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You might be making the assumption that the US wants to make the process easier.
by rwmj 1y ago
You might be making the assumption that the US wants to make the process easier.
- cromka 1y agoYou use the same system for Business visas. Hard to imagine US wouldn’t want those as easy as possible.
- nkoren 1y agoHard to imagine that the US wouldn't be as paranoid, self-sabotaging, and bureaucratically inept as possible? </sarcasm>
- jimz 1y ago[flagged]
- cogogo 1y agoMy wife, a green card holder, applied for citizenship in April and was naturalized yesterday (from an EU country). Not that I don’t believe it could be true but where are you getting the 3-4yr timeline? If that’s accurate she/we may have dodged a massive bullet.
- bluGill 1y agoSpouses always get better treatment as there is a voter who would be mad otherwise. They check for scam marriages but otherwise hurry the process through - if they don't a voter contacts their congressman to push the process. That voter will also likely know a lot of other voters and thus influence the next election while someone not married is unlikely to have that local network to use.
- cogogo 1y agoI would love to see data that backs this up. While definitely plausible the pathway she followed to naturalization was based on time in country and not our marriage. I didn’t need to push but I’ve generally found my congressman (who is also almost our neighbor) to be pretty unresponsive on any other issue. My understanding - which may not be correct - is the length of the process primarily depends on your country of origin and secondarily on how you are eligible. Very interested in any source showing that a relatively normal process has pushed out from months to years.
- filoleg 1y agoThis is patently false for one reason - once someone has a U.S. green card and has met the residency requirement to apply for citizenship, the application form and process are the same for everyone, regardless of how they got their green card (through work, marriage, asylum, investment, etc.). Once you are eligible to apply, the whole process is basically form N400->biometrics->interview (just doublechecking your name and other paper info, takes 5 minutes)->civics test->ceremony. However, the timelines and process for getting the green card itself is different depending on the nature of your visa, and they will indeed try to check for scam marriages before you get your green card (if you were applying for it through the marriage visa).
- bluGill 1y agoI stand corrected.
- klipt 1y agoNot exactly, if you're married to a citizen the residence requirement is 3 years not 5, and the form clearly distinguishes the 3 and 5 year options (3 years requires extra evidence of marriage and spouse's US citizenship)
- filoleg 1y agoYes, I am aware, which is why my grandparent comment said “[…] once someone […] has met the residency requirement to apply for citizenship.” The amount of time one has to wait before meeting the residency requirement (aka before they can apply for the US citizenship) depends on other circumstances. With the default being 5 years (technically 4 years and 9 months, because by the time process finishes and you get your citizenship, you will hit the required 5y mark, so they officially let people apply at 4y9mo mark; there is even a first-party "early filing calculator" tool[0]), and the number going down depending on whether it was through marriage, whether you served in the US military and applied for the expedited process, etc. However, my post explicitly mentioned that I was talking about the time one has to wait after they apply for the US citizenship, to which this has zero relevance. 0. https://www.uscis.gov/archive/uscis-early-filing-calculator https://www.uscis.gov/archive/uscis-early-filing-calculator
- ecshafer 1y ago3-4 year timeline makes more sense for Greencard application to Naturalization, that was 4.5 years for my wife. But its not 3-4 years N400 to Naturalization, no way. Timelines for USCIS depends heavily on where you are, since some offices just have more people to go through than others. So I have talked to people that one step might be 4 months for them and a year for another person.
- giantg2 1y agoI don't see how blaming the pre-existing website on the current administration makes sense.
- reaperducer 1y agoI don't see how blaming the pre-existing website on the current administration makes sense. Many federal web sites were very quickly altered or replaced by the new administration. This is common. Work begins on some web sites immediately after the election. For example, when a new president is sworn in, the White House web site flips immediately. More to the parent poster's point, it has been widely reported in the legitimate media repeatedly that many federal web sites have been replaced or significantly altered by the current administration. There's an entire pseudo-department for it that also makes headlines for its greater transgressions. Add to that severe and sudden budget and staffing cuts, and like all government functions -- you get what you pay for.
- DaSHacka 1y agoSo you claim the visa website was also changed by this administration?
- zzzeek 1y agoElon Musk set out hundreds of very young and arrogant programmers to modify code throughout the federal government including to change decades old code used by Treasury, Social Security, etc. While this went on he would tweet idiotic statements like "Dead people are getting social security!" (because he didn't understand the deceased have beneficiaries) and "we're giving social security to people who are 150 years old!" (because he and we presume some subset of his young programmers didn't understand date fields being set to the epoch indicated the date of birth/death had not been recorded). All this is to say we probably shouldn't assume any current US government website, especially ones that have to do with immigration, hasn't been completely modified by this team.
- monkeyelite 1y agoIs your claim that they found zero people fraudulently collecting social security through a dead relative?
- conductr 1y agoAs a US citizen, I feel it’s opposite. Hard to imagine they’d want anything related to visas to be easy.
- jazzypants 1y agoYou don't have a good enough imagination for how stupid our current leadership really is.
- more_corn 1y agoI guarantee the visa system was created before the current administration.
- xp84 1y agoDuring 8 years of Obama and 4 years of Biden, none of this was different or better. Perhaps this isn't a partisan political issue.
- schlauerfox 1y agoFrom 2014 until it was, in effect, obliterated by DOGE actions this year there was the "United States Digital Service", a crack team of programmers, a sort of skunkworks who worked to improve U.S. government websites of departments that wanted the help. So it seems to be partisan to want good websites, but there are countless people involved in politics with many agendas.
- snapetom 1y agoI don’t know if you’re US-based or not but in the US, government work has the stigma of attracting the bottom of the barrel. It is nearly impossible to get fired for performance reasons. Combine low pay and high job security, and you’re not going to attract the most innovative, motivated, or competent people. Early in my career, I was warned that if I took a job with the state of California, I’d be stuck there for my whole career. I’d be unhirable in the private sector.
- klipt 1y ago> high job security Not so much after DOGE fired entire departments for dubious reasons. I don't know why anyone would work for the federal government now - pay still sucks, and job security has been demonstrated to no longer be guaranteed.
- IT4MD 1y agoThat would be an abysmally poor assumption currently.
- dfxm12 1y agoI'd invoke Hanlon's razor, but in this case, it's certainly both malice and stupidity...
- cossatot 1y agoThey are so frequently intertwined
- clarkmoody 1y agoThe purpose of a system is what it does.
- swat535 1y agoIf there is any conclusion to be drawn here, it is that the United States doesn't want foreigners in their land (for tourism or otherwise). I'm not sure I see the upside of moving to a nation knowing that its citizens actively despise my existence.
- throw10920 1y agoNot to defend the US immigration system, but my experience is that this user-hostile behavior (modulo the port scanning lol) is endemic across US government websites - including those that nominally want to serve you, those that are at the state level instead of the federal level (such as the DMV sites), and those that are even internal for use by government employees only. It's bad enough that in some cases I believe the designers should be threatened with legal penalties.
- Our_Benefactors 1y agoThis. The website for buying treasury products is straight out of the year 2002. The login is so bad I would never consider buying them there - the service fee charged by brokerages is absolutely worth it in this case.
- ryandrake 1y agoWhich brokerages charge fees for purchasing US Treasuries? Schwab definitely doesn't. Really the only reason you need TreasuryDirect is for buying Series I bonds (and maybe a few other niche Treasury products), which are not available through brokerages.
- aianus 1y agoSchwab folds their fees into their bid/ask spread, they're not doing it for free.
- teiferer 1y agoMakes it obvious which lobby has a hand in this, doesn't it?
- PaulHoule 1y agoBack when interest rates peaked around that period I bought a huge number of I bonds which were a great investment —- got fired by my broker because I interrupted a sales presentation with “why don’t I just buy I bonds?” Back then I thought Treasury Direct was great.
- qingcharles 1y agoThe web front ends are awful, but the back ends are even worse. The backlogs for some of these applications is insane. I was at a US embassy one time and got talking to a girl who had just had her application approved after an 18 year wait.
- LorenPechtel 1y ago18 year wait for approval or 18 year wait for family sponsored immigrant visa? Because from some countries those do have 18 year backlogs.
- qingcharles 1y agoI believe it was the latter, if memory serves correct.