In Light of Current ICE Raids: Fund USCIS!
US immigration discourse is so dogshit. It’s broken not just in policy, but in how it’s popularly talked about. It is SO beyond emotionally driven, where everyone has an extreme opinion in one direction or the other, but very little substantive critique of the topic.
The spectacle of migrant violence and the inhumanity of ICE is what mobilizes the right and left, respectively, and nothing more. It’s frustrating to witness as someone living in the country as a permanent resident. There is so much emphasis on what rattles the emotions and not much on the boring procedural reality of what makes immigration here so fucked up and low-IQ.
I NEVER hear people talk about the deep structural dysfunction of USCIS, and this neglect obscures the material barriers migrants in this country face when attempting to pursue legal pathways to residency and citizenship. Especially those with fewer resources than me. I feel like liberals avoid it due to its lack of emotional resonance, and conservatives avoid it because it doesn’t necessitate beating people with sticks.
Liberal rhetoric centers ICE as the face of cruelty -- focusing on detention centers, raids, and family separation. Fucked up yes, I agree. The inhumanities migrants face at the bloated hands of balding, Oakely wearing ICE agents are undeniably abhorrent. However, there is over-emphasis on the gravity and emotional spectacle of their harm and under-emphasis on the institutional mechanics (or lack there of) that have put people in these positions of precarity. One might argue that emotional narratives are necessary to mobilize public interest, but it has not yet materialized into any meaningful engagement. And we’re literally in grind time with these fucking raids. There is a total lack of structural awareness but high levels of moral outrage.
Do I seem a bit dismissive of Trump admin ICE enforcement? Maybe. But I’m more concerned with root-cause diagnosis than the results of institutional failure. The liberal propensity to tunnel vision on the emotionally evocative rather than the bureaucratically dull is a massive problem. I need my paperwork processed so I don’t get thrown in a fucking white van! Please get the pencil pushers paid and in the office!!
USCIS is the central bureaucratic bottleneck. This is the federal agency responsible for processing visas, green cards, naturalizations, asylum requests, renewals and adjustments of status (ahem 👀), etc. This agency is the backbone of immigration in this country, and it is impossible to legally reside in the US without their work. Yet somehow, the entire agency is funded via application fees. Yes, you heard that right. Application fees.
My $450 green card renewal costs that much just to keep the agency solvent. Despite its centrality, it’s not funded by tax payer dollars. The perversity of the financing structure feels satirical.
A. We receive 96% of our funding from filing fees, not from congressional appropriations.
This structure is a quirky neoliberal artifact. Citizenship is treated like a product, not a public good, and USCIS is built like a toll road. You want access? Pay up.
No one is marching in the streets for this. There is no serious public discourse about improvements or reform. Perhaps in siloed writing by immigration scholars, NGOs, or policy advocates, but the meat of the discourse is unengaged with by the general public writ large. This is a critique of popular discourse - that of mass media, political campaigns, and protest culture - not the professional or academic. The eggheads aren’t the only ones voting. Ask yourself dear reader, how do the people from your Facebook friends list think about immigration? Your instagram following? What about the people at your workplace? Remember, we uber-cool (😎), and super-smart (🤓), terminally online Substack users are not representative of the average engagement with the subject.
The legal immigration pathway is a myth for the poor. Even a privileged immigrant like me (😉😜) -- fluent in English, semi-gainfully employed, and semi-well educated -- has struggled with the application process. I have no financial support from my family, so that $450 fee was afforded through a second job and careful financial planning. The green card renewal application was submitted months ago with no update and limited transparency. This is a document I have been legally entitled to for well over 20 years and need to be able to work, travel, and benefit from the tax money I’ve paid into public services.
For low(er) income immigrants -- who lack the language fluency, the education, the financial access, and the socio-cultural capital -- this process is even more inaccessible.
The application process for naturalization alone can cost upwards of $2,000. Immigration lawyers -- which are absolutely necessary in cases with even minor logistical or legal complexity -- are expensive (e.g. $1000 retainer, ~$350 hourly on the cheap end). Pro bono services are overburdened with massive waitlists. Language barriers, digital access issues, and lengthy paperwork make clear navigation effectively impossible. Fee waivers exist, but are few and far between, and are gatekept by poor publicization and high demonstrated-need thresholds.
Conservatives in the country are generally dumber/more insane about the topic than the liberals. Though to some degree, they are more cognizant of the obvious “crisis” that characterizes the current immigration process. Liberals will reject the framing outright - they are too married to the “no human is illegal” rhetoric to willingly accept the idea that conservatives are totally right in labling the problem as the crisis that it is. They frequently ignore and/or outright reject the reality of immigration necessitating regulatory institutional process. Like people should just show up to the country and expect to be accommodated, which is just wildly out of touch with how things have to work (“No human is illegal on stolen land!!”). They conflate two totally segregate ideas: (1) Human dignity should be protected. (Good ✅) and (2) Bureaucratic architecture for immigration, and the enforcement of that, is inherently oppressive. (Deluded ❌)
There is frequently a refusal to engage with the need for banal, managerial procedure. Documentation, verification, logistics, etc. are necessary for safe and efficient migration. Instead, many liberals (and more broadly, the left) lean into hyper-moralized fantasy where borders are irrelevant and resources are unlimited. This bizarre sentimentalism only reads as empathetic on social media and is usually driven by a fear of percieved racism (that only exists online). Elsewhere it seems a bit bone-headed and performative.
Conservative prescriptive solutions, in contrast, are just grossly inhumane. They see a problem and their solution is to beat it with sticks (literally). The near sociopathic obsession with punitiative enforcement is borderline pathological. The outcomes of dogshit MAGA policy like “Remain in Mexico” or Title 42 are celebrated only by disordered personalities; it’s more motivated by psychological dysfunction than thoughtful governance. Proposed Republican solutions frequently produce human suffering in squalid tent encampments. If you care about human rights, it’s abhorrent. If you care about local capacity to live without active dysfunction, it’s abhorrent. They are not serious people, with only solutions that please no one but disaffected OANN addicts.
There is so much emphasis on “coming here the right way” from these folk, and very little understanding that the broken-ass systems make it hard as fuck to “come here the right way”. Most attribute to malice what is frequently human error or lack of access in the big immigration equation. No one is trying to game the system when they can’t even get into the fucking system to game it.
Some people absolutely do “game” the immigration system, to be fair to the paranoid Republicans. They just don’t look like the Guatemalans sitting in the tent shantytowns in Laredo. Do people really think impoverished migrants who don’t even have stable access to water or bathrooms are capable of complex legal scheming? (🧐 Republican schizo paranoia?)
The whole Trump admin attempted undoing of birthright citizenship is bonkers for so many reasons that I’m not even going to touch on. I do think liberals have reflexive moral outrage against this without much discussion of how it is exploited by wealthy, globally mobile elites via birth tourism. Though it doesn’t happen at the frequency that conservatives whine about, nor by the demographics they dehumanize.
But it happens.
This exploitation benefits a class of people who are not vulnerable - the international rich who want an advantageous passport for their children - not the working poor or the refugees. This is not an uncommon practice amongst the Chinese bourgeoisie.
The conservative obsession with ending birthright citizenship of course has an argument that is legally/politically/constitutionally distinct. Take a gander at any anti-immigrant think piece coming out of the academics at Claremont or Heritage. But for the general MAGA-poisoned public, I truly question what imaginary immigrant boogeyman they think they’re fighting against. I doubt they are thinking in the same kind of political abstraction as kooky academics.
I don’t think a relatively fringe phenomenon like birth tourism justifies redefining American identity via ending constitutional birthright. But both liberals and conservatives avoid inconvenient truths about class based exploitation and mundane systemic issues in order to continue the charged moralized rhetoric around their political goals. Which are frequently muddy and ill-defined at best. There is a massive failure in differentiating elites exploiting a broken, pay-to-play immigration system vs refugees and working migrants just trying to get by. Nuance and class identification gets in the way of clear moral branding. It’s not deliberate, people just trend toward what’s epistemically easier. It’s more lazy than nefarious, and immigration is an overwhelming issue even for experts. Ordinary people become reliant on provocation to drive interest.
On a day to day basis, a lot of “illegal immigration” is just people overstaying visas or failing to follow up in self-reporting to USCIS.
It’s actually super easy to fuck up your own immigration.
Conservative discourse is schizophrenically detached from reality, of course. They fixate aggressively on criminals and cartel members - literal statistical outliers given the insane volume of immigrants coming to this country. They gaslight and doublespeak themselves into thinking undocumented migrants are fucking non-human animals (pet eating Haitians hello?). Conservatives across the country have masturbatory fantasies about vigilante justice against…South American migrant workers?
There is this delusional emphasis on the word “vetting” with no substantive weight - USCIS already performs this “vetting” process they whine about. Interviews, biometric checks, criminal background reviews have existed for decades - I should know! My first one was two decades ago when I was in my mother’s arms as my step-dad was interviewed for her adjustment of status when they married. They are freaking out as though this shit doesn’t already happen. The problem is that there is no funding or streamlining of the process. People apply (when they can) and sit in administrative limbo for months, even years, before their “vetting”.
This wait time is for the I-90 form, i.e. the application to renew a green card, which for me is renewed every 10 years. This long ass processing time is for people who have already been “vetted” and are legally here. They make this shit a damn endurance test. This is the immigration equivalent of going to the DMV and being told that they can maybe print your renewed driver’s license in a year. The green card as a document has no bearing on your status (analogous to your driver’s license having no bearing on your ability to drive) - you are a permanent resident even if you don’t have the card. But without the card, you can’t prove your status for administrative requirements like work authorization or international travel (like how your license proves you know how to drive to the government).
I’m in this Kafkaesque nightmare of being legally allowed to be here but bureaucratically unable to prove I can be.
This should be the simplest category of applicant to process. Okay you haven’t committed multiple felonies or plotted domestic terrorism in 10 years? No? Are you who you say you are? Yeah? OK, here’s your card.
Imagine how fucking bad it is for immigrants in other applicant categories (of which there are many). I already had work authorization, and I already had a job - a stream of income. If you’re undocumented and never had work authorization to begin with, and you apply, and during this limbo period are unable to work…how the fuck do you survive? Food? Rent? Medicine? The waiting period for legal working papers is nearly two years for some people; that’s two years without legal income. Sometimes it can be longer.
The legal pathways already exist, but are a de facto fiction for most of the working class. Literally impossible for lumpenprole types (unfortunate description but accurate).
Immigration in this country is a complete bipartisan failure. Liberals obsess over moral optics and symbolic gestures (Taylor Swift Eras tour sign at the ICE protest, slay) and conservatives sensationalize threats and block functional reform. “Abolish ICE” and “Build the Wall” become a moral brand, not a policy demand. Either way, this theatrical moral outrage distracts from the root issue - USCIS is collapsing under its workload.
It’s a bureaucratic agency, not a political one. It’s not vindictive or punitative (hence my lack of concern about writing this). It’s underfunded and overwhelmed. Tossing some fedbucks at it would be so chill.
No one wants to meaningfully invest in the crucial work of funding USCIS, simplyfing existing legal architecture, and reducing the economic and legal barriers for working-class migrants. Only ~$111 million of the total USCIS budget is tax payer funded discretionary appropriations. ICE receives billions. Not to sound too radical, but why are we wasting money like this?
A lot of brainy liberals have overengineered solutions to “fix” the immigration process. Usually these involve radical procedural overhauls or some creation of entirely new third party agencies. Why? The mechanical architecture already exists. They’re just broke and understaffed. For FY26 USCIS is adding only 287 new staff. Meanwhile they handle millions of complex cases annually. It seems like the fundamental problem is a lack of allocated funding to the one agency. Everything else is tertiary until this is fixed. How much of the immigration problem could just be solved by throwing money at USCIS?
The most direct pathways to helping immigrants at risk is for the financially privileged and structurally protected to just sponsor applications. If you can afford to help someone pay for their application, if you speak another language and can volunteer to help someone fill out their application, that could be the difference between them being deported or not. That could mean an extension of a visa, temporary residency, or whatever other document - paperwork can be life or death. But then there’s still the absurd wait for processing that is out of everyone’s control.
Despite being in perfect standing, I am struggling against slow, expensive bureaucracy. I can only imagine how laborious and confusing the process is for those less privileged. I am totally alienated by public discourse that overfocuses on the end result of a broken system (ICE raids, overburdened holding centers, family seperation, etc.), and not on real reform for the procedural nightmare. The prevailing discourse is emotionally manipulative, class-insensitive, spectacle-addicted, and deeply out of touch with what the problem actually is. I hate to “both sides are bad” an issue but I just want my fucking paperwork processed before I get beaten with sticks by a guy who looks like this.
