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Silicon Valley congresswoman slams INS

J M Shenoy

The agency from hell: That is what many constituents call it when they speak to Zoe Lofgren, the congresswoman from Silicon Valley, when they air their complaints against the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The delays in processing the papers for visas, green cards, and citizenship -- and poor customers service -- has resulted in the federal agency making "a nightmare of the American dream," Lofgren, a Democrat, says.

It is also causing Silicon Valley and other high tech industry centers in America to lose millions of dollars.

Intel Corp had to spend over $ 200,000 recently on an engineer from Malaysia to relocate him for three months because his H-1B visa was expiring, but the INS had not been able to process his green card.

Executive of Sun Microsystems, which also has in an office in Bangalore, say that at least 10 workers on temporary work visas will lose their jobs because the INS did not process their green cards quickly enough. About 100 more face the same prospect in the near future, according to Heidi Wilson, the company's corporate immigrant manager.

Last weekend, Lofgren met over 200 area residents, high-tech employers and workers and INS officials to study ways for the agency to clear its backlog of 100,000 files. Some of these could take four years to process before the visas are changed into permanent residents and green cards into citizenship documents.

She was told how many high-tech workers with H-1B visas had to wait for green cards for several years. She was told anecdotes of rude and abusive treatment by INS officials and stories of inadequacy -- lost fingerprints, standing hours in line and waiting years to hear about their cases from the INS offices in San Jose and San Francisco.

"In an era when FedEx can tell you online precisely where your package is, why can't the INS office tell you anything about the status of an application pending with it for years?'' Lofgren asked.

"In an era when you can secure a home loan and obligate yourself on the World Wide Web for hundreds of thousands of dollars without standing in line, why is it that the best you can do at an INS web site is to download some form, so you can fill it out by hand, stand in line in the rain and wait half-a-decade for an answer?

"What can we do to help the INS get into the 21st century?'' Lofgren asked.

Sunil Vatave of TekEdge in Santa Clara suggested that if any organization gets rid of a mindset, it can undo past mistakes and delays. If the INS has an antiquated system, it should not be difficult to update it or completely overhaul it, he said.

His firm offers a Web-based data system to H1-B workers who want to find out their visa status, he said, while still wondering why the INS could not give out that information promptly and efficiently.

"It took us all of two weeks to get the TekEdge Web-based system running," he said.

The meeting also heard the critics of INS who faulted the agency for not checking H1-B visa abuses, in particular the alleged scam by Lakireddy Bali Reddy and his son Vijay Kumar. The two are charged with bringing people in claiming they were computer programmers and making them work for menial wages. At least two teenage girls, who were "supposed" to have been the daughters of one of the "experts" were imported for sexual purpose, the charges say. Reddy and his son have denied the charges.

After Congress gave the INS millions of dollars last year to update its systems, it has started keeping electronic files of fingerprints and adding workers but critics say it has a long way to go yet.

William Yates, the INS deputy executive associate commissioner, blamed the delays partly on the shifting of the agency's focus from citizenship to so-called "status adjustment", or processing of green cards. More delays were caused by the change to electronic fingerprinting, he said.

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