by about 200-1000 online volunteers. This will be plenty assuming most routine applications can be processed within a few minutes.
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.
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…
The main difference between small and large companies was it simply took longer for people who got nothing done to be let go. In the worst cases for companies, money stops coming in the door and cuts are forced.
Contrast the above with the government where it sometimes literally takes an act of congress to fire someone. If the populace is unhappy with how the government is spending its tax dollars they cannot simply stop paying taxes and go somewhere else.
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.
Have you undergone the interview yet?
I spoke with some USDS/18F folks a few months back, and I know they're working with USCIS to try and remedy the failures of contracting this all out to IBM. I'm hopeful things will get better in the next few years.
I've always found the biggest joke in these forms, among other federal forms, to be the OMB "paperwork reduction" statements. [1] Even airport landing customs cards have these. Why these make no sense: - They take up a good chunk of a page and consume both paper and the reader's time. - These forms aren't exactly optional, so I am going to spend time filling them out anyway. They would be easier to fill out if they w…
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…
But when individual private companies screw up, other companies do what they tried to do better, and in the end the problem gets solved.
> The root problem, I think, is that the people who are put in charge of these massive software projects -- typically, MBAs or lawyers by training -- often don't know anything about how to develop software at scale
Sounds like a... branch problem. What is the root cause of government projects being run by incompetents?