President Obama has pitched his executive action as a humanitarian effort to help millions of immigrants whose lives are in limbo because they are in the country illegally, but in doing so, he made life a lot harder for those who are trying to immigrate legally.
Obama’s immigration executive action, announced last Thursday, makes nearly 5 million undocumented immigrants eligible for temporary legal status. But every single immigrant seeking temporary legal status will have to apply through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. USCIS says it currently receives approximately 6 million immigration applications a year for all types of legal immigration. Thanks to Obama’s executive action, those who apply to cross the nation’s borders legally could find themselves left waiting behind those who cut the line and came here illegally five or more years ago.
Obama administration officials claim the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy is evidence that USCIS can adequately handle a sudden influx of applications. But DACA drew only 700,000 applications, 70 percent of those eligible.
If 70 percent of those newly-eligible for temporary legal status apply in 2015, USCIS would be faced with 3.4 million additional applications, almost five times more than it faced under DACA. USCIS’s application workload would increase by 57 percent, compared to the roughly 12 percent increase under DACA.
Green cards for immediate family are supposed to be the simplest part of the immigration system, but thanks to DACA, some application wait times tripled. Green cards for spouses, children, or parents were delayed from the typical five months to 15 months. The California Service Center for USCIS is still processing I-130 forms filed in 2010 for U.S. citizens wishing to establish their relationship to a sibling or married child over 21 years old. Even longer delays are likely to result from diverting USCIS resources toward temporary legal status applications.
The obstacle facing USCIS is not a funding issue. The fees collected from applicants are expected to outweigh the costs of additional employees. But a bureaucracy stretched thin enough as it is will be stretched even further 6 months from now when applications begin flooding in.
According to USCIS job openings on USAJobs.gov, it takes at least five weeks to train an immigration services officer, who must learn all of the intricacies required to judge an immigration application. It will likely take even longer to train officers on Obama’s new executive action since the situation is unprecedented. Surprisingly, the job openings do not list any prior knowledge of immigration law as a required qualification.
Even the web page with frequently asked questions about executive action on USCIS’s website gives a discomforting non-answer to the question, “Will the processing of other applications and petitions (such as family-based petitions and green card applications) be delayed?” The USCIS response reads, “USCIS is working hard to build capacity and increase staffing to begin accepting requests and applications for the initiatives. We will monitor resources and capacity very closely, and we will keep the public and all of our stakeholders informed as this process develops over the course of the coming months.”
Obama claims his executive action will keep immigrant families together that would otherwise be torn apart. Instead, the strain his action places on the immigration bureaucracy only prioritizes families who came here illegally over those willing to follow immigration laws, even if those laws are already excessively burdensome on applicants.
