Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the notion of Attorneys as intercessors in the US Visa process. I am specifically talking about what is called Consular Processing so this is Visa processing at US Embassies outside of the United States. 

I bring this up because first of all it should be noted you know when you are dealing with a prospective Immigrant outside the USA their rights are extremely truncated to the point of being effectively non-existent. On top of this you are also talking about a situation wherein Consular Officers have what is called the Doctrine of Consular Non-reviewability with respect to fact finding in Visa cases outside the United States especially at Embassies and Consulates abroad. 

The reason I bring this up is I was actually reading through the Canterbury Tales, not reading the whole thing, but I was thinking about it the other day and I went online and I was looking at excerpts and they brought up one of the tales that I didn't read when I was younger and I was reading through it. It was the Partner's Tale and they talked about this tale; this was the Partner. I am not comparing Attorneys to the Partner per se but there were some interesting insights into this where they were talking about this. This was at a time when the Roman Catholic church was very powerful in Christendom in Western Europe and in the Canterbury Tales they talk about this partner and this was a person that basically in a sense acted as a kind of an intercessor in a way as an intermediary between the plenary power of the Church i.e. The Pope, Rome the Vatican and individuals in order to get indulgences for example granted to people for sins etc. The reason I bring this up I am not trying to veer too far out into sort of the realm of esotery or anything, but at the time the reason this was possible is there were these notions of plenary indulgences and this is very akin to the plenary power associated with Immigration. It is very evident when you are dealing with Consular Processing. You are not dealing specifically with legal issues per se all the time. In some cases yeah we are certainly dealing with the Immigration Nationality Act in a legal context on certain things but fact-finding, we are talking about plenary powers where these counselor offices have the Doctrine of Consular Absolutism. They can make factual determinations and they are not subject to review. The Supreme Court has basically, this is centuries ago I think it was the first decade of the 1800s made a ruling on this and said look we are not going to be in the business of reviewing these Consular officers’, these Consoles’ fact finding because this is operating in plenary power and it is just not something we are going to do and here we are now. Now again there is the INA, there is law that undergirds how this stuff operates but in a factual sense, when you are dealing with the facts of the case and where you are trying to advocate for your client, I often think of this sort of Attorney as intercessor or maybe in a sense lobbyist in a way but definitely advocate where you are trying your best to deal with this person, to put forth the best case you can to a person who has really unfettered for lack of a better term, plenary power to make factual findings in the case. Again legal findings are a little bit different. There is a framework for dealing with that but in factual matters, this is heavy stuff and they really have pretty unfettered discretion with respect to making factual findings. 

So again, the thing to take away from this video is Attorneys in this context, I often have people that get a little bit miffed with me for lack of a better term, that they think I am not moving things along fast enough especially right now where we just had the whole system turned off. It was just almost seized up. We got maybe in the latter half of 2020, if I got half a dozen cases through the Embassy I would be surprised. It was just not much was going through there and then BOOM, a week pretty much after Biden, we really started seeing cases process out of NVC and BOOM the apparatus just kind of turns back on. 

Look everybody, I suspect, I don't know, but I suspect that the folks that are having to process cases through the Visa unit they are working double time especially compared to 6 or 8 months ago when there wasn't much going on at all. It is like the Maytag repair office down there; there was nothing going on at one point I suspect. Then now it is probably double the case load if not more so and they have got to make the decisions that they need to make in a very efficient manner. They don't have a lot of time to deal with this stuff and the timing of how you put forth cases and deal with these things it is something best left to an Attorney especially an Attorney who has had a lot of experience dealing with this specific Embassy, dealing with this specific post abroad and at least has some insight into how that is going to process as an administrative matter because believe me, you can end up in a situation where if you do things in such a way that is not, I hesitate to say it is inefficient but if you do things in such a way that it throws the overall system or throws things out of joint in how things get done, I almost think of Immigration as a conveyor belt in a way. Things process through and yes there are certain times, if you will like a river there can be a log jam, you have got to get that log jam moved in a given case or the situation is such that a given agency that deals with this is doing things in a certain way that is not particularly efficient and you need to try and deal with that accordingly. However in situations where there is a lot of consternation, there is a lot of haste going on and there is a lot of flared passions, especially from applicants and things, sometimes it is best to listen to your Attorney about how best to deal with those things because sometimes a softer touch is a little bit better than banging on somebody's door trying to get something done, especially in the context when you are dealing with people that are operating again under this sort of plenary power where their factual determinations can have a tremendous and substantial impact on the outcome and on the attributes, on the adjudication of a given case.