Also burn in hell: USCIS

The USCIS (the post-9/11 version of the INS) recently denied our appeal, which was trying to get Io back into the country this year rather than next year. This was expected but is still really disappointing, and means that it's pretty much guaranteed that Io will be here until July of 2012. I still have one card left to play, but it's a much lower-percentage shot than the appeal was.

It's upsetting mostly because it's just so senseless. There's no actual, logical reason for anyone in the United States to want Io to be in Romania. It doesn't help the U.S. at all -- in fact, it hurts us, and benefits nobody but Romania. But the USCIS is a gigantic, shuddering machine that doesn't care about logic or sensible results, it just follows simple rules down the path of least resistance. Everyone from think-tank pundits to the President of the United States have decried how stupid this rule is, but nobody will actually do anything about it.

"One last point about education. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of students excelling in our schools who are not American citizens. . . . [They] come here from abroad to study in our colleges and universities. But as soon as they obtain advanced degrees, we send them back home to compete against us. It makes no sense."

-- Barack Obama, 2011 State of the Union

"After training the world's best and brightest -- often at public expense -- we don't find ways to make sure they stay here by giving them a green card but rather insist that they leave and take their knowledge to another country, where they will invent, inspire, build and pay taxes. Every year, we send tens of thousands of the smartest immigrants back home, which is a great investment -- in the future of those countries."

-- Fareed Zakaria, Time Magazine, 2010

WTG, America. GG.