Up on the Soapbox

Okay. So, maybe that last post was a little over the top. I'm not usually so vocal or so prone to breathing fire. I just tend to feel very very strongly about that topic. Especially having been through the entire process of immigration processing with my wife. It's not cheap, it's not easy, it's definitely not quick, and I resent the puffed-up buffoons in the capitol who only care what interest groups think without consideration for either the voting public, the law, or the safety of our people.

Speaking of Safety... did you know that local and state police don't even have a method of communication with USCIS (immigration) enforcement teams? Local and state police have no jurisdiction within their own areas to enforce immigration law?

You as a US Citizen... all you can do is FAX a letter to a USCIS number in Washington DC and hope they'll actually read it. There's no email. There's no hotline. There's no actually process at all for us to report KNOWN illegals. Forget about suspected illegals, we can't even report the ones we have 100% proof positive about.

That's just plain stupid.

What is USCIS's Enforcement Division doing about it? Nothing. Not a damn thing. They have no real interest in it actually. They are up to their eyeballs in paperwork and bureaucracy.

They have a backlog of somewhere around 2 million applications. They process something like 800k refugee requests per year... and the backlog grows by something like 50% per year. I don't remember the exact statistics, but what is really staggering is - they still do it all manually with pen, paper, and filing cabinets. There's no computer automation. No electronic processing at all.

After 9/11 their budget for IT enhancement of their system was redirected for formation of DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and never re-budgeted in any fiscal plan afterward.

What's their solution? Raise the application fees. And what will the increased fees pay for? More clerks and analysts to manually process more applications.

Here we are in the 21st century, and our entire system for processing immigration applications and related materials is done by hand and courier.

Ladies and gentlemen, this isn't Somalia, or Burma, or Laos, Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan or some other developing nation, this is the United States of America. Surely we can do better than this?