Democrats and Republicans may not be able to agree on much when it comes to immigration. But the one thing they can agree on is that it's one of the most important issues facing the country today. It's so important, in fact, that Congress refuses to do anything about it for at least another year.
Wait, what?
In a recent interview with ABC and again with Fox News, the newly elected Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said he doesn't plan on continuing immigration reform conversations until after President Obama is out of office. “We won’t bring immigration legislation with a president we cannot trust on this issue,” he told ABC.
It's the kind of political stalemating that Americans have come to expect—and to revile. But while it may take Congress years to pass comprehensive immigration reform, there's still plenty tech companies can do to make the existing burdensome immigration process more efficient.
SimpleCitizen is one of those companies. To borrow a common Demo Day construct, SimpleCitizen is like TurboTax for green cards. It walks users through a series of questions and uses them to fill out the arcane immigration application. It sounds like a small idea, but in reality, it shrinks the amount of time it takes to fill out a green card application from several months to several hours, and eliminates the thousands of dollars people would otherwise spend on immigration lawyers.
Sam Stoddard, the co-founder of SimpleCitizen, says he didn't realize quite how burdensome the green card process was until he began filling out the application for his wife, a South Korean native, who had lived in the U.S. as a student for seven years already. Stoddard, who was pursuing a Master's degree in accounting at the time, says he spent five months working on the application, before bringing it to an immigration lawyer, who charged him $500 just to look it over and give the final approval.
"I started to wonder if maybe you don't need an attorney to go through the immigration process," Stoddard says.
Stoddard and his two co-founders, Brady Stoddard and Ayde Soto, began poring over the green card applications, writing every question down on notecards and finding all the instances those questions were repeated. They then assigned every question a variable and assigned that variable to the answer fields on the application, itself. Finally, they arranged the questions into flow charts, with each answer leading to the next relevant question and skipping the irrelevant ones.
"It’s basically a decision tree that walks them through the process, eliminating forms they don't need," Stoddard says. "These are rules that are found in the instructions of all the forms, so it’s public knowledge. It just takes a long time to sift through it all."
With software, that process is automated. When the application is complete, SimpleCitizen charges users a flat fee of $249. For an extra $99, they can have their application assessed by a licensed immigration lawyer, who partners with the company. And if a user's application gets rejected, the company offers a full money-back guarantee.
For now, the company is still working with a fairly small sample size of the wider immigration community, and it hasn't been around long enough to know what percentage of those green cards will actually be granted. Only a few thousand people have used or are using the site to date, and SimpleCitizen is dealing with a fairly straightforward type of green card, which applies to immediate family members who are already living in the U.S. In the coming months, though, Stoddard says the company plans on expanding the types of visas it supports. Already, it's licensed its software to non-profits working with refugee applicants.
Of course, this type of software tends to be pretty controversial among immigration attorneys. According to Bill Stock, president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, SimpleCitizen is "certainly a more efficient way to navigate the system yourself," and much cheaper than hiring a lawyer. But, Stock cautions, "you get what you pay for."
Stock says that while there are plenty of straightforward immigration cases that could use a service like this, there are also countless complexities that arise, which a software program may not understand the way a trained immigration lawyer would. Often, he says, the applicants themselves don't even realize that their case is complicated. "Like most services along these lines," Stock says, "it doesn't tell you what you're missing."
