I was once a records-manager for the now-defunct Immigration & Naturalization (it is part of Homeland Security now; back then, it was part of the U.S. Department of Justice).
It was my observation that "asylum examiners" in Immigration & Naturalization were rather more interested in assembling around the water-cooler at the office, discussing the latest Chicago Cubs baseball game, than they were in doing their job.....jobs for which they were very well paid.
Many of them never even bothered reading files carefully and painstakingly assembled by petitioners; it was just more fun to play "Solitaire" on the office computer.....again, despite that they were very well paid, and they were very fortunate indeed to have jobs that demanded only reading, no other work.
The rest of us could be so lucky.
Whether one is pro-immigrant, anti-immigrant, or somewhere in between, one has to admit such is a tremendous waste of taxpayer money, bureaucratic inertia and non-work.
It was in the mid-1990s that immigration attorneys began frankly advising asylum applicants that the process for asylum was merely a wasteful and time-consuming facade that had to be endured; that one just had to have the patience to last it out, until an appeal could be filed in a court.
I do not know how it is now, but at least then, circa ten years ago, the attitude was, that while a bureaucrat never paid attention to documentation, judges were conscientious about it, and gave the applicant his first fair hearing.
A waste of taxpayers' money, having all these people on the payroll not bothering to apply the clearly-stated laws of the land.
One way to reduce the "backlog" is to deny hearings and order the immediate deportation of anyone who cannot prove he/she entered the United States through an established border checkpoint.
But while that appeal is pending,they have to stay behind bars until all the appeals are decided.
Just bringing the lawsuits Americans won't bring.
Thanks for the post BUMP!!
The solution to this problem is to enforce the law at the border. Nothing else will work.