What's the one mistake that most people make when it comes to thinking about immigration?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States out of our office in St. Louis, Missouri, and our office in San Diego, California, which actually opens today, January 4th, 2021. So we're very excited about that.
A lot of new subscribers have joined us over the last six months or so, and that's very exciting. We love to have new members in our Immigrant Home Facebook group. We love to have new subscribers to the YouTube channel. And so I wanted to come back to a theme that if you've been with us for a while, you will be familiar with. And that is that immigration is not your friend. The State Department is not your friend. These governmental agencies are not acting in good faith. They do not have your best interests at heart.
And so I wanted to make sure that you understand that when you're dealing with these agencies, you have to think of them as dealing with a snake or a dangerous animal, and that they can try and bite you at any time. And too many people go into the lion's den or go into the arena unfamiliar with all the traps, and the tricks, and the schemes, and the evil intention. Now, certainly there are fair USCIS officers. There are fair USCIS field offices. There are fair embassies and fair people at the National Visa Center, but the system is stacked against you. The system is designed to find fraud, even when it's not there. The system is designed to create hurdles that don't need to be there. The system is designed to keep you or your loved one from getting the immigration benefit that you are entitled to.
So as we go into 2021, and hopefully with a new outlook at immigration, based on the change in president, these things might change. But the overall theme was true when George Bush was president, when Barack Obama was president, when Donald Trump was president and it will continue when Joe Biden's president. Obviously things are going to get easier and I would not be honest if I was telling you that things aren't going to get better, but it's going to take a long time. Donald Trump has had some really evil, smart people in the halls of USCIS and the State Department, Mike Pompeo being the biggest clown criminal of all. And so nothing's going to change quickly, but even when it does get "back to normal", everybody forgets that under Barack Obama, he deported plenty of people. We used to call him the deporter-in-chief. So the games will continue. The bureaucracy will continue.
Hopefully the delays will speed up, that cases will go faster. I really hope that's one of the big changes, is just simply that cases that used to take two or three months that have ballooned up to 18 or 24 months will go back down to the appropriate amount of time.
But that does not mean that everything's going to be easy or that immigration is going to be trying to approve more cases. I think that the demand for denials will go down, but you're still going to have these officers who've been conditioned over the last four years to make life as difficult as possible for immigrants. That's just going to continue. And it's going to take a while for "the kindness" or "the goodness" of Joe Biden and his administration to seep back into this huge agency that employs tens of thousands of people.
So we are hopeful, as we start this new year together, we are hopeful that immigration's going to return to a place of equilibrium, of fairness, but even when it's "fair", there are so many hurdles that you can't see, that you don't know about, and that, if you're not careful, are going to bite you like that snake that I mentioned.
So hopefully we're all heading into an easier time at immigration and hopefully your case is going to get approved. But if you need help, you should give us a call at (314) 961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, which is called Immigrant Home. We'd love to have you in there. We're up to almost 4,000 members. Good debates and discussions in there every day.
And then, of course, we have our YouTube channel. Hopefully you subscribed or will be subscribing so that you get updates whenever we make videos just like this one. Don't forget that every Tuesday and Thursday at noon Central time, I'll be live in Facebook and on our YouTube channel in that Facebook Immigrant Home group answering all of your questions for an hour for free, it's like a call-in show. We've been having a lot of fun with it. I really enjoyed it, and I've made some new friends. So hope to see you there and I hope you have a great 2021. Thanks everybody.
