My wife is an immigrant. Her path to citizenship took about 8 years and an extraordinary amount of time filling out paperwork, refilling it out, submitting it, waiting months at a time while "something" happened with it (of course with no way of status checking the progress of it). At the time, there was almost no "instruction manual" you could use. You simply went to www.ins.gov and started downloading PDF files and filling them out. You filled out anything that seemed even remotely relevant because you didn't want to show up missing something (more on that later).

Here's some of my recollection of it:

I remember spending many 5am mornings standing in a line outside the immigration office with my wife, only for the daily quota of people allowed in to max out and not be able to get in the building. More infuriating is that people who made it in the previous day were given paperwork to let them jump the line.

If you made it in, you simply stood in another line, so long that it wrapped around the lobby, and then up into the emergency exit stairs, then wrapped around the next floor then back into the stairs until you made it into the waiting area -- this was usually around noon.

If you left the line for any reason (since 5am!) for food, bathroom, anything, you lost your place.

Here you were met bruskly by a security guard who spoke rapid slang to all of the immigrants and she spot checked the paperwork. If anything seemed incorrect or they couldn't answer her questions (which even I had a hard time understanding) they were kicked out of line). A second desk of immigration officers then fielded complaints in the 20 or 30 languages of the people who were kicked out after waiting 7 hours but it mostly served as a place the officers could take a break and watch TV.

If you made it past that gauntlet you took a number and had to sit on the floor since the waiting area had at least 2 times as many people in it as it was designed to hold. Every 20 or 30 minutes a security guard would walk around and force people to stand up yelling "no sitting on the floor!". But after 7-8 hours of standing there weren't many people who followed that.

Most likely, after watching the call numbers for a few hours (and seeing only one or two windows actually providing service), they'd shut down for the day and you'd get a raincheck with a day to come back (where you could then jump the morning line and get directly into the waiting room).

After returning on your raincheck, and waiting a few hours more, you finally get up to a window, only to find out that either:

a) you brought the wrong, but incredibly similar, documentation (you filled out the relative sponsorship rather than the spousal or some such)

b) you brought the correct documentation, but they no longer accept that revision of the form. There is, in fact, an older version of the form that you didn't fill out because you figured the newer one would be more correct, but that's the only one they accept (and later when you return you find out that either they've reverted back to the new form, or you didn't fill out the addendum PDF you didn't know about that makes up for the gap in information that the new form was supposed to remedy

c) they simply don't like how you filled it out, you could return on another day, see a different immigration officer and have them accept the paperwork right off the bat

d) some of the required documents simply don't exist in the immigrants country of origin and they won't accept the equivalent (for example, my wife's native country doesn't use birth certificates)

d) you did everything well enough for the person working the window that day that they accept it. If you are lucky you are at the part of the process where you get a verification serial number of some sort that you are supposed to be able to use for them to look up your case for status checks etc.

Bear in mind that quite often the pile of papers you just gave the officer has the only existing copy of some of the legal documents, many of which are irreplaceable or extremely expensive and time consuming to replace. You are supposed to get these back at some point. In the meantime these documents are now unavailable for anything else that might require them. In our case this mean lost jobs and tens of thousands of dollars in lost wages.

The receiving officer unceremoniously dumps this precious cargo into a bin with a huge mishmash of other odds and ends. It could be a trash can or it could be the proper receiving bin, who knows? They assure you that by law processing this step must take n-days.

At n+180 days you start to panic. Calls to the number they gave you result in several hours of on hold time only to be told that they can't provide you with a status update.

At n+270 days they call you back because of a problem with your documentation. You go through the drill described above, usually taking one to two days of waiting in line to be told that

a) they can't find your file so you'll have to redo all of the documentation again (but those original one of a kind documents!). Don't worry, they assure you, they'll turn up.

b) they couldn't verify the address for her sister or some such nonsense, who of course has moved sometime in the previous 11 months, or god forbid a relative drop dead and you have to figure out how to get a death certificate into your file.

Either way, you'll have to spend yet another day or two standing in line.

Eventually...and this is back when they did work permits for green card applicants...you'll get a flimsy hand glued id card for whatever it was you were applying for. My wife had to go through the process 3 times on work permits, each time with the INS missing their legal response date by months, before finally getting called in for our green card interview.

Here, because up to this point you've received virtually no communication whatsoever from immigration, you do what everybody does, pile various artifacts from your life together, and memorize each other's toothbrush colors, where you then go and wait in line, only now with a box of stuff that'll have trouble making it through security, for a day or two. At the end you find you that it's not actually the interview day, this is the day they need you there to schedule the interview.

You return months later. In the meantime you get a letter that the medical checkup has expired since the process is taking so long, and your wife needs to go get another expensive checkup from one of two carefully selected doctors that the INS uses. This results in a multi-week position on a waiting list, only now you find out that your green card interview is happening before the doctor's appointment. In a blind panic you make dozens of phone calls trying to sort this out to no avail - but it doesn't matter anyhow, because what nobody tells you is that it doesn't matter, after the interview you can just submit the new checkup with an addendum form they won't tell you about. But you find this out much later.

There's no appeals process too which makes all this fun, so when immigration screws something up (they will) you have effectively no resort. You just hope they don't fuck anything up too badly.

Finally, after waiting in line for another few hours, you make the interview, where the officer looks at you and your wife says, "I believe you're married" (so you didn't have to bring anything at all anyways, you've just been lugging around 40 pounds of mementos for 4 days for no reason).

Now repeat the above nightmare for the citizenship application and you can see why it's so hard to legally immigrate.

Oh, and suppose my wife's friend wants to immigrate, but has no current job applying for her visa status and no relatives (she'll be the first generation ever in the U.S.). How does she get in? She doesn't! There simply is no path to immigration for this person. Sure she has a Ph.D. in Pharmacology or some such, but immigrating here and then looking for a job is simply not possible.

edit this was in 2001, I've heard the process has been improved greatly since then, our finally few visits for citizenship were smooth sailing in comparison to our early experiences