The way people think immigration works and the way it really does
With roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, people are understandably frustrated. The presence of so many people with no official status raises obvious questions.
Why don’t more of them get right with the law or go just back home? And why didn’t they just get in line, wait their turn, and immigrate the right way in the first place?
However, experts say such questions are based on misconceptions about how the immigration system currently works in the United States. They say the reality instead is an antiquated, broken system that actually serves to keep millions from ever becoming documented.
That forces the undocumented to stay in the shadows in a way that perversely serves the ends of human traffickers, drug cartels and other criminal organizations — the people we wanted to be protected from in the first place.
Focusing only on deportations without undertaking more basic reforms will only make the problem worse, said Heather Prendergast, a Cleveland-based immigration lawyer.
“We can’t just have enforcement,” she said. “People are going to keep coming. If you don’t have a way to open the faucet a little bit to relieve some of that pressure, they’re going to find other ways. That’s not good for any of us. That’s what benefits the gangs and the cartels and the criminal element. We want to bring people out of the shadows.”
Not what people think
Lynn Tramonte, founder of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, had a recent experience indicating that even people with direct experience with the U.S. immigration system can be misinformed about how it works.
“One Friday I had two different conversations with two different Lyft drivers — pretty deep conversations about immigration,” she said. “One was a Croatian immigrant himself and one is the father-in-law of a man who won asylum from South Africa.”
However, their ideas were based on decades-old information, and in both instances involved special programs. They were wrong about the current landscape, but that didn’t mean their ideas weren’t reasonable, Tramonte said.
“I just asked myself, ‘Why don’t we have the immigration system these Lyft drivers think we have?'” she said.
The Lyft drivers are hardly alone, and the further American families are from an immigration experience, the more likely they are to have mistaken beliefs about how things work, said Celinda Lake, a Washington, D.C.-based Democratic pollster and political strategist. Some misconceptions are particularly common, she said.
“We recently did some work on people who receive citizenship through marriage,” Lake said. “People believe firmly that if you marry a citizen, you become an American citizen. When we tried to talk to them about that, they said, ‘Oh no. I saw the movie.’ They said they saw the movie ‘Green Card.'”
Prendergast, the immigration attorney, said that sometimes the system does work that way, but only sometimes. For many others, it’s all but impossible to get the permanent residency one gains with a Green Card, not to mention full citizenship, she said.
“If you have come here through the broken back door, for example, and you marry a U.S. citizen, you can’t get your Green Card in America,” Prendergast said. “You didn’t come in the front door. You weren’t inspected and admitted. You actually have to leave the United States and go to the consulate in your home country to apply for your visa.”
That process comes with a 1990s-era poison pill in the form of a 10-year wait before anything can happen.
“When you leave America, thanks to the Clinton administration, if you’ve accrued time in the U.S. without legal status, you’re subject to a 10-year bar,” Prendergast said. “So that means leaving your family and your U.S. citizen spouse so you can go sit outside America for 10 years.”
She said there are waivers for those who can demonstrate extreme hardship, but even those take years to adjudicate. So it’s hard to see many undocumented people leaving their families and taking a bet on a process that at best will take years.
Meanwhile, Lake, the pollster, said Americans overwhelmingly want the system to work like so many mistakenly think it does — marry a citizen, get a Green Card and have a path to citizenship.
“When we survey on whether that should happen, two-thirds to three quarters say. ‘Yes. Absolutely. I thought it was the law now.'” Lake said.
Get in line
When many say the millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States just need to come “the right way,” they envision an orderly process in which people can find the line and get in it.
“People don’t understand why you can’t just become a citizen,” Lake said. “Why don’t you just walk down to the post office and file the papers? Post office is literally where they think you’d file to get it.”
Not only is the post office not the place that handles immigration matters, nothing about the system is that straightforward, Prendergast said.
“The thing about immigration is that it’s super fact-specific,” she said. “If you’ve seen one case, you’ve seen one case. You can’t have these broad generalities.”
Nowhere is this more true than with what Prendergast calls the “mythical line.” There’s not one line, but many, and which one you might find yourself in depends not only on why you think you should be able to come to the United States, but also the country you’re coming from.
“There’s no mythical line,” Predergast said. “The line that people talk about — they say, ‘They should wait in line like my family members had to — the way our grandparents came in.’ But they didn’t have these processes and procedures that we do now.”
In fact, the many lines for noncitizens to get Green Cards are so complex that it takes a staff of government economists to keep track of them.
Known as the Visa Bulletin, each month the State Department publishes when applicants for permanent residency have reached the front of their respective lines.
There are no annual limits to the number of Green Cards that can be issued to the spouses, parents and minor children of U.S. citizens — so long as those family members didn’t, as Predndergast said, come in “through the broken back door.”
But there are strict limits for everybody else. Other family-based visas are capped at 226,000 a year and employment-based visas are limited to 140,000.
Because there are also per-country caps set by statute — and because more people want to come from some countries than they do from others — some of the lines stretch for decades. For example, if you’re a married Mexican child of a U.S. citizen, you would have had to have gotten in the Green Card line on or before Nov. 22, 2000 to now be at the front of it. That’s almost a quarter century ago.
Those from China, India and the Philippines seeking family-based Green Cards can face waits nearly as long.
Such seemingly arbitrary waits are also true for professionals seeking employment-based visas.
Let’s say you’re the administrator of a rural hospital and you need an anesthesiologist. If you want to sponsor one from India, because of country limits that doctor would have to have gotten in line for a Green Card on or before Dec. 1, 2012, according to the March Visa Bulletin. It isn’t likely that employers or employees can plan to fill vacancies in a hospital 12 years in advance.
The convoluted system is a far cry from what most would consider sensible.
“It’s not a real line,” Prendergast said. “It’s a mythical line and this is what it comes from. It comes from the Visa Bulletin. It’s really confusing and we need economists to tell us whose turn it is, because there’s a lot of math and whatever else economists do involved.”
“The good guy visa”
Lake said that her public opinion research shows strong support for undocumented people who come, work for a decade or more, abide by the laws] and pay taxes.
Two such men from Mauritania were in Ohio when they were deported during the first Trump administration, with devastating consequences for them and their families.
“People don’t think you can never become a citizen,” Lake said. “They think that if you came over undocumented, there’s amnesty. If you work here 20 years and pay taxes, there’s amnesty, you can at least get a visa. They’re very, very supportive of anybody who works 20 years and pays taxes. They support that they should be able to become citizens. It’s 60-plus percent of the public that believes you should become a citizen under those circumstances. What’s more American than working for 20 years and paying taxes?”
But again, the reality is quite different. It just seems fair that after years of proving oneself and paying your way, you should be given a chance but you’re unlikely to get one.
Facetiously dubbing it “the good guy visa,” Prendergast said that even people who take a dim view of immigration support a less-than-absolute policy.
“Some people may think they don’t like immigrants, but they think ‘my immigrant,’ or ‘my Mexican restaurant person, or my landscaper, he’s a really good guy, so there should be an immigrant visa for him,'” she said.
But regardless of whether migrants come in without documents or overstay visas, or run into one of many other snarls, they can face situations that are almost impossible to fix.
“When you have fallen out of legal status whether it’s because you never had it to begin with — you came through that broken back window — or you came here on a visa but you didn’t maintain it, you didn’t go to class or you hired a lawyer to file something and they didn’t file it — you’ve fallen out of status, and it’s really hard to get right by the law,” Prendergast said.
Needed repairs
Not only are migrants and their families hurting because the immigration system doesn’t work the way most Americans think it does, so are thousands of businesses, said Rebecca Shi, CEO of the American Business Immigration Coalition, a group of more than 1,700 businesses and executives. That can mean higher prices for consumers, in addition to other inconveniences.
“Right now we have 1.7 million open jobs, and we don’t have enough people to fill them,” Shi said. “The labor market is so tight. Our employers from small businesses to mom and pop restaurants and bakeries to large, multistate hotel operators can’t fill positions. That has meant businesses are open only at certain hours. We have had some food processors that have had to really slow down their production. That slows down the supply chain and that means consumers may not get the products they want or that prices are going to go up.”
Her group wants many of the things that Lake’s opinion research indicates big majorities of Americans want — a path to citizenship for those who are here, keeping families together and clear, and predictable ways for people to come join the workforce.
Despite their popularity, reforms keep not happening.
Shi said that when Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden had Democratic congressional majorities early in their terms, neither gave immigration a high enough spot on their priority lists.
In 2013, when a bipartisan coalition was close on a reform package, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, worked tirelessly to tank it and has complained about our broken immigration system ever since.
Last year, another bipartisan package seemed near the finish line when then-candidate Donald Trump killed the right-leaning package. Then he ran a campaign in which he excoriated the country’s troubled immigration system.
That leaves people like Prendergast and all her clients to deal with what remains.
“The work I do as an immigration lawyer, I’m not helping people to come to America the wrong way,” she said. “My job as an immigration lawyer is to help people who may already be here — or not — find a way to accomplish their immigration goals… I’m trying to help people to do things the right way. And there aren’t a lot of tools to work with, and the tools that we have are old and rusty and sometimes don’t fit today’s equipment.”
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