Law and Software

The July (2013) USCIS Office of Performance and Quality  report  gives a list of acceptances and approvals by country of origin.

This intriguing data set isn’t very helpful, because there is still significant backlog of acceptances awaiting review, and USCIS choose not to show how the backlog is distributed. The data raises issues – in particular that there may be winners and losers.

Let’s assume that each country-of-origin group is backlogged the same as every other. It’s a false assumption, since we don’t know how delays build up in the system or whether different groups “jumped” or waited during the initial wave of pre-election applications (see my previous post: Daca Denials).

Nevertheless, we know that as of end July, 77.8% of all applications had been reviewed and completed. So if we use this as the baseline, we can see whether more (or less) than 77.8% of applications from each country were approved. Here’s the graph:

 This graph ignores the fact that there were 421,649 applications from Mexico, and only 7,408 from South Korea. But it does raise some questions. Why (with similar raw applicant numbers – 7254 and 6034 respectively – did people whose families came from Peru do so much better than those from Brazil.  And why have some countries not fared well at all. The data also hints that the 7450 denials so far may not be spread evenly. Or it may simply show that some regions have a greater backlog than others. CIS know, but they aren’t telling.

The report also shows the same Application/Acceptance ratio by State. How applications are faring by state. To see if there is any trend, I made a map of that data using the same normalization assumptions. Anywhere that is green is “dry land” – i.e above the line in the graph above. So California and Illinois are ahead of the game. Everything else, with various shades of blue is underwater, with a negative value. Who knows what it means, if anything.