The load of paperwork for immigration applications has been doubled, quadrupled or more – these are the new obstacles quietly thrown up by Trump’s administration to curtail legal immigrants.
The new paperwork has complex and vague questions that will force mistakes with dire consequences and cost the immigrant’s attorney fees running into thousands of dollars.
The agency that processes applications for immigrants – Citizenship and Immigration Services – has, since January, increased the length of 15 immigration applications including the most commonly required forms — resulting in the page length increasing from 72-162 pages. Each of these new forms also comes with instructions, which also almost doubled in length from 114-215 pages. In one smooth move, an incredible 191 pages of data has been increased.
This agency claims that it will take only 7 percent longer time to fill the forms and in 10 of these forms, it will not take even a minute longer to complete. In particular, the I-485 form’s instruction pages have increased from eight to 42 pages, a 500 percent jump. But the government still claims that the immigrants will need just the same amount of time, at roughly 3x faster per page.
The main issue here is more about the cost than the time taken to read through and fill the forms. The U.S. citizens need to complete 9x pages to bring their spouses over, and the complexity of the forms has necessitated employing a lawyer now which could earlier be done by themselves. Naturally, the attorney’s prices have now skyrocketed.
U.S. President Trump wants a drastic cut to the number of legal immigrants – through a bill. The new forms and bureaucratic hurdles are a sure way to meet that goal without legislation of any form, viz., delay, confuse, and demoralize immigrants who would otherwise come to the United States.
It is time for the Congress to step in, reassert its control, and protect the system that it created.
