Monday, July 16, 2007

The Mirage - Part 2

This supplements and analyzes the recent entry, "The Anatomy of a Mirage"

Reliable sources now indicate that in the weeks following the mid-June announcement of the July visa availability, the USCIS requested tens of thousands of immigrant visa numbers. It is undisputed that requests for some of these numbers were made on July 1 and 2 (during the month of July), so that numbers could then be (ahem!) “unavailable” for the month of July, thus enabling the USCIS to refuse to accept new applications “during” July. (Don’t claim you can’t understand this.) Instead of an orderly use of the visa slots as dictated by the Immigration and Nationality Act, what we have witnessed is a chaotic misuse of the procedures, for the convenience of the USCIS and to the detriment of the companies and people USCIS calls its “customers.”

How does an agency become so arrogant as to believe that the law exists only for its own convenience? One theory would be that there is a Bush (Cheney) "administration culture," a darker version of "corporate" cultures in our law firms and at our clients' companies. It is not coincidental that this Visa Bulletin-Gate would occur for the only time in 30 years under an administration where the VP can cynically claim to be part of the legislative branch to dodge the legal requirements that apply to the executive. It is easy to image how this shell game was plotted by senior USCIS officials: "We can just request all the numbers, and then try to catch up by using them later. Who is going to stop us? This system is so complicated that only an EB-2 Computer Scientist from India can understand it, and no one will be able to explain how this move is illegal. Now we won’t have all that extra work next month.”

Welcome to America (sometime in the future).

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