Citizenship and Immigration Services Addicted to Delays

As a self-funded agency that depends upon fees from immigrants, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has become addicted to slow services that extract frequent payments. The services could be streamlined, but at the risk of severe revenue reductions. These are some of the findings in a June 30 report from the USCIS Ombudsman.
“Over one million family-based immigration petitions
are pending with USCIS leaving customers frustrated and creating extra work for USCIS,” reports Prakash Khatri, who is a naturalized citizen. “Most of these petitions have been pending for many years and may not be adjudicated for many more years; USCIS does not consider them as part of its backlog.”

One reason why long delays are not considered backlogs by USCIS is that the agency has a stake in prolonging the fee-intensive process.

“Like many major organizations, USCIS has been
unable to commit to fundamentally reengineering the way it does business – its approach to accepting and processing immigration benefits petitions and applications,” writes Khatri. “The root problem for
USCIS is money – or, more precisely, the way in which the agency is funded and the mandate
that USCIS recovers all of its costs from fees charged to applicants.”

For example, USCIS clients may pay for fast-track processing for some services, but to guarantee a 15-day turnaround, they have to pay the agency $1,000. As a result, the agency collects up to $200 million per year.

In one “case problem” cited by Khatri, a naturalization application filed in 1998 was listed as “pending” in 2006.

When the President and Congress defined timely processing in terms of six months, USCIS simply reclassified 1.1 million cases so that they would not be counted as backlogs, even though they were pending longer than six months.

“USCIS managed only to remain arguably close to the six month cycle time target by altering the definition in effect when the goal originally was set,” writes Khatri.

Of nearly 80 offices rated by the Ombudsman for Green-Card processing, only five are meeting 90-day deadlines and only one of those (San Antonio) is located near the Mexico border. The other four are along the Canadian border in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and St. Albans, VT.)

The worst performing offices are in Chicago, New York, and Orlando where processing times average 500 to 700 days.–gm See June 30 press release and link to pdf