Transcript of the above video:

One of the more frustrating things about being an Immigration Attorney, and I've been doing this for going better part of 20 years now, but it’s dealing with people's perceptions more than anything that can become very frustrating. It doesn't help that the system itself is in a real state of disrepair; it's just not in a good place right now. I think objectively speaking any practitioner would agree with that statement. Now we may all have, I think reasonable people can disagree with how you deal with that but yeah, the system itself is not in good shape; I don't think anybody disagrees with that. 

Now the point of this video though is over time I do deal with folks who basically just have an unrealistic expectation and understanding of how the US Immigration System works. What are we talking about? Well I have done videos on this in the past. Immigration doesn't care about your travel plans okay? And I am not saying this to be jokey or snarky or anything, I am saying this so people understand it so they don't spin their wheels and pull their hair out because in a sense a lot of people want to believe that the Government is responsive and cares and whatever. Well in an Immigration context yeah they care about doing their job but they don't care about your plans. They are not a travel agency, that's not their purpose and I see this happen a lot. People will say, "well I wanted to get her over to the United States and now we are in the Adjustment of Status process for example and it's taking a long time and it's very frustrating". I totally understand the frustration. What I fail to really understand, where people need to kind of change their own mind a little bit, is you need to understand what the system is and deal with it, not get angry about the system not being the way that you want it to be. And this is coming from somebody who has had to grapple with this for the better part of two decades because I myself have to go through it all the time. I am a little bit more numb to it if you will, I'm a little bit more nonchalant about it but again if people don't get in the right frame of mind for how to deal with the process, it's going to be even more miserable than it already is probably going to be. This is a long process now - I don't care what visa it is, family-based you are dealing with, Fiancé, Marriage, whatever, the process is already cumbersome; it's already rather time consuming; it's already rather expensive in terms of time and resources to on top of that have to deal with your own internal grappling with the state of the system, you're just adding more hardship that provides no benefits. It's sort of like the line in the movie Bridge of Spies where Tom Hanks acts as the lawyer for the spy Abel in the film and he said well there are a couple of times that it comes up, "you may be subject to the death penalty" and the spy just is kind of calm and he keeps saying "do you ever worry! you don't seem concerned." and he says "well, would it help?" and that is kind of the mindset you want to have with regard to Immigration. 

I want to be clear I am not a lawyer that just says "oh you have got to roll over and just sort of deal with whatever they give you in terms of Immigration", that's not my point. That said, there are a lot of people that think that complaining at the system or screaming into the abyss or something, I don't know what the right phrase here is, but just generally making their displeasure known to the system is going to somehow change it. Generally speaking that is not the case. They do have a high volume. I am not going to act as an apologist for them because quite honestly the system doesn't deserve it at this point and there have been so many things done in these past few administrations - and this is a non-partisan statement - there have been so many things done that have just substantively and tangibly made the system worse in the past five, six years that I am not going to sit here and say that this is a system that is in any way something to be particularly proud of. If anything, I think serious reform is needed in a variety of different ways. That being said, it is not helpful to people that are getting ready to go through this process to not have the correct mindset about it because all it is going to do is drive you nuts as the process goes on so understand what you are dealing with getting in to it; understand that there may be unforeseen things that pop up in given cases, it's just kind of the nature of the beast. Be prepared to have to deal with that and sort of get on down the road because spinning your wheels over the state of the system and why it's not in a good place is basically a recipe to sort of drive yourself up the wall.