Time and time again immigration lawyers like to tell you how complicated the immigration laws are.  Often the motivation for saying this is to encourage people to hire a lawyer. While hiring a lawyer may help to avoid the procedural pitfalls of trying to obtain benefits from immigration agencies, the biggest problem is that the immigration laws are too complicated for the agencies themselves to administer. Lawyers have a hard time stopping the decision makers from making their stupid mistakes….

For years before it actually happened in 2003, many immigration-law pundits advocated for the division of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) into different components. The idea was that the cultures of benefit granting and enforcement were incompatible. When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in 2003, the immigration functions of the INS were moved from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and given to the new DHS. Within DHS, INS functions were, like a dream come true…