I have to interject myself here, because I’ve seen the issue up close, first hand and I have some perspective that the “kick ‘em out” crowd misses. And I say this, having once been a member of the “kick ‘em out crowd”.
My thought traditionally was that if you want to come here, you should “get in line” and come here legally. People who don’t follow the rules are causing the problems, because one person just comes over while someone’s been on a waiting list, just encourages that person to just come over here and then we have chaos. This is what I thought until I found out two things.
#1 – There is no line to get in.
#2 – There is no list to get on.
I also used to harbor the Hollywood idea that you just had to marry a citizen and bam, you got your green card. That’s bullshit. Our immigration system in the 60s “used” to be about keeping families together. Not any more. It has become a political issue.
The dirty secret is that our government knows that illegal immigration props up our economy by allowing businesses to obtain cheap labor, and that if we fixed the system, we would put several small businesses out of business, we would increase the costs of labor to all businesses, we would create a labor shortage which would drive up wages everywhere, and we would lose our competitive edge on the global market.
I have also learned that the US government no longer cares about really policing this issue, they have enforcement simply to set examples and to convince the law and order types that something is being done. They want to keep this issue as an issue, because it is a wedge issue that can be used to swing elections as well. It gives politicians a place to hang their hats and curry favor with one side or the other. The entire issue of illegal immigration is nothing more than a trumped up political issue which plays with peoples’ lives.
I’ll tell you how I came about my knowledge. My wife has a friend she’s known since the 5th grade. This friend took a job as a hostess at a local restaurant where they hired illegal Mexican immigrants…why? Well not only could they pay these guys a lot less than an American would demand for the same job (when you count the overall cost of overtime, taxes, benefits, etc that they can avoid), they get a work ethic which is 10 times greater than their average American worker. People come over here at great personal expense and peril and are grateful to have a job that pays them $10 an hour in cash when they are lucky to make $5 a day at home. They don’t mind working 80 hour weeks with no overtime, because it allows them to buy homes and raise families, it allows them to improve the quality of life for relatives back home by sending them money…they may have to live in a small house with 12 other people and work nearly every waking hour, but it’s a better life for them than they could have ever dreamed of back home. So it’s hard to not see the motivation for them to come, and it’s hard to not see the motivation for companies to hire these people.
Now that doesn’t make it “right”, but it does make it “understandable”.
Anyway, this friend met and married one of their cooks. He had come from Mexico in 1993 at the urging of his brother who knew where he could get work. Their parents back in Mexico had no health insurance and their mother had cancer, and he sent most of his money back to help her (she has been in remission for many years now in no small part due to the money her sons sent back). Unfortunately for this guy, who met our friend in 1995, married her in 1996, had their first kid in 1998 and second kid in 2000, back in 1994 he was caught.
Now, his understanding was that if you were caught, you had to go home. He knew almost no English at the time (but by 1995 when he met our friend, he was fluent). The law states that if you are caught however, you get a trial. It also states that you are to be informed, in YOUR NATIVE LANGUAGE if you can’t speak English, of the date and time of the trial. I mean, I understand people saying “why do we have to speak THEIR language,” but you don’t try someone and not tell them the time and the place of the trial, do you? Well, that never happened, they sent him his trial notice in English. The law says that this would be enough to declare a mistrial, more on that in a moment.
Now what this guy thought was that he had to go home…he was caught, and was being kicked out. He got the notice, and it said something about a deportation trial, and of the few words he know, deportation was one. So, he left the country, thinking that was what he was supposed to do. The next year however he decided to come back, again at great personal expense and peril, thinking he had somehow “reset” the clock and as long as he didn’t get caught this time, he’d be fine.
Well, I heard about our friend dating this guy and I was OUTRAGED. What in the world is she doing? This guy is just USING her to get his green card. He’s illegal, he should have GOTTEN IN LINE and WAITED HIS TURN. I was ready to call immigration. My wife convinced me this wasn’t my life I was messing with so calm down. I demured, and today there are two wonderful American girls and a happy 12 year old marriage that might have never been. But I just basically turned a blind eye to it. I met the guy, he was very nice, and over time I realized that his marrying our friend had nothing to do with trying to obtain legal status, and everything to do with their actually loving each other.
OK, well fast forward to 2004. Our friend was getting increasingly edgy about her husband’s legal status, and remember, they’ve been married 8 years at this point. We began to learn what was really going on. You see, since he just left on his own and didn’t show up for his trial back in 1994 (10 years before now), they had entered a “deportation in absentia” order against him. So, we asked questions, like why didn’t he come here legally in the first place, and isn’t there any way to get him legal now that you’re married, and that’s when my prejudices started to get wiped away.
You see, what Americans don’t know, but Mexicans do is that Mexico, along with 19 other countries are what are considered by our State Department to be “well represented”. It is no longer a matter of “give us your poor, tired, huddled masses yearning to be free.” It is now, “we’ve got enough Mexicans (or insert one of 19 other nationalities here), don’t bother.” In other words, if you go to get the forms you need to apply for legal immigration, you’re told that no such form exists.
But wait a minute, we all know there are legal immigrants from Mexico, so where do they come from? Well, essentially there are 3 pools of people from these 20 countries that become legal. One are the people who are sponsored by a family member who is legal inside the US. By sponsored it means you take full financial and legal responsibility for them, and you have to be an American to sponsor someone, and that person can’t already be here, they have to wait at home until it is approved, and often you need a good reason. So unless you already have a good in here, you’re not getting in that way. Second group is those who are sponsored by their employers on H1-B work Visas. If your US based employer says they need to bring you into the country to work here, then if they’re lucky and get one of the permits that essentially get snapped up on the one day a year they’re offered (and usually go to graduate students from Asia and India), then you might get over that way.
The third way most Mexicans and people from these other countries get here legally is to first come here ILLEGALLY. You read that right, the preferred method of legal immigration into the US is to first immigrate here ILLEGALLY. You see, if our friend’s husband had gone to that trial, at the trial he could have requested from the judge what is called an “adjustment in legal status”.
Now requesting that doesn’t guarantee you get in, but you hold down a job, get married, have kids, don’t break any laws, etc. (all things this guy did), it will often work. But the process is neither quick, nor cheap. Usually requests are denied several times, appealed several times and eventually rubber stamped. But add a glitch to the process, and good luck to you, regardless of your situation. These are the people the government uses as examples to show that they’re serious about deporting illegal immigrants.
So, what happened to this guy we know is that he didn’t do this right away. As far as the government knew, he never left the country in 1994, he simply ignored the deportation hearing. So after they had been married for a while and he got a lawyer and went to turn himself in and apply for an “adjustment in status”, he was told he couldn’t because he’d already been deported. So, he and his wife worked themselves like animals…each was taking on 3 jobs, working 80+ hours a week, while raising 2 kids, they got one day a week to see each other and to spend as a family and that was it. He never caused trouble for anyone, and has essentially paid taxes via withholdings by using false SSNs rather than being paid in cash, even though it was cash out of his pocket and he couldn’t file a tax return to get any of it back.
Anyway, they spent several years and thousands upon thousands of dollars in legal filing and trial fees, and essentially according to US law, the only thing he should have needed to prove was that his original court date was never communicated to him in a language that he could understand. But in violation of the US’ own laws, his appeals kept getting denied.
In 2004, the Bush campaign actually targeted this family for their mailings, claiming that if Bush were elected, he would see to it that guys like him could stay in the country, and the woman bought it! But on Bush’s innauguration day in 2005, he was physically deported. But that’s only part of the story.
You see, despite having a wife and 2 kids who relied on him for half their financial support, despite being an upstanding worker, family man and citizen for almost 12 years at that point, despite having injected thousands of dollars of tax revenue and money into the legal system and despite being a homeowner, he was ejected in a crass an inhumane manner. He knew this was a possibility, and he was cooperating with officials…he was not a flight risk, he had nowhere to go. One day they called him and asked him to come down to their offices to “discuss his case”. He told them, I will be right down, but can I ask you one favor. I am going to have my wife drive me there because I do not drive (true, because he doesn’t want to even break the law by obtaining a license by illegal means), and because I have two young children (4 1/2 and 7 at that time), they will have to come with. If you are going to arrest me, please either tell me now so that I can prepare my family and take a bus to the station so my young children do not have to see me be arrested, or at least when I get there, ask them to go home and wait until they are gone to arrest me. Oh, don’t worry, they said, we just want to discuss your case. What happens? He gets there and there’s a boot on his neck right in front of his kids, the cuffs get slapped on and he’s dragged away and told he’ll be on a plane in 4 days.
On the DAY of his departure, again Bush’s innauguration day…so much for his promise…our friend, his wife, suffers congestive heart failure. Why? Because at age 35, she has been under stress about this situation for 8 years. She has been working 80 hours a week and with his 80 hours a week they’ve barely been keeping their heads above water. Now she doesn’t know how she’s going to raise her kids or pay her bills. She’s lost almost everything. And of course working these 3 part time labor jobs, she has no health benefits, so she’s never gone to the Dr. when she’s gotten sick. But now she passes out, and wakes up, to be told she has congestive heart failure, she now has only 15% function in her heart and will never be able to work again. So in ONE DAY the family lost its entire livelihood.
Now, we stepped in to help her out, we threw a benefit to pay for the costs of new legal filings. One thing we could do was to apply for humanitarian parole. This is to allow an otherwise inadmissiable (i.e. deported) alien to come back to the US for humanitarian reasons involving their family. Her father even offered to sponsor him. We wrote to both our Senators (the Democrat wrote a letter on our behalf, the Republican wouldn’t take our calls). The verdict was that her situation wasn’t bad enough to justify letting this guy back in the country.
It took a year for her to get Social Security and by the time she got it, they took 2/3 of it away from her because her father had loaned her money, and they considered a loan from a family member to be a gift. Her house was foreclosed on. The welfare office’s response to her was “why don’t you move to Mexico”. Now she doesn’t speak Spanish, neither do her kids. Not only that, they are very light skinned, and in the town where he was deported to, they would have been kidnapped almost immediately. He was repeatedly shaken down by cops at home because they knew they could make him give them whatever money he had on them because if he didn’t, they would arrest him and he’d NEVER have a chance to get home. He is barred from entering the US for 10 years, unable to see his kids become teenagers and then women. Unable to save his house. Unable to support his wife and daughters. Unable to have a life worth living essentially.
Do you think I objected to him coming back illegally a third time?
Immigration is fucked up, period. Even for countries where we don’t already have enough of their people, in a country of over 300 million people with 26 square miles of land per person, we allow only 55,000 people a year to APPLY for legal residency, IF they are from a country that is admissible (but not from where people actually want to come). And most of those applications are rejeted. Bottom line, we’re basically allowing our population to grow 1% of 1% a year via legal immigration…that’s not enough.
The whole reason is that we can look like we’re doing something about immigration reform so we actually don’t have to do anything about it, in that way we can prop up our economy by relying on below market labor and as long as we tear apart a few families and kick out a few hard working, law abiding people who only broke the law in the first place because our government ENCOURAGES you to do so by offering legal immigration via an illegal back door, making an example of them to quell the rage we’ve manufactured about the issue in the first place, then we don’t give a shit whose lives we destroy, whether we’re being fair or humane.
In reality, if we would reform our laws so that a reasonable number of people from the countries where people want to immigrate from could actually apply for and obtain citizenship legally, we would eliminate the incentive to immigrate illegally. THEN, anyone who did not go through legitimate channels could actually be considered a criminal…as the only reason to illegally immigrate and go through the cost and risk would be because our filter (designed to keep criminals and dangerous folks out) would eliminate you from consideration. Then and ONLY then, we could take the moral high ground by saying “shoot on sight” at the border crossings. We would be able to apply a fraction of the enforcement dollars to capture more people, and the ones we did capture would actually be criminals and not people just yearning for a better life. The path to immigration reform does not lie in stricter border controls, it lies in amore sensible legal avenues for people to take, and MUCH higher quotas for legal immigration.
What we need to do is to declare a sort of amnesty, but each person should be required to have a background check, pay a fine and file for legal immigration. They can be given a trial and if they are an upstanding citizen, we should give them legal status. Then all existing quotas will be wiped out and replaced with a new system which controls the total number of people who can come in to our country each year to avoid overwhelming our system, but which applies the criteria of who applied and paid the proper fees and whether or not they have a clean record and can be expected to be a contributing citizen. And they should be expected to pay taxes and obey our laws. I would also favor that they be required to, at their expense, take English language courses. And certainly revokation of legal status would be an option for anyone who breaks our laws, takes advantage of our welfare systems, or disrespects our cultural mores. But we shouldn’t be tearing families apart, we shouldn’t be rejecting hard working people who want to contribute to our society and our tax base, and we should be respecting and following our own laws and not just using them to our political and public relations advantage.
Our current system is in a word, inhumane, and as far as I’m concerned an unjust law is begging to be broken. Our laws are designed to encourage this behavior as it is, so we can’t then demonize people for taking advantage of a loophole we gave them. Our overriding concerns should be (but are not) fairness and the greater good of society. And until we fix our laws, we will never fix the problem, and we must as a people rise above it and stop scapegoating. Walk a mile in the shoes of one of these people and tell me that you wouldn’t do exactly the same thing they’re doing. Do you realize that it costs $4,000 US (the life savings of an average Mexican citizen) to get a Coyote to smuggle you across the border, sometimes in conditions which might KILL you, and yet people do it EVERY single day. What does that tell you about their quality of life and living conditions? I guarantee you, 99.99% of Americans would do the same if the conditions were reversed.
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