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

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

#61

Post by knz »

artmageddon wrote: post #27
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.

My wife and I are going through the same thing for her Adjustment of status, she's here on an F-1 visa. It took us a little while to get the paperwork all in order(she was away for work for a few months and we needed to sort out a number of things to give us the highest chance of getting approved). For us, the hardest part was sorting through all the tiny little details and that a lot of the I-xxx forms kept expiring…

I did the interviews 8 years ago (as part of a K-1 visa and then for permanent residency). It really wasn't a big deal. The guy barely looked through our supporting evidence and seemed more interesting in asking general questions about what my home country was like.

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

#62

Post by wahsd »

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…

The root of the problem is really that instead of trying to figure out how to digitize immigration forms, we should be figuring out how to fill capacity within the country and not simply kick poor and underserved communities to the ditch and just cream people from other countries and societies where we are cherry picking off the best.

I get it, that won't be a popular sentiment here because the hidden racism backed into immigration to fill holes created by incompetence and ignorance of long term problems by filling them with short term solutions is still quite popular, let alone not even realized. It's kind of like simply going to the title loan place to leverage the future to pay back the credit card of bad past choices.

Digitizing the immigration forms is really more of a sad reminder of how racist our country is that we refuse to provide for our own people, while we are more than willing to deprive source countries of success by making people build industries and technologies in their own country.

I know, I'm all wrong ... screw those mostly black poor kids in poor neighborhoods and screw those other countries, America needs to undermine their success in order to dominate.

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

#63

Post by rhino369 »

api wrote: post #39
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…

I say this very often: The MBA (who has no other expertise) is capitalism's answer to the Soviet "apparatchik." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik "Management" is a secondary skill in the sense that it only makes any sense if one also has a primary skill. An engineer might learn to manage and thus become an engineering manager. A baker might learn to manage and might manage a baking company or a restaurant/caf…

MBAs as an empty suit who manages what they don't understand is as much of an useless stereotype as programmer as a code monkey who just creates what you tell him to. You have the same ignorance about them that you accuse them of having about you.

I also don't believe programming is as alien as you think it is.

I will grant you that most of the diploma mill MBA programs are worthless. But the MBA's going to work in F500 companies aren't just idiots.

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

#65

Post by artmageddon »

vijayr wrote: post #57
Someone1234 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

True. It is definitely not easy. Another problem is the waiting periods these days is frustratingly long - so if you made a small mistake then it adds anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to remedy it, to an already lengthy process. This is why most people hire attorneys. The ironic thing is that attorneys make mistakes too - happened to me and a handful of people I know.

> The ironic thing is that attorneys make mistakes too - happened to me and a handful of people I know.

I commented on this above, but it nearly happened to me, too. We picked an immigration attorney to look over our paperwork, just to make sure we didn't make any glaring mistakes. While we did get some good suggestions, they missed something pretty big that we found on both the official government documentation and a number of forums, and had decided not to go with their services anymore. Luckily we caught it prior to submission.

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

#66

Post by mbesto »

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…

The root problem is incentives. When a failed project doesn't mean any loss (financial or otherwise), there is no market correction. That, and no one has been able to actually defined what a failure is. Is 10 years too long? Who knows...there are no experts who can plan for that. [0]

When healthcare.gov was turned around by a select set of motivated individuals, it only happened because the people who were involved had a high degree of motivation. IMHO I believe they were motivated by eliminating personal frustration (or having empathy for those who are frustrated) and the upside of a highly visible software project (with none of the downside...it was already failing). Money wasn't a focal point here.

[0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/jg/planning_fallacy/

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

#67

Post by CWuestefeld »

Retric wrote: post #55
matwood wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in large companies, small startups, and government, government is orders of magnitude the worst offender when it comes to simply wasting money and getting nothing done. 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 t…

On the upside when a gov project works they are often willing to keep it for a very long time and killing a project does not mean the original need is not still there. So, often really old government boondoggles are often 2 or 3 separate projects which keep the name after the first one fails. > cannot simply stop paying taxes and go somewhere else Plenty of people leave the US every year. It's generally really easy t…

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.

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

#68

Post by _delirium »

rayiner wrote: post #21
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 wonder how much is the result of lobbying from the vastly larger contingent of people who simply don't want immigration into the U.S.

I think this is a bigger part of it. There are occasionally scandals that get media attention where someone got through the immigration system when they arguably shouldn't have (past involvement with organized crime, etc.), which produces public pressure to add another check to make sure it doesn't happen again. So the system is oriented around an adversarial sort of approach: we think there's a good chance you probably shouldn't be here, and you need to go through this complex process to prove otherwise. The system is designed to find dozens of reasons to exclude the applicant (since voters demand excluding people for those reasons), so there are a ton of pitfalls. Which is where the immigration lawyers then come in, since an individual immigrant with no idea how the system is designed or what it's looking for has a high likelihood of stumbling into one of those pitfalls.

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

#69

Post by sirkneeland »

cowardlydragon wrote: post #50

I find a major problem in very large organizations is the centralization of processes when there is ample budget to establish competing organizations. For example, clouds and datacenters in large orgs should have three different groups offering competing solutions. If one (inevitably) underperforms, then it gets axed and a new datacenter option is bootstrapped.

That is an interesting idea but it would need to be refined to avoid some pitfalls.

Nokia had competing internal smartphone groups, which led to much internecine corporate warfare but precious little in timely smartphone development

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

#70

Post by Retric »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #67
Retric wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the upside when a gov project works they are often willing to keep it for a very long time and killing a project does not mean the original need is not still there. So, often really old government boondoggles are often 2 or 3 separate projects which keep the name after the first one fails. > cannot simply stop paying taxes and go somewhere else Plenty of people leave the US every year. It's generally really easy t…

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 exceptions to that IRS rule, depending on the type of income.

PS: As to renouncing Citizenship; Social Security is an example of long term obligation that transcends where your living in a single year. If your willing to give up Social Security by renouncing Citizenship then things get simple.

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