Photo courtesy Xiao Wang

Photo courtesy Xiao Wang

Thirty years ago, at the age of three, Xiao Wang (MBA 2014) came to the United States from Nanjing, China, to join his parents in Los Angeles. The couple had moved to pursue educational opportunities not available to them in their homeland. Now they hoped to start a new life with their young son in their adopted country, but the immigration process would not be an easy one. “Everything was opaque and scary,” Wang says. “It was our one shot at being able to stay.” Stymied by the complexity of the paperwork, the family spent the equivalent of five months’ rent on an immigration attorney to navigate the bureaucracy.

“This is a story told by millions of immigrant families every year,” observes Wang. As a child, he had accepted the significant financial and procedural obstacles to legal immigration as a “rite of passage.” But by 2016, Wang, who was working as a senior project manager at Amazon, had become obsessed with understanding why the paper-heavy US immigration process remained so difficult and expensive. “Immigration is one of those overlooked areas where technology can truly do some real good,” Wang realized.

In early 2017, Wang cofounded Boundless Immigration, a Seattle-based startup that streamlines the processes for applying for a marriage green card—permission for a US citizen’s non-citizen spouse to live and work permanently in the United States—and US citizenship. (In September, the company acquired competitor RapidVisa to expand the types of cases it can handle.) The company’s online immigration applications function much as TurboTax does for IRS filings, translating the arcane language of government documents into easy-to-answer questions customized for each client. The responses are used to fill out the appropriate federal forms, which can sometimes exceed 600 pages, and independent immigration attorneys review the applications to ensure all the necessary supporting documents are included. The company tracks the application through processing, helps the client prepare for the interview, and even celebrates the final approval with them. The price for its assistance for a marriage green card application: $950, a fraction of the cost of a personal immigration attorney.

“We are doing this at scale,” Wang says to explain the savings. The company reports it has assisted more immigrants than any single law firm—more than 7,000 a year—and boasts a success rate of 99.7 percent. The volume of applicants also has other benefits. Synthesizing what it has learned from its clients’ experiences, Boundless has become a clearinghouse for reliable free information on immigration. More than 1 million people consult its resources monthly, and its aggregate data has spurred policymakers to consider disparities in the government’s procedures. In an analysis undertaken before the pandemic, Boundless found that the average processing time for applications is 10 months—double what it was prior to 2016—and that immigrants in some cities face wait times four times longer and denial rates two times higher than the national average.

For Wang, immigration advocacy is essential to the startup’s business model. Boundless led a coalition of more than 100 like-minded companies—Microsoft, Levi Strauss, and Twitter among them—in filing an amicus brief with the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in opposition to the recent public charge rule that denies admission to applicants who may need public assistance in the future. The companies believe the rule to be detrimental to the economy. In the absence of clear guidance as to which immigrants would be affected by the public charge rule, Boundless also used its data to create a tool for applicants to assess their risk.

Ever-changing immigration policy is one challenge for Boundless, which is constantly updating its application to reflect the current state of affairs. But that’s not the only reason technology had not yet tackled this pain point, Wang notes. Entrepreneurship often grows out of a founder’s own experiences. “For people who have not personally experienced this situation, you can’t appreciate how challenging it is,” he says. “This is the gauntlet that families have to go through to be able to stay in America.”

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