Immigration Delays
One reason that illegal immigration really ticks off legal immigrants like me is the hellish bureaucracy that legal immigrants have to deal with. When you have to spend endless months waiting for applications to be approved and endless hours in waiting rooms, navigating the labyrinthine maze of immigration services, it galls you that someone who just jumped a fence could get legal status.
A highly skilled “alien of extraordinary ability” has to pay thousands of dollars in fees and spend years waiting for some immigration bureaucrat to merely stamp an application.
And the situation is getting worse:
Processing times — for everything from renewing an annual work permit to securing permanent legal residency — have as much as quadrupled over the last 18 months, despite the Bush administration’s pledge to cut waiting times in half. The wait to replace a lost green card, for instance, has grown to 19 months from four. And the kind of paperwork sought by Ms. Barschdorff — a document allowing her to re-enter the country after a brief trip — now takes seven months instead of two.
19 months to replace a card! The liberal media, of course, blames Homeland Security for the increased delays:
The root cause, officials say, is the post-9/11 reassignment of 1,000 agents who used to issue documents and now do extensive security checks of every applicant instead.
Actually, that’s not true. The backlog is caused by the 1986 amnesty for illegal immigrants, which immediately created a massive flood of applications for citizenship. Once that happened, the INS became permanently backlogged and lapsed into a culture of endless delays. Many of those applications are still pending.
Consider the irony. America is making it much harder for desirable legal immigrants to come here because it made it possible for illegal immigrants (including one of the perpetrators of the first WTC bombing and the terrorist who shot up LAX in 2002) to go free.
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