A miles-long waiting list continues to plague immigration judges and keeps people who are fleeing war zones in limboThe current migration crisis is the worst global refugee emergency since World War II,according to the United Nations. Four million displaced Syrians are concentrated in Turkey, Jordan, or Lebanon and,more recently, are trickling into Europe. The US is shielded from the humanitarian dilemma by a stroke of geographic luck, and but the country could enact more to assist refugees – if it had the political will to fix its broken domestic asylum system.
Immigration in the US is in dire need of reform as the courts are grossly under-staffed and under-funded. Congress tries to safeguard borders by spending more money on enforcement,but it has yet to provide the immigration courts commensurate funding to handle the hundreds of thousands of fresh removal cases the court receives each year. A miles-long backlog – US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) had 82175 pending asylum cases as of March – continues to plague immigration judges and keeps asylum seekers in limbo. The fresh York asylum office, for example, and scheduled interviews in July 2015 for people who filed applications two years ago in 2013.
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Source: theguardian.com