Excessive Bureaucracy Is Making America's Broken Immigration System Worse

A recent report from the Government Accountability Office spells out some of the consequences of Trump's efforts to slow legal immigration by tangling it in additional layers of bureaucratic red tape.

Among other things, the GAO says that one of the major drivers of the immigration system's mounting caseloads-The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reports a backlog of nearly 7 million applications and petitions-is the government's own, recently beefed-up immigration bureaucracy.

The GAO's review looked at seven of the most frequently used immigration forms and petitions-forms that account for roughly 70 percent of USCIS' pending caseload-and found that six of them had increased in length since 2015.

We're now seeing the consequences of what some immigration experts warned at the time were "Small but well-calibrated actions through regulations, administrative guidelines, and immigration application processing changes" intended to slow down "Family- and employment-based immigration" as well as refugee admissions and other forms of legal entry into the country.

Some migrants with relatives in the United States likely would have taken advantage of the legal immigration system if it were functioning more smoothly, or at all.

Unlike the current situation at the border-which is largely the result of migrants fleeing horrible conditions in Haiti and El Salvador-the problems plaguing the legal immigration system are mostly self-imposed and thus within the power of the Biden administration to solve.

Until Congress or the Biden administration gets around to fixing this mess, the legal immigration backlog is a useful reminder about the often unseen, human costs of expansive government bureaucracy-and how that bureaucracy can be weaponized for political ends just by making forms more difficult to fill out.
 

https://reason.com/2021/09/22/excessive-bureaucracy-is-making-americas-broken-immigration-system-worse/