We keep hearing that our current immigration system is broken and it must be overhauled to better serve the immigrants, especially the illegal ones. And in this process, it seems that immigration, whether legal or illegal, is not necessarily run in the best interest of the American people, but in the best interest of crony capitalists and the ruling elites. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency with the Department of Homeland Security, was created in 2002 and assumed its functions on March 1, 2003, as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. USCIS has over 200 offices around the world and staffs 19,000 employees and contractors in four directorates and nine program offices. Applications are processed in four major USCIS Service Centers and 83 Field Offices in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Guam. Funding USCIS operations largely from user fees, less than 4 percent of its FY2014 budget came from Congressional appropriations. According to William A. Kandel, writing in a Congressional Service Report in May 2015, $124 million USCIS funding came from direct congressional appropriations and $3.097 billion came from user fees in 2014.

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