Five Questions and an Elevator Pitch: GreenScreen

1. What is the need that your project seeks to address?

Sydney: America is a nation of immigrants. Foreign-born people represent 13.9% of the total population – or 46.2 million people – as of 2022, according to the latest data from the US Census Bureau. An issue, though, is that today asylum seekers, migrants, and other people who want to enter this country are subjected to an extremely expensive, long, error-prone, bureaucratic, and inhumane system. There isn’t a centralized source of information, and current resources such as USCIS [US Citizenship and Immigration Services], which is part of the US Department of Homeland Security, has a website that can be generalized and confusing. The current system is designed for immigrants to fail. As a result, applicants face extreme stress linked to uncertain futures and job insecurity.

Currently, people seeking a Green Card, H-1B visa, or other immigration documentation assistance often turn to immigration organizations, lawyers, employers, or other immigrants who have experience maneuvering the complexities of the system. Current AI-based immigration software solutions are directed at lawyers rather than individuals, with business models that incorporate minimal translation services.

In the Biodesign for Societal Health class, we zeroed in on the specific need area of documentation as a social determinant of immigrant mental health. We want to minimize the bureaucratic hurdles that people face and make the online application process more automated and streamlined to help to improve the mental health outcomes of refugees, asylum seekers, and any other people dealing with the US immigration system.

Layth: My parents are both Syrian immigrants, so the Syrian refugee crisis [the world’s largest as of March 2024, according to the UN Refugee Agency] hits close to home. I recognize there is a great need for a better solution than the status quo of expensive and often ineffective immigration lawyers. Imagine you’re fleeing from your home country due to violence or other dangerous conditions. You want to come to the US as a safe haven and to start a new life for your family. Instead, you’re thrown into a nightmare of bureaucratic hurdles.

Sydney: We are addressing the urgent need for a less burdensome, more effective way to submit complete and error-free immigration paperwork for individuals and employers sponsoring visa and residency applications, while decreasing their legal fees. Individuals currently pay between $5,000 and $10,000 in legal fees for Green Card applications, and sponsoring companies pay approximately $2,000 to $6,000 per Green Card. Our goals are to reduce the error rate in immigration paperwork by 10% and reduce legal fees by 50% for individuals and 30% for employers. In essence, we want to be the “TurboTax” for immigration paperwork.

2. How does your solution work?

Layth: We want to create an online platform that is simple to use and eliminates the mountain of paperwork and extensive legal fees currently charged by lawyers to individuals and companies. The software will walk users step-by-step, in their native language, through the forms that are needed for their specific situation and based on the laws of each state. The AI software will check for errors to help reduce the mistakes that currently lead to processing delays.

Based on their answers to questions like how long they've been in the US, how they got here, and where they came from, the website or app will direct users to the correct documents. That could be a work permit or Green Card for refugees or asylum seekers, an O-1 or H-1B visa for specialty occupation workers, or an F-1 visa for full-time international students. We still need to specify the demographics we’ll focus on at first and the documents that are most important for those groups. We’ll take their answers to a series of questions and enter them into a legal PDF document that they can then review and submit to the proper agency.

Another critical component is providing accurate and complete translation services for the most common languages among the current population of immigrants, refugees, and asylees in America. This includes Arabic, Spanish, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, French, Dzongkha, Somali, and Korean.

Sydney: One more big challenge was figuring out how to devise a business model that would enable us to address a societal need while also creating a sustainable business. Our professors from Stanford Biodesign and Emergence were a big help in addressing this issue. In addition to targeting individuals, our plan is to target companies. We identified that companies are spending a lot of money on immigration lawyers to bring in talented foreign employees, and we thought that any ability to offload some of that cost would be incredibly attractive. We would have a monthly individual subscription service as well as an annual company subscription service, with the details behind those options still to be determined.

Layth: As an example, one of the largest employers of refugees and immigrants is Amazon, so we would potentially charge them more as part of a longer-term subscription than a small company with minimal or infrequent needs.

3. What motivated you to take on the project? And what activities have you undertaken?

Sydney: In the class, our teammate Ethan suggested the topic of refugees as a need area. The three of us voted on it and took on the project. What impacted us the most and pointed us to our current focus were primary interviews with refugees who have gone through the immigration process. One woman we spoke told us it took her 10 years to secure her Green Card. Until that process was complete, she didn’t feel that her life was on solid ground. Once the paperwork was completed, she felt more stable and safe and that she wasn't going to get deported at any second.

We’ve started building a couple of our initial immigration pathways based on populations with the greatest need. We have a decent idea of how we want the site to work and what we want it to look like. Thanks to the funding provided by our Biodesign NEXT award, our team’s next steps include interviewing immigration lawyers, paralegals, potential partner organizations, and their international offices – for example, Amazon, Meta, and other universities beyond Stanford.

We also plan to hire a developer to design a simple, working prototype of our digital offering and UI [user interface]. We’ll then undergo trials to prove the effectiveness of our innovation and seek seed funding.

4. What are the most important things you learned in advancing your project?

Layth: The idea of understanding your problem. When you talk to first-person sources, you start to understand the true problem that needs to be addressed. You can’t rely only on secondary research. You have to talk to people who are living the reality of what you’re trying to solve. Once we narrowed in on the problem of immigration documentation, everything started coming together and we were able to flesh out our solution more easily.

Sydney: In the Biodesign for Societal Health class, you spend the first half of the quarter perfecting your need statement, and I think we did a really good job in focusing on this hard work up front. It’s so important to take the required time to establish your purpose, as it saves you time later. If you jump to working on a solution too early, you’re likely to miss something and have to go back and iterate.

5. What advice do you have for other aspiring health technology innovators?

Sydney: Take this class and take it early! If you're at all interested in health technology innovation, learning the needs finding process is so useful.

Layth: Focus on an unmet health need with a novel, useful solution, rather than devising a flashier version of what others have already developed. If we’re able to help even 10 immigrants begin a better life because of our solution, then we’ve made an impact.