USCIS: the most hated entity in the Federal Gov't

At least at the Clemens' household. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services. They are the clowns preventing our adopted 'grandson' from coming into America. Making our homeland safe from incoming 6 month old infants. It's explained here and here. [We aren't too fond of our Senator, Elizabeth Dole, either. Her office refuses to even respond to requests for help]

But, lest you think that Clemens and Carmen et al are simply malcontents focusing only on their own peculiar experience, here is a helpful editorial from today's Washington Post explaining just how inept and out of control these clowns are. You will notice that they are self funded, btw. That means they are NOT controlled in any way by congress. They can, and do, tell Senators to buzz off if they have the temerity to question CIS judgement. Perhaps that explains why Senator Dole's office refuses to get involved.

Anyway, here is a key quote from the editorial:

IN JULY, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services increased naturalization and visa fees across the board by an average of 66 percent. One fee more than septupled: the application to change from temporary to permanent residency, which went from $180 to $1,370. Immigration advocacy groups and other critics (including us) decried the ghastly expenses immigrants faced. Still, USCIS pledged that the increases would benefit applicants by allowing the agency to reduce processing times: from six months to four months for permanent residency visas, and from seven months to five months for naturalization applications.

Fast-forward to today. As USCIS Director Emilio T. Gonzalez testified at a House hearing last week, permanent residency applications now take about a year to process, and naturalization applications take a whopping 18 months. USCIS attributes this to the surge in applications it received in June and July -- 3 million applications and petitions in the summer of 2007, up from 1.8 million in the summer of 2006 -- and says it had no way of anticipating the increase. But USCIS should have known that raising fees so precipitously would have this effect.

This is typical of how things operate at CIS: price gauge so they can increase their budget without Congressional oversight, blithely make pledges they can't possibly meet, and then stonewall. Twits.


[not that it is the main thrust of my post, but this 'unavoidable' delay in processing citizenship will almost certainly benefit the Republican Party in November]