While seated in the USCIS waiting area on Wednesday, in a rare moment of prising myself away from their most informative television narrowcasts, I saw a poster proclaiming their motto:
Respect. Integrity. Ingenuity.
The irony of those words is palpable. While I’d rather not speak to the second term chosen it would seem that the USCIS need a little tuition on the meaning of the first and last.
A Respectful immigration system would, at the very least, keep those immersed in it up to date with accurate information about how their application was going. It would not slow down, speed up, or add paperwork at government whim, but would instead provide clear, useful advice and offer a date on which the review of the case would be completed. Obviously it cannot offer complete security for those making plans (applications may be turned down), but it would do what it could to help those people taking the time and going to the effort of jumping through its hoops.
An Ingenuous immigration system would not require the same information to be submitted multiple times. It would not take several months to decide whether to allow someone into a country, but require the same time period to decide whether, once they had entered they would be allowed to work, or even allowed to stay. That’s simply inefficient. It isn’t very respectful either. I might be tempted to say it’s lacking in integrity.
The thing that has struck me over and over as we’ve made our way through this process is how poorly organised it is.
Of course we’ve all joked about red tape and government inefficiency, but sometimes these reality checks that show it’s more than just a joke still catch me. I hope that I will always be surprised by such poor service. If there’s much more like this, I doubt it.