Slashdot Mirror
Breaking the Visa Backlog
bart_scriv writes "As anyone who has dealt with H1-B visas can attest, the process can be a nightmare of long lines, waits and inexplicable delays. In this interview, the State Department's Tony Edson discusses what's being done to speed up and expedite the process, ranging from procedural changes to the use of new technology."
Having been through the visa process (and I'm not in a 'high demand' country like India), they do it to themselves mainly as far as workload. Part of the problem is that the people they are accountable to (the US voter) are not the people they serve (the immigrant), and INS and US Embassy jobs seem to attract more of its fair share of jobsworths and "little hitler" bureaucrats who just love to mess people around.
Take for example this. The US Embassy in London rejected my APPROVED visa application (it was an extension to a visa, and the INS in the United States had approved it, and all the embassy was required to do was to stick a new visa in my passport) because one of the forms was "out of date". So I downloaded the new, up to date form off their website. I couldn't believe it when I looked at it - it was absolutely identical to the old form, except the date at the bottom was different!
On a previous application, they rejected my application because the company I worked for hadn't filled out the form right (according to them; according to our international assignments department, generally they find a formula that works with the forms - and the forms will be processed OK by the Embassy for about 6 months, and then without warning they start rejecting them. Then they have to to-and-fro in a trial and error process until the Embassy begins accepting the forms again. And about 6 months later, the forms start getting rejected again - rinse and repeat). I had to go to London, sit in the Embassy for 4 hours.
The Embassy itself was quite interesting. You sit in this large square room, and at the end are a bunch of bank teller style windows. There is a delicatessen-style number system. You are given a ticket and wait until your number is called. Of course, prior experience with the Embassy means that you know for sure if you miss your number, they will NOT call it out again and you will be sent away - so it's incredibly difficult to do something like read a book to pass the time just in case you miss the number. There are these 'newspapers' they leave too, I think they were called "Going USA". The first half of this paper is devoted to how great the USA is (land of opportunity etc., it seemed mainly to be stories about people who wanted to immigrate to run gas stations), and how awful your home country is by comparison. The second half of this paper is dedicated to telling you how you will never, ever get a visa! So anyway, my number was called. The question?
"How long have you been working for this company"
"3 years so far"
"That's fine" (stamp stamp). "You'll get your passport back in about 3 days"
They could have asked me that over the phone rather than incurring the cost of going all the way to London, waiting 4 hours, and then sending me away.
The Embassy is probably even worse now. I've heard that the ones in India will reject your application unless you turn up in a business suit (but that's just hearsay, I can't substantiate that). They have all sorts of petty bureacratic rules they won't tell you - they just reject applications with nothing except a very vague reason, and you have to keep retrying until you satisfy them (and even then, after a few months, forms that were completely satisfactory are suddenly unsatisfactory with more vague reasons for rejection).
Then there's the obvious bias. An Irish friend of mine actually got naturalized as a US citizen. He's a doctor. There was a family in front of him for one of the interviews done by the INS. They got given a real grilling - not in a private interview room, but in front of everyone in the waiting room. When he got there? "Oh, Doctor Smart, yes this is acceptable" >stampstamp. It seemed like if you were a doctor, you weren't subjected to the INS Dehumanization adn Demoralization Programme.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Unless we stop handing out H*-* visas entirely, there will be NO opportunity for our children to learn to work, because there will be no jobs available for them to learn to work IN. That applies more to H2-* visas than H1-* visas, but the idea is the same- if you give away all the entry level jobs, there will be no way to enter the workforce.
We've been handing them out for decades, yet we seem to have near record low unemployment... Yet countries like France, which have very protectionist policies, seem to have a serious problem getting their young people into the workforce. Something seems seriously wrong with your theory.
If we don't let US companies hire foreign workers in the US, the companies will move to a country where they can hire those workers. Here's a pop quiz: Which company is likely to hire more US citizens, a company with offices in the US with a mixture of US and non-US employees, or a company with offices overseas?
I suggest you weigh your ideas against some real life data and reconsider your position.