Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing US Immigration Law. We are now in a new year, it is 2023. The lame duck session of Congress is over; it looks like we are going to have a new House of Representatives in Panel that will be slightly different than the prior iteration. The Senate, it is my understanding looks much the same although slightly different. I think there was one sort of change in terms of numbers of seats.

But where are we going? I mean the question I am posing in this video is at what point is anybody going to seriously consider comprehensive Immigration reform in the United States? We really need to deal with this. I mean I am watching the Immigration System literally get worse by the day. It is really not getting better. Now I have been disinclined to make a video that just kind of bluntly says that out of the kind of the hope that things would sort of turn around and also out of the belief that okay we went through the COVID shut downs, reasonable people can disagree including myself as to whether or not that was necessary but okay we went through it. That is now over and we have still got backlogs and it doesn't look like, I do know that the Administration is doing things to trying to alleviate that but I don't really see it moving all that quickly. Meanwhile the prior Administration put rules or did changes of sort of nuances to rules in place that caused the overall system to, in my opinion just become unreasonable.

I really don't like the notion that the system is in some way adversarial. That was never the intention in my opinion of the Immigration System as evidenced by the fact that for the first 12 years that I was doing US Immigration work it really wasn't adversarial. You filed your paperwork, if they requested another document okay, give it to him but whatever. Now it is sort of like document requests are some sort of trick to try and destroy your case in terms of timing or in terms of just throwing a monkey wrench in to just intentionally cause the case to die for lack of a better term. That is really disconcerting to me. Meanwhile, you have got issues with plenary power doctrines associated with US Immigration which we have gotten into in the course of discussing things like the Doctrine of Consular Absolutism that in my opinion, in their iteration as they were dealt with 5, 7 years ago made a lot of sense. Consular Absolutism never really bothered me. That said, here recently it seems like more and more it is being utilized as some kind of manipulative trick to just again destroy people's cases for no really good reason that I can find. And again I don't understand why the US Immigration System has become in some way implicitly adversarial when there is no need for that. The purpose of Department Homeland Security and Department of State and their functions when they are dealing with US Immigration is to essentially vet folks that are looking to come to the United States, make sure that the person for example that might be sponsoring them meets the requirements; make sure that the alien meets the requirements and isn't some kind of a foreign criminal or something of this nature and then move on; it is not there to thwart. And unfortunately I think there were some in the past administration that specifically went into the system and changed things in an effort to simply thwart cases and I have got to be honest, I haven't seen the present Administration acting with what I can see is a great deal of  alacrity to kind of reverse that trend. I definitely think we need to start seeing that sooner rather than later.

That said, more to the point the entire Law on which the US Immigration apparatus is presently based I believe was drafted in the Eisenhower Administration so we are talking about something that is what, 70 years old now going back into the '50s? And look the world has changed, I mean and the law needs to keep up so I think it is definitely time to see some kind of comprehensive Immigration reform and honestly if this Congress and the last two years of this present Administration doesn't have anything else to do, I think that would be a very productive use of their time.