Before Snowden: The Whistleblowers Who Tried To Lift The Veil

Before Snowden: The Whistleblowers Who Tried To Lift The Veil

“The NSA is overseen by Congress, the courts and other government departments. It’s also supposed to be watched from the inside by its own workers.

But over the past dozen years, whistleblowers have had a rough track record.

Those who tried unsuccessfully to work within the system say Edward Snowden — the former National Security Agency contractor who shared top-secret documents with reporters — learned from their bitter experience.”

Very disheartening; this definitely puts the Snowden scandal into a new perspective.

The Cost of Getting a Green Card

The Cost of Getting a Green Card

“The expenses associated with getting a green card come in three general categories: official fees paid to the government, professional fees (lawyers, passport photos, etc.), and black market costs (fake documents, fake marriages, scams of all sorts). I talked to some immigration lawyers and some immigrants I know to get a sense of what these costs can look like.

First, the official costs. A green card application costs a total of $1,490. (If I were in charge, it would be $1,492, because government bureaucracy needs a little whimsical irony.) That is definitely not nothing, but Danielle Briand and Yazmin Rodriguez, immigration lawyers in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who were good enough to give me some orientation in this realm, told me that the immigration service is pretty good about giving people waivers for financial hardship. Of course, there are many many permutations and combinations of fees you might have to pay (here is a daunting pdf of all of them). With the cost of possible appeals, ancillary forms and fees that different circumstances might require, and medical examination and mailing costs, it would be easy to drop $2,000 just on government fees.”

The fees are bad enough, but having to fill out overwhelming stacks of unreadable government forms that are barely in English, which is probably not the applicant’s native language anyway, must be even more overwhelming and discouraging.

“Despite being accompanied by extensive instruction booklets, the forms still have some irreducibly ambiguous questions, perhaps reflecting several different generations of bureaucratic obfuscation. And the green card government hotline notwithstanding, I believe there is very little useful, free, and credible help available to people in trouble-shooting ambiguous questions. When the stakes are so high, and when even a single error can mess up a person’s application or stall it by months or even years, this seems worrisome.”

Not to mention the fact that immigration law changes constantly, and that the process is more subjective than scientific. Something to think about next time the subject of illegal immigration comes up.