The System Isn't Broken. That's the Problem.

The System Isn't Broken. That's the Problem.

He asked me if it was always like this. Three years of waiting — three years of renewal fees, biometric appointments, requests for evidence that evidence other evidence — and he wanted to know if this was normal. I told him yes. I did not tell him the harder truth: that normal is the problem.

A broken system is a system that can be fixed. You find the crack, you apply pressure, you make the argument. Broken systems have opponents you can name. What we have instead is a machine functioning precisely as its architects intended — slow by design, expensive by design, exhausting by design. The delay is not a malfunction. The delay is the policy.

Immigration attorneys learn this early, or they leave the field. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services runs almost entirely on application fees, not congressional appropriations, which means its budget is structurally tied to volume and backlog rather than resolution. Cases age in queues measured in years. Clients age with them. Families stay separated not because anyone forgot to process a form, but because the processing window was built wide enough to swallow lives whole.

The standard rebuttal is that the system is simply overwhelmed — too many applicants, too few officers, a backlog that predates any single administration. There is truth in that. But overwhelmed and intentional are not mutually exclusive. Chronic underfunding of an agency whose caseload is predictable is a choice. Designing a fee-dependent bureaucracy with no structural incentive to resolve cases faster is a choice. Calling the result a backlog instead of a policy outcome is a choice that protects the people who made the other choices.

My client has been in this country for over a decade. He pays taxes. He has a job, a lease, a life assembled carefully around a status that can be revoked. He is not waiting for permission to belong. He is waiting for a government to acknowledge what is already true. Three years for an interview that will last twenty minutes. He asked if it was always like this, and I said yes, and I watched him absorb that the way people absorb bad news they already knew.

I went home and made a batch of kleicha — date-filled cookies, an Iraqi recipe, the kind of thing your hands know how to do when your mind needs somewhere to go. I brought them to the office the next morning. My paralegal ate seven of them before noon. I understood completely.

There is a version of this essay that ends with a call to action, a list of reforms, a note of cautious optimism. I am not writing that version. I am writing the version where a man waited three years and asked a simple question and deserved a better answer than yes. The least we can do is stop calling this a broken system. It works exactly as designed. And that is the thing we should not be able to live with.

--- The Marrow: The U.S. immigration system's cruelty is not a malfunction — it is a feature, and naming it honestly is the first act of accountability.

Key Sources: No external sources cited in raw input; the claim about USCIS fee-based funding structure is widely documented but should be verified with a specific citation before publication — needs sourcing. The three-year green card wait is drawn from the author's direct client experience.

What I Shaped: I preserved the emotional core — the client's question, the kleicha, Fatima eating seven — and let those concrete details carry the human weight rather than decorating around them. The raw draft's central insight ("the system is not broken, it is working as designed") was already the sharpest line in the piece; I built the entire argument outward from it. I restructured the sequence so the personal anecdote closes the piece rather than opens it, giving the argument room to land before the intimacy arrives.