There's no single answer to the question of how to fix the U.S. immigration system. It's an issue so thorny that politicians on either side of the aisle seem incapable of even agreeing on a definition of what fixing the U.S. immigration process really means. And don't even get us started on Donald Trump.

Still, there is something that most everyone seems capable of agreeing on, and that is that applying for a U.S. visa, no matter who you are or where you're from, really, really sucks. And that's not because of politics. It's because of paper. The immigration process requires applicants to deal with mountains of paper which get shuffled manually from government agency to government agency. Which is precisely why, last November, President Obama took a series of executive actions, which, among other things, aimed to modernize the archaic way we process visa applications.

Along with the Department of Homeland Security and Department of State, the White House enlisted the help of the new U.S. Digital Service team, led by former Google engineer Mikey Dickerson, to find a way to streamline the immigration process with technology.

The Digital Service team has since conducted months of field research, sitting alongside visa applicants as they try to navigate the labyrinthine process, and today, the group released its final report, which is chock full of recommendations. Entitled "Modernizing & Streamlining Our Legal Immigration System," it aims to drastically cut down on the amount of paper involved in the process, while also recommending systems that would help government agencies communicate more efficiently with each other.

According to one White House official who spoke with WIRED, the Digital Service team was floored by how much actual legwork goes into getting a visa, from applicants shuttling their documents around to different agencies to consulates, themselves, hand-mailing stacks of documents to government agencies. "As a group of technologists, that stuff just killed us," the official says. "It’s insane we would do that in 2015. We invented these things called computers."

Immigration UX

The recommendations included in the report are intentionally precise. For instance, the report proposes simple fixes, like ensuring that applicants are prompted to pay all the fees associated with the visa process at once, rather than facing intermittent fees throughout the process.

"Paying multiple fees should be as simple as buying multiple items in an online shopping cart," the report states. "Separating the fees for different processes should happen entirely on the back-end."

The report also suggests redesigning the visa process based on who the applicant is, not which government agency the applicant is dealing with and which form the applicant is filling out. In other words, a current green card holder should receive a roadmap of the visa process that's different than, say, a foreign national seeking to come to the U.S. for the first time. That process has already begun, thanks to a new website called my.USCIS.gov, which launched earlier this year. But the report says the government can do more to ensure that once on that site, applicants aren't forced to enter and re-enter the same information for different agencies. That entails better collaboration between agencies and instituting new backend technology that can enable that collaboration.

Some of these recommendations are already being tested by government agencies. A so-called modern immigrant visa program is being piloted this year at consulates in Montreal, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, and Sydney, and the program is set to expand next year.

These fixes, of course, are just a bandaid on the gaping wound that is our convoluted and at times unjust immigration system. And yet, they could at least serve to ensure that no one has trouble securing a visa simply because the application is too complex. And that, at least, is a good place to start.