USCIS Testimonies and Speeches

[JimVaPhuong 4,863]

I do not actually think that we should have an absolute right for whoever we marry to immigrate. If an American woman married Osama bin Laden, how many of us think Osama would then have a right to live on your block?

But that power of the government should be very, very, very limited, for use only in extreme cases like Osama. Presently it goes way too far. For example, if your lady was a prostitute 10 years ago and got busted and sent to jail but since then cleaned her act up and lived a perfectly law abiding life, I think she should be allowed in. But the present law says she should be blocked. And that law is wrong.

The really big wrong is the waiting time. 30 days, 60 days is one thing, but 6 months is patently unreasonable and a system that doesn't work. Just because it works in 6 months does not mean that it works. There is a point where passage of time means that it does not work.

To those of you who say "it works, just not fast enough for your liking", what if it took 10 years? And what if you told me it doesn't work? And what if I told you "Just wait 10 years. It works, just not fast enough for your liking". Does it work? Or do you now see a point where passage of time makes it not work?

Before I would conclude that six months is "patently unreasonable" I'd have to know exactly why it's currently taking six months.

If it's taking six months because USCIS is overwhelmed with petitions, and they're stacking up far faster then they can adjudicate them, then I'd say that's not reasonable. They need to hire more adjudicators. Since the system is largely funded by fees, I'd say they could afford them. Getting more petitions means getting more fees means paying more adjudicators. The math ain't difficult.

If it's taking six months because they're just grossly inefficient, and they're largely ignoring I-129F's, especially at VSC, then I'd say that's not reasonable. They need to reorganize and root out the inefficiency, and whoever is responsible for the mess should be shown the door.

If it's taking six months because the director was told to prioritize other petitions, then I'd need to know the reason for changing the priorities before I could say whether I thought it was reasonable. I'm willing to admit that some things are more important in the grand scheme of things than bringing my fiancee to the US.

If it's taking six months because the system they had in place has been completely reorganized, and now they have to develop new procedures and processes for handling petitions under the new system, I'd say that may be reasonable if it was expected, planned for, and is expected to correct itself in a reasonable amount of time. Big ships don't turn on a dime.

I suspect it's the latter case. They switched over to having all I-129F's submitted to the Dallas Lockbox last summer. They also dropped the fees, indicating they were expecting the process to be more streamlined and require fewer man hours per petition. I suspect we're seeing the fallout from this reorganization.

Look, if I had a petition pending, and I looked at the long term statistics and saw that six months was a serious anomaly then I'd be equally pissed off. But that's not how it is. There have been many times in the not too distant past when processing times were as bad or worse than they are now. When I first began lurking this forum there were people saying to expect 6 to 8 months minimum, and back then it was CSC that was the major bottleneck. I was fully expecting a long wait, but by the time I filed the following year it had dropped to four months, and I ended up waiting a bit over 3 months. Things changed in a matter of months. If anything should be apparent from looking at the USCIS trends, it's that things are constantly changing. If the current processing times were far outside the historical swing then I'd be seriously concerned, but they're not. It sucks for the people who are unfortunate enough to have gotten on the roller coaster at the bottom, and it will equally suck for the people who get on next time it bottoms out, and the time after that, and the time after that...