Immigration reform news 2015 - U.S. Digital team uses technology to speed up citizenship process

Obtaining citizenship in the United States is a sloth-paced process that takes some a lifetime to attain, if ever.

First, undocumented immigrants can only apply after living in the country for at least five years; three if they meet certain requirements ranging from marriage to a U.S. citizen to work status. They must wait five years to the date of gaining permanent residency before even considering going forward. That doesn't include the wait list, which some anticipate being 25 years and over 4.4 million people long. 

Because of the overwhelming number of visa applications, the current immigration process is first-come, first-serve and limits the total number of people allowed each year. When President Obama, last November, took swift executive action protecting millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation, he also presented language aimed at expediting the visa process through technology.

Obama and the Department of Homeland Security created the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) team, led by former Google engineer Mikey Dickerson, soon after. Their goal is to streamline the stagnant citizenship system by eliminating obsolete obstacles, like the mountains of paperwork involved.

"As a group of technologists, that stuff just killed us," an unnamed White House official said in speaking with WIRED. "It's insane we would do that in 2015. We invented these things called computers."

The group's final report, entitled "Modernizing & Streamlining Our Legal Immigration System for the 21^st Century," was released Wednesday and featured a slew of recommendations.

"Currently, the immigration application and adjudication process is mostly paper-based, requiring documents to change hands and locations among various federal actors at least six times for some petitions," the report read. "These recommendations will make our system more accessible to applicants, bringing our technology to the 21^st century, and enhance data transparency."

USDS's objectives were to understand what people need, address the application experience from start to finish, make the process simple and clear for all users, and be consistent with language and design patterns.

One such was is through an improved online application interface. An updated digital program, which will more effectively manage records, is already being tested in at select overseas consular locations. The group also found the payment process to be too complicated. The report recommends splitting up payments so they're as "simple as buying multiple items in an online shopping cart."

Strengthening public communication about the visa process is pivotal. Applicant feedback to consular offices is often lost in translation and office workers don't have a clear way of exchanging information. The plan is to increase outreach by, for example, translating the immigrant visa portions of travel.state.gov - which receives 69 million visitors annually - into Spanish, among other highly-used languages.

"These are commonsense steps, but we must also continue to pursue more permanent solutions to fix the broken system," the report concluded, adding that Obama is committed to action, "but only Congress can finish the job with comprehensive, commonsense immigration reform."