I write to you all with a heavy heart this week, as I have decided to mothball the Immiwonk project for the time being. Before I go I wanted to share some final thoughts on my experience and hopefully give a little insight to our readers about what this project was and what we accomplished.
Immiwonk is a pandemic-era project dreamt up by myself and some colleagues who saw the burgeoning newsletter format (in particular via Substack) as a great opportunity to share some unfiltered, detailed, and lesser-known information about the immigration system directly with whomever was interested. While we spent several months addressing various topics in detail, as time went on and life slowly returned to normal many of our collaborators moved on to other projects and I was left to maintain and update the newsletter myself, which is why we shifted our content offerings in February to a digest format. While I enjoy writing about immigration, personal commitments have made it difficult to provide the level of interaction and attention throughout the week necessary to provide real insight into what is going on. Rather than let our newsletter slide in quality and timeliness I made the hard decision to put things on hiatus, with future plans to revive the effort as time allows.
While I have maintained my anonymity throughout this journey (and I will continue to do so now) I did want to share a little story about myself to help people understand why this effort is important to me. While our subscribers may have noticed that I have quite a lot to say about immigration, it wasn’t always this way.
Fifteen years ago when I was beginning my journey in the immigration world I was a lot like most people, I didn’t know a form I-485 from a B2 visa and the whole process seemed impossible to understand. I met the love of my life while working overseas, and after dating for a few years we decided to make it official. Around that time I was finishing up school, and I received a new job offer which was very focused on immigration and would require me to work overseas again after graduation. My then-girlfriend was from a visa-waiver country, so she would come visit for a month or two a couple times a year while I was wrapping up my last couple semesters at school.
Unfortunately after a few of these longish trips CBP began to give my wife the business every time she came back to the U.S. I went through a couple rounds of waiting at the airport for four or five hours as they pulled her into secondary for a grilling before I figured out that they weren’t too happy when they found out a fiancee of an American citizen was entering the U.S. on visa waiver with possible plans to get married. Not wanting to cause any trouble for myself or anyone else, I looked into a fiancee visa, which seemed like the right way to handle the situation. I submitted my I-129f, we waited the requisite six months or so, and she got her Embassy appointment to receive her visa. Great, I thought, with this in hand she should be good to go, and we can take care of whatever else is necessary before I finish up training for my new job and get sent overseas.
Well, alas it was not so simple. When my fiancee arrived we did get married a few weeks later in a beautiful ceremony with many family and friends, including her parents and siblings who came all the way to Texas to participate. It really was one of the best and most memorable moments in my entire life. Shortly after that we moved back up to D.C. where I was working pending my overseas assignment, and I filed a I-485 adjustment of status application for her, which I handled myself. As a young twenty-something starting a new career those fees stung something fierce, but I figured the fact that she had already received the fiancee visa would make things simple and we would be able to get the green card squared away in the 3-4 months I had left in the States before I went overseas.
Many of you are probably shaking your head at my naivete, but it’s worse than that. Not only did I not get her green card handled, I never even got a I-797 “Notice of Acceptance”. The lockbox cashed my check (ouch!) and that was the last I ever heard from USCIS about that application. I sweated bullets for a while before I finally succumbed to the inevitable, heading overseas with my wife to hopefully figure the whole thing out at the Embassy in the country I would now be working in.
Many months later I obtained a B1/B2 visa for my wife so we could visit the U.S. temporarily (the consular officer was not at all pleased that she had failed to adjust despite receiving a K1, but he relented when it became clear that we had made an honest attempt to adjust and simply hadn’t had time to do so). I knew that she would need an actual visa because with what she had done so far we were bound to get hassled if we returned to the States on visa waiver while she was married to me. Before we finally finished our time overseas I got an appointment with a USCIS official at the field office in the U.S. Embassy, who was a very professional and helpful person who I will forever be thankful for. He told me I had effectively abandoned my I-485 application when I left the States, and any plan to recoup the fees I paid was probably doomed to fail. He did then help me through the process of completing a I-130 application, approved it quickly, and a few weeks later we were in front of a consular officer getting my wife’s Immigrant Visa approved. By the time I wrapped up that assignment and returned to the States she was able to hand in her paperwork at Customs, and a few weeks later we received her green card in the mail. Success!
I think about that experience often when I look at the challenges that people face in the U.S. immigration system. If I, a person born and raised in the U.S., college educated, with adequate financial resources and plenty of information at my fingertips, couldn’t figure this thing out, what hope does anyone else have? (I chose to exclude the possibility that I am just an idiot) Knowing what I know now I can clearly see the mistakes I made, but how can I share that knowledge with other people? That is basically the motivation that led me to write this newsletter.
So let’s look at what we have done here at Immiwonk. We have published a newsletter weekly since August of last year, and from that time until February of this year we published multi-part, in-depth breakdowns of popular immigration forms and visa processes. It was never our intention to monetize any of this content, and it will stay available going forward for anyone who wants to review or share it. Our immigration news digests are probably a bit less valuable long term, but will serve as a nice snapshot of how the early days of the Biden administration progressed vis a vis the immigration reform promises that were made versus the actions that were taken. I will maintain the immiwonk@gmail.com address and the @immiwonk twitter account, though the activity on these accounts will be limited.
Finally, I’d like to share some information about other newsletters, thought leaders, and commentators that I have been impressed with during this process. If our readers still want to see ongoing, insightful commentary regarding immigration topics going forward this is the best content we have found, and it comes highly recommended:
My personal favorite is Border/Lines, by Felipe de la Hoz and Gaby del Valle. It’s more focused on border issues but I just find it to be really well written and informative.
I also really enjoy reading Alex Nowrasteh and David Bier at Cato. I know people have certain ideas about “libertarians” but Alex and David bring a critical eye and a data driven approach to immigration topics, and I think that gives a much better sense of what’s working and what’s not than ideological stances (whether in favor or opposed). The fact that the “data” tends to show that most types of immigration are a net positive to the U.S. at large is a fact not to be dismissed.
I have generally found reporters that handle immigration topics to be very good, but I want to single out Dara Lind (@DLind on twitter) at ProPublica as someone that I especially admire. She digs deeper and her coverage rings true. I also highly recommend Kate Morrisey at the San Diego Tribune (@bgirledukate), she has done some on-the-spot coverage with immigrants that goes beyond the norm in terms of insight and depth.
There are so many other people commenting in the immigration space, but for someone who wants to create an informative Twitter feed I’ll give a couple suggestions (aside from those I have already mentioned): Austin Kocher (@ackocher), Doug Rand (@doug_rand), Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick), Greg Siskind (@gsiskind), and Anirban Das (@anirb_das).
Thanks again to all of our subscribers, I sincerely appreciate your support and interest over the last year. I am sincere when I say this was a labor of love and I hope that it inspires other people to share what they know and work together to make our immigration system better, more efficient, and more accessible for all people who are navigating their journey to the United States. After traveling all over the world I believe this melting pot, or mixed salad, or whatever you want to call it, is still a new and bold experiment that is unprecedented in world history. That’s something that Americans should be proud of, and no matter what your political persuasion we should recognize that it is a critical part of America’s identity to keep this tradition alive.
Immiwonk signing off.