If you could write legislation and change United States immigration laws, what would you change to make things humane for immigrants while still keeping citizens safe?
I would start by suggesting that it’s not a question of humane treatment of immigrants vs. citizen safety. All human beings should be treated humanely, and immigrants are not — by virtue of their status as immigrants — a danger to society. Fundamentally, the question is: who should be allowed to come to the United States and, of those here, who should be allowed to stay? I have a brilliant colleague who recently left private immigration practice to open a think tank on open borders. He said that the more he has worked in the field, the more he has come to the position that migration is a human right. Although I suspect you will have a lot of readers who denounce this position, I think he may have a point. The more you look at immigration through a moral lens, the harder it becomes to justify excluding some while permitting others. This obviously does not mean that anyone who poses a security threat should be allowed in. I’m just saying — why does the brother of a US citizen get to come here? Why does a person who can invest a million dollars get to come here? Why the person who wins the lottery? Why not the person who has no family, but just really wants to earn a living picking mushrooms because it will support his kids and wife back home? Why not the person who believes her kids could eat more than beans and tortillas, or even live in a house with a toilet, if she just cleaned houses in the US for a few years? Why not the person who studied at our top university and is a few years away from discovering the next brilliant innovation in medical research?
Is there anything else you’d like us to know?
I’d like you to know that as an immigration practitioner I have to tell clients and potential clients every day the following: “Good news is bad news, and bad news is good news.”
The middle-aged single, childless man who has lived here since he was 18, works hard, pays his bills, cares for his bedridden, elderly aunt (a United States citizen)? He’s out of luck. His good news is bad news. Until he tells me that he was brutally beaten to within an inch of his life two years ago, and had to testify about it at his assailant’s trial. Suddenly, his bad news is good news!! He may be eligible for a visa.
A mother of three children has been living here for 10 years when she is picked up by immigration. She may be eligible for a benefit that could lead to her having a green card. But only if she can show that her children would suffer “extreme and exceptionally unusual hardship” if she is deported. Her kids are healthy and young and adaptable, so the case is going to lose. Until it turns out that one of her kids is diagnosed with an incurable, life-threatening disease. Good news! She might actually get to stay here.
A family says they can’t go home because they are afraid of the gangs that run their neighborhood. Gang members were threatening their youngest son because he was refusing to do favors for them. That’s not a very strong claim to asylum. But then… good news! The oldest son, who stayed behind with his own wife and kids, is gunned down in retaliation. Now they have a winner.
This is the reality of our immigration laws right now, for many undocumented immigrants. It’s not black and white. There are no heroes and villains. There is only humanity, or the search for it, within a really complex and contradictory set of laws that can be enforced with more or less compassion depending on who is in charge of enforcement. Under the Trump administration, if there is compassion, it is being kept hidden, quiet, so that nobody gets any ideas that this administration will be soft. And that’s unfortunate for all of us.
(image via Pixabay)
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