Statement by Linus Torvalds.
Re: Immigration and Naturalization Service delays.
Event: Congressional field hearing in San Jose, CA.
Date: February 25, 2000.
Source: Office of Zoe Lofgren.

Statement of LINUS TORVALDS

Before the Bay Area Congressional Delegation
Field Hearing on the practice and process
of the Immigration and and Naturalization Service (INS)

February 25, 2000

I want to thank you all for holding this hearing. It's a pleasure being here, not because I particularly like going to hearings, but because I for rather obvious personal reasons find the issues discussed here to be rather important.

I'm not here to tell horror stories about the INS - in fact I'm probably one of the better cases. Most people would agree that I fulfill all the good criteria for not having any trouble at all immigrating to the United States - an educated person from western Europe, with special skills in areas that are in high demand, and able to support not only myself but my family quite reasonably.

And that is why I'm here.

Because if it's true that I'm in just about the best possible situation anybody can be in with the INS, then something is quite seriously wrong with how things work.

I came to the US just over three years ago on a H-1B visa. An H-1B, of course, is the most common visa for my kind of skilled workforce interested in working in the US.

Getting the visa was not a huge problem: the company I work for has done the paperwork before, and as my application was at the beginning of the visa year and I come from Western Europe there were no huge lines or visa caps that would have been a problem.

Coming here, we didn't know what to expect - whether we'd actually like living in the US or not. Having been here three years I can definitely say that we've liked it a lot, and we feel this is home. But it cannot really be home as long as we might be kicked out at any time.

And that is where the INS experience has broken down. In order to actually be a permanent resident, and what makes you start appreciating the pure bureaucracy of the whole INS experience, you can't just apply for a green card. You start out applying for permission to apply. Once you have petitioned (and been allowed) to actually work here as an immigrant rather than as a temporary worker, you can then actually move on to the exalted status of waiting for your green card application (I-485) to be accepted .... which can take a long time. The official INS notion of action papers said that the I-485 phase is supposed to take half a year. It's been a year and a half now, and the INS hasn't informed me of my status. In the meantime, whenever we want to travel to meet friends and family in Finland, we need to make sure that we have extra travel documents so that we can actually come back to where we live and work.

Why is this bureaucracy in place? Why does it take nine months to get a drivers license in California if you're out-of-country and the INS has to verify that you're here legally? Why are people left pending, their whole lives on hold while papers get shuffled for years without end?

In short, the current INS system doesn't work even for the people who have everything going for them. I can only say that I'm happy I'm considered a sure case, because based on my experience with the INS I'd really hate to be in a category that is considered problematic.