“Like TurboTax, but for immigration”
Harvey Multani, a Business and Entrepreneurship major at Washington University, had big plans for one of his senior year projects.
“Basically totally eliminating the hassle of immigration throughout the world,” said Multani.
Multani helped develop NationLeap, a program that was aimed at streamlining the immigration process by providing a user-friendly way of matching visa eligibility, managing documents and providing a reference for all the procedures that someone attempting to enter the country would need to know.
“It would basically be like TurboTax, but for immigration,” said Multani.
That was the plan, at least, but when dealing with the complicated process of immigration, plans don’t always come to fruition. Once Multani and his team began studying immigration laws, they began to think they may have bitten off more than they could chew.
A sample of some of the extensive flow charts developed by the NationLeap team.
“We were building flow charts of the process,” Multani said. “Keep in mind, there are 59 separate visa classes for the United States. So, you’ve got to figure out which of the 59. So we decided to tackle the green card. That’s one of the 59 classes.
“We built a flow chart of it…Not even two thirds filled out, it would’ve taken up something the size of this wall,” Multani said as he gestured to the side of the coffee shop where we were talking. “The different steps, the different criteria qualifications. It’s a giant mess and I think it’s one of the biggest things inhibiting America’s competitiveness at this point.”
Multani and his team tried to modify the idea, transforming it into more of a matching service to help people find lawyers that specialized in specific areas of immigration law. Eventually, they decided to put the entire idea on hold.
“There were many, many issues with the idea,” said Multani.
Coming from an immigrant family himself, Multani got to see how much of a hassle the process can be. Multani travels a lot and was initially motivated to create NationLeap by the comments he would hear from friends in other countries.
“It was a complaint I heard from everybody. I have a lot of friends from different countries who were always like, ‘Hey. Do you know how I can stay in the United States?’ It became the background noise of my life.”
While he may no longer personally be involved in trying to eliminate the hassles of immigration, he hopes that another company is able to tackle the challenge.
“It really blew my mind how big of an issue it is,” Multani said. “I think something like 2 million people actually immigrate to the United States every year, which is like two, three St. Louis counties, right? So, it’s a huge market and I hope somebody goes after it.”
Ultimately, Multani would like to see a world where a program like NationLeap wouldn’t even be necessary. That can’t happen, he says, until the policies behind immigration are simplified.
“I think when the majority of Americans realize that people that come to the United States aren’t coming here to do this or that. They’re actually just regular people for the most part, who want to work hard, build families. When I think a lot of people see that, that’s when we’ll see the legislation change.”
What do you think about the NationLeap idea? Is a program like that worth developing, or should efforts to improve the immigration process focus on change at the legislative level?
Category: Citizenship
