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Good idea.

Its not really any easy problem. Its about 6 million applications per year.

What we should really do is make an open source app or website (perhaps p2p, perhaps run on donated servers) and completely eliminate any part of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services related to processing applications, as well as all of the relevant laws. The laws are too complicated, and the bureaucracy of USCIS uses a very large budget of more than 3 billion dollars. A short (probably 100-1000x shorter) set of streamlined replacement laws can be designed by experienced lawyers within a few months.

We can make a contest that provides 5 million dollars for the best 3 designs for protocols and schemas for a common data exchange system, then another 5 million for the best 3 apps that allow people to process data. This will spend 30 million. We can use 100 million to buy off the politicians or companies that try to stop us. That should leave hundreds of millions left to donate to poor immigrant families and/or unemployed federal workers.

The app or site can be staffed by about 200-1000 online volunteers. This will be plenty assuming most routine applications can be processed within a few minutes.



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