We generally do not associate the United States with a slow and cumbersome bureaucracy. On the contrary, we tend to think that in that country the public administration has absorbed the innovations coming from the Silicon valley, and that the delays in the digitization of government bodies are above all a European problem. In fact, large sections of the US public administration have fallen far behind. Among these is the one that deals with immigration and citizenship applications. An article in the Wall Street Journal published in Internazionale on February 4 tells the stories of some people suspended in a surreal bureaucratic limbo.
“When he applied for US citizenship in May 2020, Shawntel Went had taken into account that there would be delays due to the pandemic. But the months went by without the practice unlocking, while her friends who had submitted her request after her received positive responses. So Went began to worry. Finally, at the beginning of January 2022, the Citizenship and immigration services (USCIS), the US agency that examines citizenship applications, told her what the problem was: the documents needed to complete her file were blocked in one of the deposits of federal record centerthe archives of the federal registers ”.
These facilities, which make up a gigantic network of underground spaces in the Kansas City, Missouri metropolitan area, have been closed due to covid-19 and are unlikely to reopen any time soon. Without those documents – in which Went’s entire personal story is told after his arrival in the United States from Barbados in 2011 – the authorities cannot approve his request. The government explained to Went that a solution does not currently exist. “They don’t want to open that office and go get the documents. It doesn’t make any sense, ”says the exasperated woman.
“Went is not the only person in this bureaucratic limbo. Currently, more than 350,000 immigration-related applications are blocked at the National Archives and Records Administration (Nara), the agency that manages the federal registry warehouses in Kansas City. The blocking of citizenship applications is the most striking example of a problem that has plagued the US immigration system for some time: everything is still based on paper. The documents, in total about eighty million, occupy so much space that the Uscis have entrusted part of the archiving activity to Nara. This agency is expected to recover the files of people applying for citizenship, but due to the pandemic it has had to close the archives and deal only with urgent cases. So the documents needed to approve some requests are unreachable “. Here the rest of the article.
Blunt weapons
In other cases the bureaucratic slowness is the result of a precise political choice. Officials are buried under piles of documents to effectively prevent them from doing their job. This is the situation in which government employees dealing with firearm tracking find themselves. A few years ago Gq told the absurd story of the National tracing center, the only archive in the country, housed in an anonymous building in Martinsburg, a small town in West Virginia.
Whenever a policeman anywhere in the United States wants to link a weapon used in a crime to its owner, they file a request that ends up at the National Tracing Center, where employees try to trace the buyer via the serial number of the weapon. They first contact the manufacturing or importing company, which takes them to a wholesaler or distributor, and from there they finally arrive at the retail store where the gun was bought. Once the request is received, the merchant has twenty-four hours to respond and submit the buyer’s documents.
But it may happen that the seller or the manufacturer has closed their doors in the meantime. In that case all their documentation on the weapons sold is already in the archives of the National tracing center. The problem – the detail that gives the whole story a Kafkaesque twist – is that office employees cannot find what they are looking for in the fastest and easiest way, that is, by entering data into a computer. Since 1986, a law has been in force that prevents the government from creating a weapons database that is “searchable”, ie based on a centralized computer system that allows for quick searches. Employees scan sheets of paper and then, when they have to find a document, they are forced to look at one image at a time, with a system similar to that of microfilms that were once used in library archives.
That 1986 law is perhaps one of the greatest successes of the National rifle association, the arms lobby, which during the Reagan presidency managed to pass the idea that creating a database of weapons sold was the first step towards confiscating weapons. and the abolition of the second amendment to the constitution (which establishes the right to bear arms). Today the United States keeps track of everything – every product sold, every movement – except weapons.
To get an idea of how colossal the work of the officials of the National tracing center can be – there are no more than fifty – it is necessary to think that in 2021 alone they received 540 thousand requests for verification from police departments across the country. At the moment the digital archive contains more than 800 million files. In September, when an NBC reporter visited the center, he found twenty thousand boxes of documents that had yet to be scanned. For fear that the weight of the boxes could cause the floor to collapse, a few years ago it was decided to move them in dozens of containers outside the building.
This story allows us to reflect on some paradoxical aspects of the debates on bureaucracy, not only in the United States. The word bureaucracy has long been used as a kind of container in which to put everything that does not work in a country. In times of populism, the bureaucracy, that is the set of activities that serve to administer a state, is confused with politics, and the anger of the voters ultimately weakens the state more than the political class.
In the United States this process was more painful and more evident because the denigration of government activities at all levels began in the 1980s, earlier than in the rest of the Western world. On this it is worth recovering a long article by Dan Balz, columnist for the Washington Post, published a few months after the start of the covid-19 pandemic. When the virus began to spread across the country, Americans realized that the government did not have the tools to deal with the situation, precisely because much of the public administration – in health care and beyond – had been dismantled. And also because the country was led by a person, Donald Trump, who had no experience of government and had built his political fortune by riding the anger against the “deep state”, that set of occult powers they would belong to, according to conspiracy theories, even unelected government officials.
A name, a story
Another problem is that cultural and political tribalism makes the work of bureaucrats more difficult. A few days ago Atlantic told the story of the Board on geographic names (Bgn, commission for geographic names), a body unknown to most Americans that has the enormous power to create the official map of the United States. “The Bgn found itself in the midst of the bitter national debate on racism and language. In recent years, its officials – which include experts from various government agencies, from the Pentagon to the CIA, from the post office to the department of commerce – have spent most of their time figuring out how to rename places that have names they consider offensive. ”
It is a potentially boundless field, considering the amount of conflicts and traumatic events in US history, and above all the fact that those traumas are quite recent, so for many people difficult to ignore. “Examine a detailed map of the United States and you will find wounds left by racism almost everywhere: in New Mexico is the Wetback Tank (translated as ‘Mexican dirt tank’); in Louisiana there is a swamp called Mulatto Bayou; hundreds of names include the words ‘negro’ and ‘squaw’, a derogatory term for Native American women ”.
In November 2020 Deb Haaland, the first native woman to hold the post of secretary of the interior (the ministry that deals with the management and conservation of federal lands), ordered the word “squaw” to be deleted from official maps and the creation of a commission that should identify other offensive names to change. It will take about a year to replace “squaw”, but it is the simplest case to solve. It is generally more difficult to tell if a name is truly offensive. The process, in itself slow, is further delayed by the overlaps between the federal administration and the state and local ones.
Furthermore, officials must not only decide that a name needs to be changed, they must also find the new one. They accept proposals from anyone, even from individual citizens (a woman once asked to change the name of the property she moved to because she was the same as her ex-husband’s surname), but they decide based on very precise rules, some apparently arbitrary. “People still alive cannot be honored; trade names are prohibited; the historical characters proposed must have had a very close connection with the place in question; animal species names are acceptable but precise animal names are not; the Saxon genitive is frowned upon “. In 2014 alone, the Bgn attributed more than 700,000 names.