Trump administration building "wall of paperwork" to keep immigrants out.
Even for visa applicants who still have a shot at qualifying, the process will soon become more expensive, at least if the administration prevails in ongoing litigation regarding an across-the-board increase in fees. The cost for a naturalization application, for instance, would nearly double, from $640 to at least $1,160.
Costs have risen indirectly, too. Common immigration forms are longer and more complicated. When Trump took office, the main “adjustment of status” form for green-card applicants was six pages long, with eight pages of instructions; the form has since stretched to 20 pages, plus 45 pages of instructions, not including the additional reams of supporting evidence and peripheral forms now required. (An update to the form and instructions, recently proposed by the administration, would be even longer.)
What’s more, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has essentially booby-trapped many of these forms. Applications can be rejected or denied if any fields are left blank — even if the field in question isn’t applicable. Examples: a blank field for a middle name, when the applicant doesn’t have a middle name; or no address listed for a deceased parent; or only three siblings named, when the form has space for four. Forms have even been rejected when applicants wrote “NA” instead of “N/A” — that slash apparently indicating a critical measure of the applicant’s merit.
Over the first six months that this “no blanks” policy was in place for one category of visa, half of all such applications were rejected because of it, according to a recent lawsuit. (An agency spokesperson said the policy helps adjudicators confirm an applicant’s identity and eligibility and that “Ensuring an application is complete from the beginning saves both the applicant and the agency time and resources.”)
Likewise, forms expire with little or no notice, replaced by nearly identical new forms, and applications already mailed with the old version get rejected.
Yet another new policy, introduced in 2017, encourages government officials to completely reinvestigate applications for extensions of existing visas, even when nothing about the case has changed. In practical terms, this means immigrants who have lived and worked here for years, sometimes in the exact same job, have to painstakingly re-document things they’d already proved to previous immigration officials long ago, like whether they have a college degree or what they do day to day. The process can end with an unwelcome surprise. Immigrants who have laid down roots — bought a house, paid taxes, enrolled their U.S.-born children in local schools — can abruptly be told to leave the country.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/29/trump-immigration-daca-family-separation/
