If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Having been through the US immigration process (I got my first work visa more than 25 years ago and became a citizen in 2022), it's obvious to me that Americans have no idea how weird and tortuous their immigration system is:
As of a couple years ago, Americans' ignorance of their own immigration system was merely frustrating, as I encountered both squishy liberals and xenophobic conservatives talking about undocumented immigrants and insisting that they should "just follow the rules." But today, as murderous ICE squads patrol our streets kidnapping people and sending them to concentration camps where they are beaten to death or deported to offshore slave labor prisons, the issue has gone from frustrating to terrifying and enraging.
Let's be clear: I played the US immigration game on the easiest level. I am relatively affluent – rich enough to afford fancy immigration lawyers with offices on four continents – and I am a native English speaker. This made the immigration system ten thousand times (at a minimum) easier for me than it is for most US immigrants.
There are lots of Americans (who don't know anything about their own immigration system) who advocate for a "points-based" system that favors rich people and professionals, but America already has this system, because dealing with the immigration process costs tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and without a lawyer, it is essentially unnavigable. Same goes for Trump's "Golden Visa" for rich people – anyone who can afford to pay for one of these is already spending five- or six-figure sums with a white shoe immigration firm.
I'm not quite like those people, though. The typical path to US work visas and eventual immigration is through a corporate employer, who pays the law firm on your behalf (and also ties your residency to your employment, making it risky and expensive to quit your job). I found my own immigration lawyers through a friend's husband who worked in a fancy investment bank, and it quickly became apparent that immigration firms assume that their clients have extensive administrative support who can drop everything to produce mountains of obscure documents on demand.
There were lots of times over the years when I had to remind my lawyers that I was paying them, not my employer, and that I didn't have an administrative assistant, so when they gave me 48 hours' notice to assemble 300 pages of documentation (this happened several times!), it meant that I had to drop everything (that is, the activities that let me pay their gigantic invoices) to fulfill their requests.
When you deal with US immigration authorities, everything is elevated to the highest possible stakes. Every step of every process – work visa, green card, citizenship – comes with forms that you sign, on penalty of perjury, attesting that you have made no mistakes or omissions. A single error constitutes a potential falsification of your paperwork, and can result in deportation – losing your job, your house, your kid's schooling, everything.
This means that, at every stage, you have to be as comprehensive as possible. This is a photo of my second O-1 ("Alien of Extraordinary Ability") visa application. It's 800 pages long:
Like I say, I became a citizen in 2022 (for some reason, my wife got her citizenship in 2021, even though we applied jointly). At that point, I thought I was done with the process. But then my kid applied to university and was told that she should sign up for FASFA, which is the federal student loan and grant process; she got pretty good grades and there was a chance she could get a couple grand knocked off her tuition. Seemed like a good idea to me.
So we filled in the FASFA paperwork, and partway through, it asks if you are a naturalized citizen, and, if you are, it asks you to upload a copy of your certificate of citizenship. My wife and I both have certificates, but the kid doesn't – she was naturalized along with my wife in 2021, and while my wife's certificate was sufficient to get our daughter a passport, it doesn't actually have the kid's name on it.
I checked in with our lawyers and was told that the kid couldn't get her certificate of citizenship until she turned 18, which she did last Tuesday. My calendar reminded me that it was time to fill in her N-600, the form for applying for a certificate of citizenship.
So yesterday, I sat down at the computer, cleared a couple hours, and went to work. I am used to gnarly bureaucratic questions on this kind of paperwork, and I confess I get a small thrill of victory whenever I can bring up an obscure document demanded by the form. For example: I was able to pull up the number of the passport our daughter used to enter the country in 2015, along with the flight number and date. I was able to pull up all three of the numbers that the US immigration service assigned to both my wife and me.
And then, about two hours into this process, I got to this section of the form: "U.S. citizen mother or father's physical presence." This section requires me to list every border crossing I made into the USA from the day I was born until the date I became a citizen. That includes, for example, the time when I was two years old and my parents took me to Fort Lauderdale to visit my retired grandparents. This question comes after a screen where you attest that you will not make any omissions or errors, and that any such omission or error will be treated as an attempt to defraud the US immigration system, with the most severe penalties imaginable.
I tried to call the US immigration service's info line. It is now staffed exclusively by an AI chatbot (thanks, Elon). I tried a dozen times to get the chatbot to put me on the phone with a human who could confirm what I should do about visits to the US that I took more than 50 years ago, when I was two years old. But the chatbot would only offer to text me a link to the online form, which has no guidance on this subject.
Then I tried the online chat, which is also answered by a chatbot. This chatbot only allows you to ask questions that are less than 80 characters long. Eventually, I managed to piece together a complete conversation with the chatbot that conveyed my question, and it gave me a link to the same online form.
But there is an option to escalate the online chat from a bot to a human. So I tried that, and, after repeatedly being prompted to provide my full name and address (home address and mailing address), date of birth, phone number – and disconnected for not typing all this quickly enough – the human eventually pasted in boilerplate telling me to consult an immigration attorney and terminated the chat before I could reply.
Just to be clear here: this is immigration on the easiest setting. I am an affluent native English speaker with access to immigration counsel at a fancy firm.
Imagine instead that you are not as lucky as I am. Imagine that your parents brought you to the USA 60 years ago, and that you've been a citizen for more than half a century, but you're being told that you should carry your certificate of citizenship if you don't want to be shot in the face or kidnapped to a slave labor camp. Your parents – long dead – never got you that certificate, so you create an online ID with the immigration service and try to complete form N-600. Do you know the date and flight number for the plane you flew to America on when you were three? Do you know your passport number from back then? Do you have all three of each of your dead parents' numeric immigration identifiers? Can you recover the dates of every border crossing your parents made into the USA from the day they were born until the day they became citizens?
Anyone who says that "immigrants should just follow the rules" has missed the fact that the rules are impossible to follow. I get to do luxury Kafka, the business class version of US immigration Kafka, where you get to board first and nibble from a dish of warm nuts while everyone else shuffles past you, and I've given up on getting my daughter's certificate of citizenship. The alternative – omitting a single American vacation between 1971 and 2022 – could constitute an attempt to defraud the US immigration system, after all.
This was terrible a couple years ago, when the immigration system still had human operators you could reach by sitting on hold for several hours. Today, thanks to a single billionaire's gleeful cruelty, the system is literally unnavigable, "staffed" by a chatbot that can't answer basic questions. A timely reminder that the only jobs AI can do are the jobs that no one gives a shit about:
It's also a timely reminder of the awesome destructive power of a single billionaire. This week, I took a Southwest flight to visit my daughter at college for her 18th birthday, and of course, SWA now charges for bags and seats. Multiple passengers complained bitterly and loudly about this as they boarded (despite the fact that the plane was only half full, many people were given middle seats and banned from moving to empty rows). One woman plaintively called out, "Why does everything get worse all the time?" (Yes, I'm aware of the irony of someone saying that within my earshot):
Southwest sucks today because of just one guy: Paul Singer, the billionaire owner of Elliott Investment Management, who bought a stake in SWA and used it to force the board to end open seating and free bag-check, then sold off his stake and disappeared into the sunset, millions richer, leaving behind a pile of shit where a beloved airline once flew:
One guy, Elon Musk, took the immigration system from "frustrating and inefficient" to "totally impossible." That same guy is an avowed white nationalist – and illegal US immigrant who did cheat the immigration system – who sadistically celebrates the unlimited cruelty the immigration system heaps on other immigrants:
Again: I've got it easy. The people they want to put in concentration camps are doing something a million times harder than anything I've had to do to become a US citizen. People sometimes joke about how Americans couldn't pass the US citizenship test, with its questions about the tortured syntax of the 10th Amendment and the different branches of government. But the US citizenship test is the easy part. That test sits at the center of a bureaucratic maze that no American could find their way through.
Doubtless you’ve heard that “we all get the same 24 hours in the day.” Of course it’s not true: rich people and poor people experience very different demands on their time. The richer you are, the more your time is your own — not only are many systems arranged with your convenience in mind, but you also command the social power to do something about systems that abuse your time.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
For example: if you live in most American cities, public transit is slow, infrequent and overcrowded. Without a car, you lose hours every day to a commute spent standing on a lurching bus. And while a private car can substantially shorted that commute, people who can afford taxis or Ubers get even more time every day.
There’s a thick anthropological literature on the ways that cash-poverty translates into #TimePoverty. In David Graeber’s must-read essay “The Utopia of Rules,” he nails the way that capitalist societies generate Soviet-style bureaucracies, especially for poor people. Means-testing for benefits means that poor people spend endless hours filling in forms, waiting on hold, and lining up to see caseworkers to prove that they are among the “deserving poor” — not “mooches” who are defrauding the system:
The social privilege gradient is also a time gradient: if you can afford a plane ticket, you can travel quickly across the country rather than losing days to the Greyhound or a road-trip. But if you’re even richer, you can pay for TSA Precheck and cut your airport security time from an hour to minutes. Go further up the privilege gradient and you’ll acquire airline status, shaving another hour off the check-in process.
This qualitative account of time poverty is well-developed, but it’s lacked a good, detailed quantitative counterpart, and our society often discounts qualitative work as mere anecdote and insists on having every story converted to numbers before it is taken seriously.
In “Examining inequality in the time cost of waiting,” published this month in Nature Human Behavior, public affairs researchers Steve Holt (SUNY) and Katie Vinopal (Ohio State) analyze data from the American Time Use Survey (AUTS) to produce a detailed, vibrant quantitative backstop to the qualitative narrative about time poverty:
(The paper is paywalled, but the authors made a mostly final preprint available)
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jbk3x/download
The AUTS “collects retrospective time diary data from a nationally representative subsample drawn from respondents to the Census Bureau’s Community Population Survey (CPS) each year.” These time-diary entries are sliced up in 15-minute chunks.
Here’s what they found: first, there are categories of basic services where high-income people avoid waiting altogether, and where low-income people experience substantial waits. A person from a low-income household “an hour more waiting for the same set of services than people from high-income household.” That’s 73 hours/year.
Some of that gap (5%) is attributable to proximity. Richer people don’t have to go as far to access the same services as poorer people. Travel itself accounts for 2% more — poorer people wait longer for buses and have otherwise worse travel options.
A larger determinant of the gap (25%) is working flexibility. Poor people work jobs where they have less freedom to take time off to receive services, so they are forced to take appointments during peak hours.
Specific categories show more stark difference. If a poor person and a wealthy person go to the doctor’s on the same day, the poor person waits 46.28m to receive care, while the wealthy person waits 28.75m. The underlying dynamic here isn’t hard to understand. Medical practices that serve rich people have more staff.
The same dynamic plays out in grocery stores: poor people wait an average of 24m waiting every time they go shopping. For rich people, it’s 15m. Poor people don’t just wait in longer lines — they also have to wait for understaffed stores to unlock the cases that basic necessities are locked behind (poor people also travel longer to get to the grocery store — and they travel by slower means).
A member of a poor household with a chronic condition that requires two clinic visits per month loses an additional five hours/year to waiting rooms when compared to a wealthy person. As the authors point out, this also translates to delayed care, missed appointments, and exacerbated health conditions. Time poverty leads to health poverty.
All of this is worse for people of color: “Low-income White and Black Americans are both more likely to wait when seeking services than their wealthier same-race peer” but “wealthier White people face an average wait time of 28 minutes while wealthier Black people face a 54 minute average wait time…wealthier Black people do not receive the same time-saving attention from service providers that wealthier non-Black people receive” (there’s a smaller gap for Latino people, and no observed gap for Asian Americans.)
The gender gap is more complicated: “Low-income women are 3 percentage points more likely than low-income men and high-income women are 6 percentage points more likely than high-income men to use common services” — it gets even worse for low-income mothers, who take on the time-burdens associated with their kids’ need to access services.
Surprisingly, men actually end up waiting longer than women to access services: “low-income men spend about 6 more minutes than low-income women waiting for service…high-income men spend about 12 more minutes waiting for services than high-income women.”
Given the important role that scheduling flexibility plays in the time gap, the authors propose that interventions like subsidized day-care and afterschool programming could help parents access services at off-peak hours. They also echo Graeber’s call for reduced paperwork burdens for receiving benefits and accessing public services.
They recommend changes to labor law to protect the right of low-waged workers to receive services during off-peak hours, in the manner of their high-earning peers (they reference research that shows that this also improves worker productivity and is thus a benefit to employers as well as workers).
Finally, they come to the obvious point: making people less cash-poor will alleviate their time-poverty. Higher minimum wages, larger earned income tax credits, investments in low-income neighborhoods and better public transit will all give poor people more time and more money with which to command better services.
This week (Feb 13–17), I’ll be in Australia, touring my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’re doing a remote event for NZ on Feb 13. Next are Melbourne (Feb 14), Sydney (Feb 15) and Canberra (Feb 16/17). More tickets just released for Sydney!
[Image ID: A waiting room, draped with cobwebs. A skeleton sits in one of the chairs. A digital display board reads 'Now serving 53332.' An ogrish, top-hatted figure standing at a podium, yanking a dollar-sign shaped lever looms into the frame from the right. He holds a clock aloft disdainfully, pinched between the thumb and fingers of one white-gloved hand.]
Loving it so far. It took a bit to get engaged with the Discworld in the first book but by now I've grown attached to Rincewind the terrible wizard. My favorite character, if it can be called that, remains the Luggage. Pratchett writes with wonderful good humor and one of the most personable and present narrative voices I've ever found. The narrator is not a character who exists elsewhere in the story as in the Nevernight trilogy or The Book Thief but it reads similarly.
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber
This will be going on my favorites list. Heavily annotated already, it is changing/broadening/informing my perspective on a number of issues from epistemology to the role of police in society.
The effects of all these regulations—regulations that almost always assume that normal relations between individuals are mediated by the market, and that normal groups are organized internally by relations of hierarchy and command—seem to emanate but from the government's monopoly of the use of force, but from the largeness, solidity, and heaviness of the objects themselves [objects like cars, property, bank accounts, etc. which force non-hierarchical groups or non-market-mediated interactions to become so in order to comply with government regulations].
...
When one is asked to be "realistic," then, the reality one is normally being asked to recognize is not one of natural, material facts, nor some supposed ugly truth about human nature. Being "realistic" usually means taking seriously the effects of the systemic that of violence.
'Utopia of Rules' is the sort of book that I'm going to have to sit on for a while, and really think about. It's a consideration of bureaucracy in the modern world, about structures of power that convert human interaction and consideration into systems of rules, about weaponized stupidity, and our proliferation of and attraction to such systems. There's a lot here about how they operate vs how we imagine them, how they fit into our social psychologies, and their seeming inevitability. I kind of wish he'd get more into alternative arrangements; then again, part of his thesis is about how the attraction of bureaucracy is that it flattens complex individual situations into boxes that we can deal with at-scale -- to imagine a single sweeping alternative is to imagine simply an alternative bureaucracy rather than a systemic change. It's a good, thought-provoking book, and I'd recommend it if you're interested in governance, organization, or simply understanding our modern world.
The card's interesting to me; it binds creatures in red tape, at the cost of any new experience. It's possible it should cost more, given the potentially exponential growth it could have; if you've got any decent board, it might be worth not drawing cards to lock down your opponent -- the downside being, if they don't have exactly a power-of-2 of creatures, you might have to catch some of your own in the red tape as well.
There was a time when academia was society's refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.
Much of the everyday business of social life, in fact, consists in trying to decipher others' motives and perceptions. Let us call this 'interpretive labor.' One might say, those relying on the fear of force are not obliged to engage in a lot of interpretive labor, and thus, generally speaking, they do not.
