As the Biden administration’s first calendar year wraps up, it is becoming clearer that the political leadership at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lack policy vision for the legal immigration system. Rather than overseeing the development of its own preferred policies, DHS, and mainly U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), have increasingly resorted to asking the public for ideas.

This need for crowdsourcing policy ideas in surprising because one of President Biden’s first executive orders was titled, “Restoring Faith in Our Legal Immigration Systems and Strengthening Integration and Inclusion Efforts for New Americans” and directed DHS to “identify barriers that impede access to immigration benefits and fair, efficient adjudications of these benefits”. One would reasonably assume that over the years, including during the transition, that the political appointees had already identified real barriers that they were prepared to remedy once they were in charge.

Yet, more than 11 months into this administration, USCIS has failed to identify a single, real barrier to aliens obtaining legal immigration benefits. This naturally begs the question of why would someone draft this executive order and have the new president sign it?

From the start, this dubious EO has been a cover for the Biden administration to portray eligibility requirements and processing times as “barriers” rather than the conditions set to participate in the legal immigration system. This...

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