University of Missouri at Kansas City law professor Kris Kobach has been sounding the alarm that the already dysfunctional federal immigration bureaucracies (USCIS) will collapse under the added load of Z-visa applications. He wrote:
"So let's assume (conservatively) that 12 million illegals apply for the amnesty within the year allowed. Since the federal government is open for business 250 days a year, there will be an average of 48,000 amnesty applications every day."
Professor Kobach did throw in the hedge "(conservatively)." Even so, he concluded that the de facto time for consideration of an application would drop from six minutes [!!!] in the catastrophic conditions of today (backlog of something like six million legal applications) to maybe two minutes [!!!!!!] once the Z-visa gold rush begins.
That's the way a linear-thinking physicist like me would approach it, too: 12 million illegals in 250 days averages out to 48,000 per day. But we should train ourselves to think like famously-devious immigration lawyers (e.g. there's no hint in this letter from the Billings Gazette that its author is an immigration lawyer, but she is) and organizations making up the ethnic invasion lobby (e.g. MALDEF, LaRaza, and LULAC).
The key thing is that the government would have only one business day to do a background check on an applicant for a provisional Z visa. If they can't complete it within the requisite 24 hours, tough noogies, the applicant gets the provisional Z.
So why wouldn't MALDEF, ACLU, et al. simply arrange to hold off on submitting applications until, say, one million had accumulated (about twenty days at the Kris Kobach rate) and then dump the whole stack on the bureaucracy, along with the noisy reminder that "You'd better turn these around by tomorrow"?
Upshot? I'll bet USCIS will wind up handing out provisional Z visas as casually as if they were prizes from boxes of Cracker Jack.
