Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc.

October 26, 2010 — Mid-level federal bureaucrats don’t often attract sizable media contingents. But that’s where Andrea Quarantillo found herself last week, standing at a touch-screen monitor as a circle of reporters, flipcams at the ready, jostled for a view.

Quarantillo is the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ district office in New York City, which on Oct. 20 held its first-ever open house. The event attracted several hundred visitors, mostly immigrants and their advocates, who had the opportunity to ask questions about cases and concerns while their children were greeted by employees dressed as Uncle Sam and Abe Lincoln. It also drew a couple dozen members of the press — reporters for ethnic and international outlets, but also CNN, The Associated Press, and The New York Times — who came to hear USCIS’s pitch about how it is remaking itself. Those touch-screen computer stations, which allow immigrants to schedule appointments with case officers, stand at the entrance to an expansive “customer service” floor. They are part of the agency’s ongoing effort to offer better services to people overseas who want to migrate to the U.S., and to immigrants who want to become permanent residents and American citizens.

While political debate tends to focus on undocumented immigrants, the legal pathway to immigration has long been notoriously slow, complicated, and inefficient. But, many advocates and attorneys say, there has been real — if not yet sufficient — improvement over the past three or four years. Straightforward applications, which earlier this decade routinely took years to process, are now usually completed within months. (It can still take many years to get a visa or a green card, but most delays are now the result not of administrative backlogs, but of annual statutory caps on the number of visas, green cards, and other authorizations the government can issue.)