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1. Embed this notice
   Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:05:51 JST Cory Doctorow

   Having been through the US immigration process (I got my first work visa more than 25 years ago and became a citizen in 2022), it's obvious to me that Americans have *no idea* how weird and tortuous their immigration system is:

   https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/52177745821/

   --

   If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

   https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/06/doge-ball/#n-600

   1/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:07:47 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Let's be clear: I played the US immigration game on the easiest level. I am relatively affluent - rich enough to afford fancy immigration lawyers with offices on four continents - and I am a native English speaker. This made the immigration system ten thousand times (at a minimum) easier for me than it is for most US immigrants.

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     Kim Scheinberg repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:07:48 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     A couple years ago, Americans' ignorance of their immigration system was merely frustrating, as I encountered squishy liberals and xenophobic conservatives talking about undocumented immigrants and insisting they should "just follow the rules." But today, as murderous ICE squads roam our streets kidnapping people and sending them to concentration camps to be beaten to death or deported to offshore slave labor prisons, the issue's gone from frustrating to terrifying and enraging.

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     Kim Scheinberg repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:08:10 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This means that, at every stage, you have to be as comprehensive as possible. This is a photo of my second O-1 ("Alien of Extraordinary Ability") visa application. It's 800 pages long:

     https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2242342898/

     The next one was *1200* pages long.

     Like I say, I became a citizen in 2022 (for some reason, my wife got her citizenship in 2021, even though we applied jointly). At that point, I thought I was done with the process.

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:08:11 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     When you deal with US immigration authorities, everything is elevated to the highest possible stakes. Every step of every process - work visa, green card, citizenship - comes with forms that you sign, on penalty of perjury, attesting that you have made no mistakes or omissions. A single error constitutes a potential falsification of your paperwork, and can result in deportation - losing your job, your house, your kid's schooling, everything.

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     Kim Scheinberg and GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:08:12 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     There were lots of times over the years when I had to remind my lawyers that *I* was paying them, not my employer, and that I *didn't* have an administrative assistant, so when they gave me 48 hours' notice to assemble 300 pages of documentation (this happened several times!), it meant that *I* had to drop everything (that is, the activities that let me pay their gigantic invoices) to fulfill their requests.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:08:13 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     I found my own immigration lawyers through a friend's husband who worked in a fancy investment bank, and it quickly became apparent that immigration firms assume that their clients have extensive administrative support who can drop everything to produce mountains of obscure documents on demand.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:08:14 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Same goes for Trump's "Golden Visa" for rich people - anyone who can afford to pay for one of these is already spending five- or six-figure sums with a white shoe immigration firm.

     I'm not quite like those people, though. The typical path to US work visas and eventual immigration is through a corporate employer, who pays the law firm on your behalf (and also ties your residency to your employment, making it risky and expensive to quit your job).

     5/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:08:15 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     There are lots of Americans (who don't know anything about their own immigration system) who advocate for a "points-based" system that favors rich people and professionals, but America *already* has this system, because dealing with the immigration process costs tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and without a lawyer, it is essentially unnavigable.

     4/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:08:50 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     My wife and I have certificates, but the kid doesn't - she was naturalized along with my wife, and while my wife's certificate was sufficient to get our daughter a passport, it doesn't have the kid's name on it.

     I checked in with our lawyers and was told that the kid couldn't get her certificate of citizenship until she turned 18, which she did last Tuesday. My calendar reminded me that it was time to fill in her N-600, the form for applying for a certificate of citizenship.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:08:51 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     But then my kid applied to university and was told that she should sign up for FASFA, which is the federal student loan and grant process; she got pretty good grades and there was a chance she could get a couple grand knocked off her tuition. Seemed like a good idea to me.

     So we filled in the FASFA paperwork, and partway through, it asks if you are a naturalized citizen, and, if you are, it asks you to upload a copy of your certificate of citizenship.

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     Kim Scheinberg and GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:11:38 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     I get to do *luxury Kafka*, the business class version of US immigration Kafka, where you get to board first and nibble from a dish of warm nuts while everyone else shuffles past you, and I've *given up* on getting my daughter's certificate of citizenship. The alternative - omitting a single American vacation between 1971 and 2022 - could constitute an attempt to defraud the US immigration system, after all.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:11:39 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Can you recover the dates of every border crossing your parents made into the USA from the day they were born until the day they became citizens?

     Anyone who says that "immigrants should just follow the rules" has missed the fact that *the rules are impossible to follow*.

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     Kim Scheinberg and GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:11:40 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Your parents - long dead - never got you that certificate, so you create an online ID with the immigration service and try to complete form N-600. Do you know the date and flight number for the plane you flew to America on when you were three? Do you know your passport number from back then? Do you have all three of each of your dead parents' numeric immigration identifiers?

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:11:41 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     To be clear: this is *immigration on the easiest setting*. I am an affluent native English speaker with access to immigration counsel at a fancy firm.

     Imagine instead that you are not as lucky as I am. Imagine that your parents brought you to the USA 60 years ago, and that you've been a citizen for more than half a century, but you're being told that you should carry your certificate of citizenship if you don't want to be shot in the face or kidnapped to a slave labor camp.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:11:42 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     But there *is* an option to escalate the online chat from a bot to a human. So I tried that, and, after repeatedly being prompted to provide my full name and address (home address and mailing address), date of birth, phone number - and disconnected for not typing all this quickly enough - the human eventually pasted in boilerplate telling me to consult an immigration attorney and terminated the chat before I could reply.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:11:43 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Then I tried the online chat, which is *also* answered by a chatbot. This chatbot only allows you to ask questions that are less than 80 characters long. Eventually, I managed to piece together a complete conversation with the chatbot that conveyed my question, and it gave me a link to the same online form.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:11:44 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     I tried to call the US immigration service's info line. It is now staffed exclusively by an AI chatbot (thanks, Elon). I tried a dozen times to get the chatbot to put me on the phone with a human who could confirm what I should do about visits to the US that I took more than 50 years ago, when I was two years old. But the chatbot would only offer to text me a link to the online form, which has no guidance on this subject.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:11:45 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     That includes, for example, the time when I was two years old and my parents took me to Fort Lauderdale to visit my retired grandparents. This question comes after a screen where you attest that you will not make any omissions or errors, and that any such omission or error will be treated as an attempt to defraud the US immigration system, with the most severe penalties imaginable.

     14/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:11:46 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     I was able to pull up all *three* of the numbers that the US immigration service assigned to both my wife *and* me.

     And then, about two hours into this process, I got to this section of the form: "U.S. citizen mother or father's physical presence." This section requires me to list every border crossing I made into the USA *from the day I was born until the date I became a citizen*.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:11:48 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     So yesterday, I sat down at the computer, cleared a couple hours, and went to work. I am used to gnarly bureaucratic questions on this kind of paperwork, and I confess I get a small thrill of victory whenever I can bring up an obscure document demanded by the form. For example: I was able to pull up the number of the passport our daughter used to enter the country in 2015, along with the flight number and date.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:13:14 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Southwest sucks today because of just one guy: Paul Singer, the billionaire owner of Elliott Investment Management, who bought a stake in SWA and used it to force the board to end open seating and free bag-check, then sold off his stake and disappeared into the sunset, millions richer, leaving behind a pile of shit where a beloved airline once flew:

     https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2024/10/24/southwest-airlines-bends-to-activist-investor-restructures-board/

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:13:15 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     One woman plaintively called out, "Why does everything get worse all the time?" (Yes, I'm aware of the irony of someone saying that within my earshot):

     https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system

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     Kim Scheinberg and GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:13:17 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     It's also a timely reminder of the awesome destructive power of a single billionaire. This week, I took a Southwest flight to visit my daughter at college for her 18th birthday, and of course, SWA now charges for bags and seats. Multiple passengers complained bitterly and loudly about this as they boarded (despite the fact that the plane was only half full, many people were given middle seats and banned from moving to empty rows).

     23/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:13:18 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This was terrible a couple years ago, when the immigration system still had human operators you could reach by sitting on hold for several hours. Today, thanks to a single billionaire's gleeful cruelty, the system is literally unnavigable, "staffed" by a chatbot that can't answer basic questions. A timely reminder that the only jobs AI can do are the jobs that no one gives a shit about:

     https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Kim Scheinberg (kims@mas.to)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:19:27 JST Kim Scheinberg

     in reply to

     • Graeme 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

     @pa27 @pluralistic
     This essay might help explain it

     Whenever I despair about my country (which is often) I reread this

     https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2025/06/28/american/

   • Embed this notice
     Graeme 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (pa27@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:19:28 JST Graeme 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

     in reply to

     @pluralistic Why would anyone - especially a canadian - even want to be s US citizen, is beyond me!

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 08-Feb-2026 00:13:10 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     One guy, Elon Musk, took the immigration system from "frustrating and inefficient" to "totally impossible." That same guy is an avowed white nationalist - and illegal US immigrant who *did* cheat the immigration system - who sadistically celebrates the unlimited cruelty the immigration system heaps on other immigrants:

     https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118277/documents/HHRG-119-JU13-20250520-SD003.pdf

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 08-Feb-2026 00:13:34 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Again: I've got it easy. The people they want to put in concentration camps are doing something a million times harder than anything I've had to do to become a US citizen. People sometimes joke about how Americans couldn't pass the US citizenship test, with its questions about the tortured syntax of the 10th Amendment and the different branches of government.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 08-Feb-2026 00:14:00 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     But the US citizenship test is the *easy* part. That test sits at the center of a bureaucratic maze that no American could find their way through.

     eof/

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Ben Aveling (benaveling@mastodon.ie)'s status on Sunday, 08-Feb-2026 00:14:16 JST Ben Aveling

     in reply to

     That the system is impossible to navigate without error is a feature, not a bug.
     The inevitable errors go unnoticed, so long as no one in power has reason to notice them.
     They get the immigrants they want, and an easy way to get rid of people they don't want.

     The aim of a police state is to make it necessary to commit crimes to survive. The police choose which crimes to enforce, and which not, and that gives them power over people.

     @pluralistic