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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Basically it means that you get bumped up in the queue. Which when you think about it is really a very odd feature to add to a government (i.e. non-profit generating) service.

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It's a good way to deal with scarcity. And scarcity is definitely an issue when the government agency in question doesn't necessarily have the resources available to them to actually perform at the level that they need to due to funding and political football.

Paying a premium for expedited service is fine (I'm sure you've paid USPS a few extra bucks to mail your package faster), but I do agree that it should be applied judiciously.

It's self funded.

The State Department has a similar service for expediting passports. It's great because it lets people that actually need it fast to prioritize themselves by paying more.

When the normal queue is 9 months, it would be immoral not to have any ways to jump to the front. Like the WWDC selling out in seconds, it might be "fair" but it's clearly not the optimal solution.

Are we all not (potential) workers that would improve the economy? This premium service does not protect against national threats.

This has nothing to do with Trump, or national threats. No F1B holder is superior to the others, but I'm glad that there's a way to jump the line if you have the means.

This along your other comment in this thread is the definition of 'classism' and how the income gap widens.

Attempting to frame opposition to lowest-common-denominator-politics as a equivalent to racism and other -isms with a word made up by sociologists is laughable. A Porsche costs more than a Toyota. 2-weeks processing costs more and uses more resources than 9-month processing, and you can pay for it if you wish. If everybody paid the premium fee, then USCIS could hire more, and everybody could get it done in 2 weeks. Couldn't be fairer. USCIS is entirely (99%) funded by applicant fees, so this is literally how it works.

Why immoral? Genuine question - if anything surely the premium processing is immoral as it pushes other (innocent?!) workers further down the queue?

It's better to have recourse. Either everybody waits a ton of time, or some people barely wait and some people wait a ton of time. Why drag everybody down to the lowest common denominator because of "fairness"?

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