Both the White House and the Republican
Party are proposing legislation which would radically change our current
immigration laws. To date, all of these proposed plans include a provision which
will allow persons illegally in the United States to get on a “path to
citizenship”, one similar to the path provided by the amnesty provisions of the
1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA).
Should such legislation be signed into law, administration of the
amnesty or legalization provisions of the new law would fall within the purview
of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within the Department of
Homeland Security, which is currently responsible for adjudicating requests for immigration and
citizenship benefits. This article looks at how this proposed legislation, if
enacted, will affect
the current operations of USCIS, as well as how it might affect those
millions who are striving to immigrate legally to
this country under current laws.
Potential effect on the current USCIS workforce
According to the Department of Homeland Security's Office of
Immigration Statistics (OIS), an estimated 11.5 million unauthorized immigrants
resided in the United States as of
January 2011. These estimates, released in March 2012, suggest that the
unauthorized population is virtually unchanged compared to the revised 2010
estimate of 11.6 million. However, as
pointed out in an earlier post on this blog, when considering eligible family members waiting abroad the
actual number of potential legalization applicants
could easily be as many as four times this number.
In order to get a
realistic perspective of how Comprehensive
Immigration Reform (CIR) could impact the operations of USCIS, we need
only look at the legalization effort which was undertaken by INS in the mid 1980s.
During the 1986 IRCA Amnesty about 2.7
people were “legalized” by the INS; this number is only
about one quarter of number of persons who are, conservatively, expected apply for
amnesty under the various interations of the legislation currently being
considered.
It must also be noted that USCIS
adjudicated only about 6 million applications for immigration and
citizenship benefits ast year. As such, a new amnesty bill could, at minimum, triple
the USCIS workload to 18 million applications.
Additionally, one stipulation of all of the
proposals which have been put forth so far, is that persons granted lawful
status under any CIR legislation would be required to speak and understand English and demonstrate
a basic knowledge of U.S. history and civics. As such, this stipulation would
require that all of these 11.6 million or more amnesty applicants be
interviewed by a USCIS Immigration Services Officer in order to verify their
having met this requirement.
In 2010, according to
published government records, USCIS adjudicators were only able to interview about
1.2 million applicants for immigration and naturalization benefits (approximately
580,000 applicants for permanent residence and 694,193 applicants for
naturalization); as such, any new legislation with an English language and
civics requirement would potentially increase this workload ten fold.
One might be thinking at this point that
the obvious answer to this issue would be to just hire more USCIS adjudicators
to meet these new demands; however, this is easier said than done. First off,
USCIS is a fee-based agency, meaning that its operating expenses are covered almost
exclusively by the fees which applicants for immigration and citizenship
benefits pay the agency, rather than annual budget appropriations, like most
other federal government agencies.
As a result, money could not be spent to
hire new employees, or to rent new work space and equipment to accomodate these
new employees, until new amnesty applications were actually received and the
fees collected and processed .
One only need look at what transpired
during the 1986 amnesty to see the potential problems that such a situation
could cause. Because the general
legalization program in 1986 was to be self-funded through application fees,
the INS could not request an appropriation from Congress to fund the initiative in
advance of its start up date, which was designated by the Act itself. The INS, therefore, was forced
to fund the start-up costs of the program by borrowing against its normal budget.
Although application fees eventually generated more revenue than was needed to
administer the program, fewer applications were received than expected early in
the application process. This led the INS to scale down its legalization
staff midway, only to be overwhelmed by a surge of applications at the end of
the application period. Again, it must be stressed that this all occurred with
a workload which was, conservatively, only one quarter of what could be
expected from a 2013 amnesty provision.
Potential effect on current legal immigration
It is estimated that USCIS currently has a
backlog of about 4 million applications for immigration benefits. Any new
legalization program would add another 12 million applications to this number,
in addition to the 7 million new applications which the agency is already expecting
to receive during 2013.
It is noted that, before the 1986 legalization program began, there was already
a backlog of applications for immigration benefits in the INS. That backlog substantially
increased because INS resources were partially diverted by IRCA. Additionally, the number of
people receiving permanent residency through IRCA created an increase in
applications for family reunification immigration for which the INS’s resources were
inadequate.
In fact, during the 10 years immediately following the 1986 amnesty, processing
times backlogs for applications for naturalization and applications for green
cards grew from a few months in the mid 1980s to several years in the mid
1990s.
From the foregoing, it is clear that any
new CIR legislation which provides for the legalization of persons illegally in
the U.S. will certainly have a deleterious effect on legal immigration, as it
will undoubtedly divert current USCIS resources away from the working on these
cases to handle amnesty cases.
As a result, it would be expected that
processing times for applications for legal immigration benefits will grow
considerably, and persons who have been patiently waiting to immigrate to this
country legally, by virtue of sponsorship by close family members or employers
who are United States citizens, will have to wait even longer for their visas.
Strain on IT USCIS Automated Systems
It’s often popularly stated that the
capacity of our technology changes every 18 months. If this is true, to say
that USCIS’ automated support systems are antiquated
is an understatement. Even in today’s digital world, USCIS still uses a
paper-based system for accepting and processing the vast majority of the
approximately 7 million applications it receives each year. To support this paper
process, the agency utilizes a patchwork of a few new and many very old
automated systems.
Currently, USCIS is dependent upon two
major automated case management systems CLAIMS
3.0 and CLAIMS 4.0, to manage the bulk of the applications for immigration
benefits it adjudicates. It should be noted that CLAIMS 3.0 was developed back
in the early 1990s, and, technologically, has changed very little since that
time. The newer CLAIMS 4.0 system, is
more than a dozen years old, and currently processes only a small percentage of
the applicant types filed with USCIS. Although the agency is, at present,
working to develop a new case management system under its Transformation
initiative, this solution is years, if not decades, away from fruition, and
will certainly not be a factor should CIR legislation be passed this
year.
So, USCIS which is operating using a collection
of miscellaneous or incongruous information technologies, which are, today,
straining under the onus of their current workload, will be asked to double,
triple or even quadruple this work load, should CIR become a reality. This
will most certainly constitute a receipe for disaster.
In Conclusion
If legislation similar to what is being presently
discussed becomes law, implementation by Homeland Security’s Citizenship and
Immigration Services, will be overwhelmed with work. Delays in processing new
applications for amnesty will be extensive, and it is not inconceivable that
applications for immigration benefits which now take months to process, could
take years to complete. Delays in all other work of the agency will, absent
enormous increases in staff, also be extended by years. Thus, we feel strongly
that Congress should simultaneously address the broader impact on the the
primary agency to insure timely implementation and completion of the proposal.
A manager at USCIS facing having to implement what is passed. (name
withheld)
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