In the zero-sum-game political world we live in, a victory for one side of a polarized issue is considered a defeat for the other side. This is true with immigration and particularly true with the influx of families and unaccompanied minors coming to America’s southern border from Central America two summers ago, and still coming to a lesser degree. Americans are polarized between those who want to provide humanitarian aid  to these wretched people and those who see them as…

Some of my clients understand what is going on in their cases. Others think of what is happening as a black box. They hire me to solve some problem. We fill out papers, pay fees, they pay me, we go to meetings or hearings, I may go to meetings or hearings without them, and their problems are gone (when we win).  Despite my explaining what we are doing and why, to them it is just magic. Then they send others…

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….

There was immigration-practice-related developments in the main stream news this week. First, the President announced that any executive orders he will make about immigration law will be after the November (2014) elections.  Also, it was reported that the immigration court backlog has reached 400,000. The popular wisdom is that the President needs to issue executive orders to placate the pro-immigration forces that are part of his base. As the President cannot run for president again, why he has to keep…