Yes, the rules are too complex, and dis-honest immigration lawyers don't help. Kantor and Siegel (sp?), those original Evil Spammers, were the lawyers of my multi-year girlfriend and her family before they discovered Usenet, and they almost got deported because their attorneys were telling them all was well, while not actually working on cases, but still taking clients money while hiding from the anti-spammers (they were here on the 'start a business' category of visa, even though they were legitimately asylum seekers, as the INS didn't recognize having your mother shot in the head for political purposes, as it wasn't clear if it was the Guatemalan guerillas or the govt. who did it <arg>).

So, while not am immigrant to the US, I have had much frustration with the INS by proxy (it is very stressful to live with someone who's status is in flux!!), hate spammers with a passion (talk about fucking up someones life!), and have no love of immigration lawyers, although the honest one they switched to did get things straightened out.

The shitty class-war type angle to all this is that, as ALL of their lawyers put it, you get a LOT more slack on the paperwork fuckups for the starting-a-business type visa than any others...you're bringing cash!! and making jobs!!

I've also known multiple British citizens who overstayed their visas for YEARS, and got not nary a slap from the INS, even when in trouble with the law...but all this was pre-911, and all of them were white as snow.

Unfortunately, treatment from the INS depends on 1) money and 2) race, at least as far as how strictly they enforce the rules, and only peripherally on 3) citizenship.

So I don't think they were stupid, just not enough of cynical realists to make sure their paperwork was in order well ahead of their visa expiration ("I'm a canadian, it'll be ok....oh, I'm not a WHITE canadian, oops").

If Commonwealth and EU countries made immigration for US citizens easier, I know a lot of geeks who'd be out of here from fear of Mssrs. Ashcroft and Poindexter, but they'd rather have uneducated 3rd worlders, and then they sream "brain drain!" when their own scientists and technicians don't want to stay, and they won't open the flood-gates to left-leaning American geeks...small wonder.

Ack, the whole business sickens me, on ALL sides!