What’s A “Legal Immigrant”, Anyway?
Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2014 8:43 am
Here are a couple of articles dealing with that question. (I'm hoping that Meade will weigh in on this, since he's the only one I know of here who has actually, personally immigrated to the U.S. from another country.)
This first is by Julia Ioffe, who came to the U.S. in 1990 as a Russian-Jewish refugee, as did most of her extended family of some 60 individuals during the 1970s, -80s, and -90s. It's a pretty long article--probably too long to copy-and-paste in its entirety--so here are a link and a few excerpts:
This next, by Christopher Flavelle, focuses more specifically on the current wave of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and on current immigration law and policy:
And look! That last article has a nice chart! (Or is it a graph?)
Any thoughts? Comments? Arguments?
Anybody?
This first is by Julia Ioffe, who came to the U.S. in 1990 as a Russian-Jewish refugee, as did most of her extended family of some 60 individuals during the 1970s, -80s, and -90s. It's a pretty long article--probably too long to copy-and-paste in its entirety--so here are a link and a few excerpts:
[...]
[...]This year, in part because of my grandfather’s acutely felt absence and in part because the immigration debate rages on, I consider how my family got to these shores ourselves.
Back in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was just starting to let out its persecuted Jewish minority and the United States was starting to accept them, my father’s cousin’s cousin arrived in Maryland. Then, in 1988, when the Soviet Union coughed up its next batch of Jews, that cousin brought over her cousin, just as my parents were applying for refugee status back in Moscow. The cousin happened to be my father’s cousin, and once she got to Maryland, she became my family’s guarantor as well as the guarantor of some other relatives. We arrived, pale and dazzled, on April 28, 1990, and also settled in Maryland. Then my father wrote to our local congressman, Ben Cardin, and asked to be reunited with my father's older sister, her husband, their two kids, and my father’s retired parents. Then my father pulled over his aunt and her son, Boris. By this point, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and all the dozen relatives my father’s cousin had been a guarantor for pulled over their own families, and they pulled in their own. By the middle of the 1990s, some 60 people who were of some blood or marital relationship to me lived within a 15-mile radius of the house my parents bought, with their cherry-red Toyota Corolla (bought new!) parked out front.
These days, when I hear the conservative mantra that people ought to come to America legally and follow the law and get in line, I wonder what, exactly, they’re talking about. My family—by that I mean, the dozens listed above—all came here legally, but we weren’t exactly part of the immigration system nor did we follow any law on the books. We were refugees, and refugees are usually counted outside the elaborate visa system that everyone agrees is broken. In fact, usually they’re let in by presidential diktat.
[...]Yes, we are a nation of immigrants, but we all got here differently. Even if we came here legally, the very definition of what that means has varied dramatically over the 200-plus years of America’s history. And quite often, it was presidential executive action that pushed it this way and that.
Our immigration law has never been a constant. For the first century of the United States’ existence, immigration was totally unregulated. The only thing that was regulated was naturalization. According to the American Naturalization Act of 1790, only free white men could become American citizens. Otherwise, it was pretty much a free for all—unless you were Chinese. Chinese were totally barred from immigrating to the U.S. under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
It is often pointed out in liberal circles that many of the very whites who are crying out against Hispanic immigration were themselves descended from the Irish and German immigrants who faced widespread discrimination in the young United States. What isn’t noted, however, is the fact that they did not come here legally, at least not in the sense that they invoke when they rail against, say, the Hondurans. The ancestors of Bill O’Reilly and his ilk, setting sail in the 19th century from Ireland, England, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, et cetera, simply got on a ship and went to America. And in America they just got off. They did not go to American consulates in Dublin and Palermo to apply for H1B visas because H1B visas didn’t exist. Nor did any kind of visas, or passports for that matter. In fact, some of these countries—Italy, Germany, Poland—didn’t exist. When the United States did introduce restrictions for health and literacy, it was the responsibility of the shipping company to check their passengers’ papers—that is, it was the shipping company that had to transport a rejected immigrant back home, on the company’s dime.
Immigration began to be regulated in the late 19th century—starting with the exclusion of the Chinese—and ever since then, immigration policy has reflected America’s foreign policy far more than it did anything domestic.
This next, by Christopher Flavelle, focuses more specifically on the current wave of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and on current immigration law and policy:
[...]
(My emphasis.)Republicans are blasting President Barack Obama ahead of his executive order on immigration for his granting residency status to those who jump the line of the legal process. Here's the problem with that narrative: That line doesn't really exist for most of those affected by the order.
A Mexican worker with no family in the U.S. and no special skills has just a sliver of a chance of getting permanent residence through the proper channels. For him, the alternative to living here illegally was probably not living here at all. That changes the calculation around judging those immigrants and what they deserve.
Look at the numbers. On its face, immigrating to the U.S. can't be that hard; last year 990,553 people got green cards (becoming "lawful permanent residents," in the official terminology). But fully two-thirds of those were sponsored by family members already in the country legally. For people who don't have family here, that effectively leaves three options.
The first is to get permanent resident through their jobs, which is how 161,110 people got green cards last year. But almost all of them were either highly skilled or wealthy: The largest category was professionals with advanced degrees, followed by "priority workers" (including "aliens with extraordinary abilities, outstanding professors and researchers, and certain multinational executives") and investors (with at least $500,000 to spend).
There's also a catchall category, called "skilled workers, professionals and unskilled workers," which accounted for just 4.4 percent of green-card recipients last year, or 43,632 people. The figures for 2013 don't say how many of those people fell into the unskilled-worker category.
The second option is to seek asylum or refugee status, which is how 119,630 people got green cards last year. But most of the 11.2 million people now living in the U.S. illegally came for a job, not to escape persecution, and so couldn't have applied under that category; in 2012, for example, 70 percent of arriving refugees were from Myanmar, Bhutan or Iraq.
Finally, somebody hoping to get permanent residence legally can apply for the Diversity Program, also known as the green-card lottery. That program is capped at 50,000, and only open to people from countries with fewer than 50,000 green-card recipients over the previous five years. That excludes people from Mexico, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Colombia and Ecuador, to name just a few.
So say you're a Mexican citizen with no special skills, no money for an investor's visa and no relatives living legally in the U.S. You can't apply for the green-card lottery, and you have no grounds for asylum. Your only hope to move to the U.S. is to be one of the few thousand unskilled workers who squeak in each year -- or to enter illegally.
One answer to all of this is, so what? The majority of people living in the U.S. illegally aren't refugees; the U.S. has no international obligation to accept them. Why should this country have to help people looking for a better life?
But that's not the argument that opponents of immigration reform have been making. Yes, people living here without authorization are breaking the law. Pretending that they had a viable legal alternative just makes it easier to demonize them, by viewing those immigrants as wrongly taking something that might have been theirs had they only followed the rules. The annual green-card figures show that for most of the people affected by Obama's order, that probably wasn't the case.
And look! That last article has a nice chart! (Or is it a graph?)
Any thoughts? Comments? Arguments?
Anybody?
) but a couple of quick points...
