The Immigration Process

In September 2018, the Trump Administration released a new immigration policy that could affect millions of immigrants. In the past, any immigration applicant that made a mistake on their application forms (missing information or errors) was issued a Request for Evidence (RFE) to fix their application. This safety net was commonly used – in fact, 72% of Indian H-1B applicants relied on RFEs for their applications. _­

However, the immigration policy removes the safety net. Now, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services can outright reject an applicant without being required to give them a second chance with an RFE. This threatens the possibility of millions of foreigners immigrating to the United States, if they even make a single mistake in their application.

We can help.

The current immigration process is complicated. A plethora of different forms, each with a multitude of pages, added to the fact that there is a 850,000+ backlog of immigration cases and that many applicants don’t even speak English means earning a place in the US can be extremely difficult. Even worse, many of the applications are still done on paper rather than online, making the process even more tedious for applicants. With all these difficulties to consider, it’s no wonder that so many immigrants end up making mistakes on their hundreds of pages of application forms.

The power of technology has the chance to revolutionize this process. The easiest solution would be a “government-side” change: making the entire application process online-based, so mistakes could be quickly fixed, and forms would easily be transferred from applicant to the government for processing. Apart from taking taxpayer dollars to develop, such a system is would take a long time to develop fully, although it is currently in the process of being built.

Therefore, “applicant-side” changes should also be made to make the process more efficient. Helping foreigners fill out the complex forms, walking them through the process step by step, and using language translation to help with language barriers would aid the process tremendously. This would also reduce the chance of errors, giving applicants a fairer chance to make it into the United States.

In the next couple of blog posts, we’ll focus the specifics of these “applicant-side” changes and how artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning can be used to build them.