5 thoughts after spending 10 hours at LaGuardia
An immigration lawyer sees immigration law issues everywhere at the airport, and justifies his new Substack newsletter
Recently I traveled to New York City for a short trip. When trying to return home, I ended up spending 10 hours at LaGuardia airport. The plane was there. The pilots were there. The passengers were there. But there were no flight attendants - all day long. So we waited. It was not a very enjoyable experience. But while sitting there, I saw metaphors for US immigration law everywhere.
To be clear, I am not even remotely suggesting that my 10 hour wait at an airport is comparable to my clients who are currently waiting 3+ months for simple visa appointments at U.S. consulates worldwide, or those long suffering Indian-born professionals who are on track to wait 10+ years to file their EB I-485 final stage green card applications. Those situations are clearly policy and process failures of the first order and not even in the same ballpark as a long, annoying day at the airport.
In any event, here are my observations after a long day at LaGuardia —
ONE OF FIVE: LaGuardia Airport is not very nice. Just like U.S. immigration law.
It is well-known that LaGuardia Airport, the closest airport to Manhattan, is not a very nice airport. I will not recount all the ways it is not nice, as many others have done that for many years. In theory “they” are trying to make the airport better, but the project to make the airport better seems to have been going on for years. Meanwhile, New York City remains one of the great cities of the world and millions of people want to visit. The fact that LaGuardia is not nice does not seem to necessarily deter people. They fly into other airports. They devise all kinds of alternative strategies to mitigate the misery of using LaGuardia. But they still get to New York City.
It was not until I had to spend 10 hours at LaGuardia that I realized the airport and its relationship to NYC is the perfect metaphor for the U.S. immigration law system.
The United States does not have a good immigration system. This is pretty much universally understood, from all sides of the political spectrum. LaGuardia is the gateway to Manhattan; the U.S. immigration system is the gateway to the United States. Even though the visa and green card system is terribly flawed, people still want to come to the United States from all over the world. And they do come!
Politicians, academics, think tank intellectuals, even lawyers (!) all talk of improving the immigration system, but it remains a bad system; just like LaGuardia remains a bad airport. And in the same way that people somehow make LaGuardia work, we who are trying to navigate the U.S. immigration system - we have to try to make it work. This is the system we have. Let’s try to make it work (although I think it is definitely fair game to envision a better system).
TWO OF FIVE: Delta Airlines employees are consistently excellent but are overwhelmed. Just like so many immigration professionals today.
During my 10 hours at LaGuardia, since I was flying Delta, I had occasion to interact with several Delta employees. They were all excellent. They were under pretty intense pressure with lots of frustrated customers, but every single Delta employee I encountered was highly competent, hard-working, and compassionate. I don’t know if I have become soft in my old middle-age, or what has happened, because I seem to recall that for most of my adult life a lot of airline employees were lackluster. That seems no longer to be the case. And yet, these excellent people were in an impossible situation - trying to manage way too many customers with too few flights available to them. And so they were making the best of a bad situation and based on many news stories over the last several weeks, and anecdotes from friends and colleagues, it seems like this is the new normal for airline employees.
This experience with Delta employees immediately reminded me of the many attorneys and non-attorney professionals working at national immigration practices (you know who you are). These law practice have many excellent attorneys and professionals, throughout the United States and even abroad, but for the past 12+ months (longer in some cases), these immigration professionals have been put into a no-win situation where they simply have way too much work. They are failing their clients. It is frustrating for clients and also demoralizing for the immigration professionals involved.
In both instances, with Delta and with the big immigration practices, I cannot help but feel this is a significant failure of senior leadership in the relevant organizations. Senior leaders need to do something substantial to improve the quality of the situation for their staff and their customers/clients. They have to either greatly increase rates in order to reduce demand or simply ‘fire’ some customers/clients. The airlines just need a lot fewer flights. They cannot deliver on their grand post-pandemic plans. Similarly, so many law firms need to have way fewer clients. This will allow the staff to return to sanity - service levels will improve; morale will improve. Clients will be happier.
Why doesn’t this happen? Month after month the airlines seem to fail us. It has been at least a year that immigration law practices have faced this major gap in capacity. In both instances, it seems to be a combination of greed and incompetence, and the fact that senior leaders are often removed from the day-to-day challenges of the staff who must interact with the customers/clients. There is a lot of virtue signaling about offering a good place to work but the Elephant in the Room is that the ‘immigration industry’ is failing its clients and staff with a lack of capacity.
THREE OF FIVE: “Hardship” is an extremely subjective concept.
I was trying to get home that day, earlier in the day rather than later, because I am the ‘lead parent’ for my son who has some health issues that require my involvement. To me, getting home on time was an important consideration and not getting home on time was a hardship - my son would have to manage some things on his own and with his mom, at her house which is not where he does best. I really wanted to find a way to get home sooner.
After my flight was delayed for the third time, I decided to go out of the gate area and outside the security area and talk to the Delta agents at the front of the airport. While in that line at the front of the airport, which was very long and very slow, I was able to talk with a couple people about their day.
One of people in line was “Mike” (well I don’t know actually know his name, but let’s call him Mike). Mike explained that he was in New York for business and earlier in the afternoon, as he was taking an Uber to LaGuardia, his flight to Maine was canceled. Then when he arrived at the airport, he was told he was booked on an EARLIER flight, which had already left! So Mike was waiting in line to address this issue. He would have to leave the next day. I was thinking he was going to miss something important in Maine and incur a lot of hotel expenses to stay in NYC another night. Initially it sounded terrible; but as I talked to him, he disclosed that (a) he has an apartment in suburban New York City and (b) he travels on Delta every week commuting back to his home in Maine and (c) he was mainly waiting in line to complain in order to maximize how many free mileage points he would get for the ‘hardship’ of having to go back to his apartment in White Plains and fly out the next morning. He was willing to wait in this very long line and he genuinely felt what had occurred to him was a hardship, and in some ways it was. But still…
Then there was “Sue” (not her real name). Sue was also waiting in line with Mike and me. Sue had arrived very early in the morning that day for her flight to Charleston, SC, which was canceled due to weather. Then Delta put her on another flight a couple hours later. That second flight sat on the runway for 3 hours, then the captain said that they needed to return to the terminal to re-fuel. After they returned to the terminal, that second flight of hers that had been on the runway for 3 hours was canceled. So she was in line for her re-booking. Now THAT seemed like a hardship! First flight canceled; second flight on the runway 3 hours - then canceled; she would later get rebooked the next day.
To each of us, the delays we were experiencing was a hardship. It is not clear which of us had a more compelling hardship from the perspective of Delta.
This reminded me of the increasing need for expedite requests in immigration processing. Earlier this year and last year USCIS was expediting certain work permit applications for certain kinds of workers in certain kinds of industries or with certain kinds of jobs. I had several clients whose spouses were waiting for work permits but their spouses were not eligible for these special industry- and occupation- specific expedites. But their employment was important to them!
And similarly, all through the pandemic lots of my clients wanted to or ‘needed to’ travel internationally. Their reasons for traveling were quite varied. Because of travel bans, many had to apply for NIEs (National Interest Exceptions). The NIEs were adjudicated in an extremely uneven fashion. In the end, evaluating issues like this are highly subjective and undermine people’s confidence in a ‘system’. It is much better to have a system that just treats people equally without so much subjective consideration. The U.S. immigration system has always had some aspect of subjectivity but the pandemic increased that and it is clear that an objective system, if possible, is a lot easier to manage and ‘feels’ fairer.
FOUR OF FIVE: AC/DC > H2O.
OK, so this fourth thought probably has nothing to do with immigration law but my 10 hour wait at LaGuardia was the first time in my life that I realized there are situations (like being stuck at an airport) where it is much easier to go 10 hours without food or drink than without a charger for your phone!
One of the reasons LaGuardia is a bad airport is that only about 10% of the chargers in the gate area worked. The search for a charger created a Lord of the Flies vibe.
I was fortunate that just before going on the trip, my son advised me to get a portable charger. I highly recommend these. Mine is from Anker, and it worked great!
FIVE OF FIVE: If you are trying to understand a complex system and if you can find a subject matter expert, there is value in running commentary.
Perhaps the nicest thing that happened during my 10 hour wait at LaGuardia was that I got connected with a friend of mine, who is a very active traveler. His job takes him throughout the United States and also to Europe regularly. He has Double Platinum Triple Dog Dare status on Delta. He seems to know every possible trick, app, website, and chatroom to track flights and all the other details associated with a situation like I was facing. He was kind enough to ‘keep me company’ texting all afternoon and evening and giving me ideas of things to consider. He helped identify a couple alternative flights and even an alternative itinerary to try. He helped interpret the seemingly vague pronouncements from the gate agent. In the end, I did not end up changing my flight; but he gave me some great ideas and I did take his advice to line up a back-up flight the next day, in case my flight ended up being canceled.
During the 10 hour wait, I did not realize it, but actually as I was flying home late into the evening I realized that my friend was doing exactly what I hope to do with my new Substack newsletter - this newsletter you are reading now.
U.S. immigration law, for better or worse, is an incredibly complex system. A BAD and incredibly complex system. A lot of people are trying to navigate it - current international students, future international students, people on temporary work visas, physicians, researchers, post-docs, professionals abroad seeing all the ample job opportunities in the US, spouses of all of the above, children of all of the above, employers, and of course professionals (attorneys and non-attorneys). My newsletter is not meant to replace your lawyer. But hopefully my newsletter can provide some ‘running commentary’ on the U.S. immigration law system. I believe there is value in that. I hope you do too.