Hon. Prakash Khatri
Ombudsman
Office of the Ombudsman
U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services
Department of Homeland Security
Washington, DC 20528

Re: End the Government’s Immigration Bias against America’s Small Businesses

Dear Mr. Khatri:

This is the third in a series of open letters outlining suggested changes in the practices of United States Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS). My letters to you are intended to put a flashlight on the behavior of USCIS – an agency that all too often remains mired in the worst practices of legacy INS. I write this time to ask that you examine and remedy several practices at the USCIS Regional Service Centers (RSCs) that hurt America’s entrepreneurs and small businesses.

This third letter asks you to intervene and cause USCIS to halt its unannounced practice of applying different, more-demanding, and wholly unlawful standards of eligibility for immigration benefits to America’s small businesses than the agency applies to large companies.

(To view this letter in its entirety click here)

The list grows longer – Bernard Kerik, Zoe Baird, Kimba Wood, Linda Chavez – all were felled in their political ascendancy by the revelation that a household employee or member lacked valid immigration papers. Just as Superman learned that the base metal, lead, could protect him from Kryptonite’s debilitating rays, politicians must recognize that immigration toxicity needs an immediate antidote.

If the immigration law supposes that we should disqualify worthy candidates for government service because they solved their pressing childcare needs by hiring or housing an undocumented nanny, then paraphrasing Charles Dickens, the law is “a ass, a idiot.”

Ironically, the subject came up in Los Angeles this week in a debate on talk radio (KNX-AM 1070’s The Business Hour), two days before Mr. Kerik’s disclosure of probable immigration violations and his resignation as President Bush’s nominee as the nation’s top immigration cop, the Secretary of the Homeland Security Department. (more…)

As if people of the world today don’t have enough concerns to keep them from smiling, the U.S. State Department has issued new guidelines (www.travel.state.gov/passport/pptphotos/composition_checklist.html) discouraging smiling in photographs for American travel documents. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”), a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, has also adopted the new requirements for U.S. green cards and work permits. The dour new rules specify that when being photographed, people are to have a “natural expression.” In sample “acceptable” photos depicting “natural” expressions, a man and woman exhibit serious, Stepford-like stares, with mouths closed. For those so bold as to risk rejection of their photos, a wan smile with closed jaw (no teeth showing) may be allowed but not preferred.

This new requirement is no laughing matter. USCIS has been enforcing the photo-specs rule and rejecting pictures in which individuals are smiling and showing their apparently well-flossed teeth. Reports indicate that the Cleveland USCIS office is a non-smiling jurisdiction. Therefore, if you’re in Cleveland, definitely avoid smiling. Perhaps, Cleveland-area dentists may wish to protest this stealth attack on their profession.

The no-smiling policy seems to make holistic sense, however, in that few can smile at our dysfunctional immigration system. So all you photographers, rather than asking your subjects to say “cheese,” suggest instead that they think “immigration”.