Go to the Back of the Line?
We hear the argument all the time: if foreigners want to work in the U.S., they should play by the rules and enter legally. If here illegally, they should go to the back of the line and wait for their number to be called.
This argument makes complete sense only if you know very little about the intricacies of U.S. immigration laws. The reality is that our immigration system makes it virtually impossible for the typical Mexican—by far the largest undocumented group and most frequent target of this argument—to enter the U.S. legally in his or her lifetime.
Take, for example, a 30-year old Mexican with a high school education and a sibling who is a U.S. citizen. According to data compiled by Forbes magazine, “playing by the rules” and applying for a green card could mean waiting in a line that stretches back an estimated 131 years!!! In most visa categories for Mexicans and Filipinos, the two most backlogged nationalities, applicants are looking at at least a 15- or 20-year wait from the time of filing their applications until they are contacted to schedule an appointment for an interview with an immigration officer.
Why such a long wait? The short answer is that current rules limit any single country to 7 percent of the total number of green cards allotted by Congress in any given year. Mexico is subject to this limit just like any other country despite being the world’s eleventh most populous country and a neighbor whose 2000-mile border with the U.S. marks the largest income gap between any two contiguous nations on Earth.
Mexican and Dominican nationals, for instance, both received about 30,000 family-based green cards in 2010. Mexico’s population, however, is 13 times that of the Dominican Republic’s. Add that there are about 7 times as many Mexicans in the U.S. who are able to petition for visas on behalf of relatives back home. This means that Mexicans have an infinitely longer wait than Dominicans simply by virtue of being born in a more populous country that has more entrenched ties with the United States.
But at least the person in the Forbes example has direct ties to a U.S. citizen. If you’re like most would-be Mexican immigrants—someone without family members who are U.S. citizens (or legal permanent residents) and with aspirations to wash dishes, clean bathrooms or pick onions—you are ineligible for a green card because you do not fall into any of the family-based or employment-based preference categories.
In this case, the only legal option would be an H-2A or H-2B visa for temporary labor in agriculture or other “low-skilled” areas like catering, landscaping, and construction. The probability of securing one of these visas is also extremely slim because a U.S. employer must first petition for the visa on the migrant’s behalf.
About 90,000 Mexicans worked on H-2A and H-2B visas last year. If this sounds like a large number, consider that it is equivalent to only 1.3 percent of the undocumented Mexican population in the U.S. and less than 0.7 percent of all the dishwashing, fast food, landscaping, janitorial, housekeeping, babysitting, construction, and hired agriculture jobs that U.S. employers needed to fill last year.
In all, the U.S. provided 178,999 visas to Mexicans for labor and family reunification purposes in 2010, equivalent to only 0.058 percent of total U.S. population. We could stand to offer more. (If anyone tells you that the U.S. provided 1.2 million visas to Mexicans, they are correct. The catch is that 971,886 of those were Border Crossing Cards, which are like tourist visas for people wealthy enough to return to their lives in Mexico. Another 68,161 visas were temporary entries for diplomats, government officials, people on official business, athletes and entertainers, etc.)
No one wants to be an illegal immigrant, primarily because no one wants to make a punishing 4-day trek though the Arizona desert that involves very real risks of dehydration in 110-degree heat and rape at the hands of a human smuggler. Most undocumented immigrants from Mexico come to the U.S. with the intention of working temporarily and returning home. But many end up staying for decades in an effort to capitalize on all they risked to get in illegally. They would jump at the chance to enter safely and legally on a temporary labor visa if only Congress provided them.
It’s silly to expect someone to go to the back of a line that never ends. If we want Mexican immigrants to play by the rules, we first need to create a set of rules that includes them in the game. Our current immigration system is the vestige of a system that was designed nearly half a century ago. A twenty-first century immigration policy should recognize Mexico’s unique status as our neighbor, Mexican workers’ desire to enter legally, and our economy’s dependence on their skills and labor.
Having completed a tremendous amount of research on this topic, the thought that constantly circulates in my mind is; Who are we as Americans to say ANY immigrant should or should not be allowed in this country? Last time I checked, we started out as a bunch of colonists from Great Britain who took this land over from the real Americans…Native American Indians. Without a doubt, that single group of people is so long forgotten in the course of discussion regarding immigration that I think we have all nearly lost our minds! Rather than continuing to justify or reason our right as a country to decide who can be here legally or illegally, how about we focus on the fact that America has and always will be a country built of and by IMMIGRANTS. Then and only then can we move to reform our immigration laws, which are so convoluted and unfair to all but those without financial concerns, so that anyone who wants to be here legally can do so without undue hardship. It might be difficult to make this work, but if we do, we would effectively increase our LEGAL workforce, and any economist will tell you that a larger population equals an increase in GDP which in turn results in a higher standard of living for the nation as a whole. The most significant problems surrounding undocumented workers is that they pay little to no taxes, are willing to work cheaper than most American citizens are willing or financial able to and still provide for a family (or themselves), and yet have no recourse to abusive employers. Those factors drive down average wages across the nation, and are response is to spend more money and man-hours hunting down undocumented workers and forcibly ejecting them from this “land of opportunity” back to (usually) Mexico, where they face third-world living conditions, one of the lowest standards of living in the modern world, all while tearing their family apart in the process. And yet, many of these “illegal” immigrants are only truly hoping to achieve one thing: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness. I think that is written in our Constitution somewhere…
So you mean to say that Mexicans deserve more opportunities than poorer countries such as the Philippines to immigrate because Mexicans were “born in a more populous country that has more entrenched ties with the United States”? And that illegal immigration from Mexico is America’s fault for not doing something to accommodate the disproportionately large number of Mexicans who want to immigrate but don’t have a realistic chance to do so? Why don’t you take responsibility for once and admit that Mexicans are the ones violating the law, and that the competition for opportunities are due to the demand among Mexicans themselves. The only fault of the United States is not securing the border enough to enforce the rigid definitions of border and private property.
I am a legal immigrant from the Philippines and my family waited 25 years (before I was born) after a petition to migrate here in America. The population of the Philippines is almost as large as Mexico’s but is significantly much poorer (with 1/5 of the GDP of Mexico). As for “entrenched ties” the Philippines has a deeper and bloodier shared history with the United States as a victim of the Philippine-US war (dubbed as the first Vietnam war, with more than 1,500,000 dead, compared to the casualties of the Mexican-American war; the devastating effects of this war is still felt today in the Philippines not only in its economy but in its cultural identity), as a colony, and later as a US commonwealth. If I said that the Philippines should get this increase in opportunities before Mexico, how would you feel? Your argument is that the hopelessness of this wait list is the root cause of illegal immigration, but you should take into account that while this wait list has a disproportionate lot of losers, it also rewards a large number of winners. Asking for more than that number is glaringly selfish and irresponsible in the perspective of other countries who want to find a better life in America too.
Yes, I am arguing that Mexicans deserve special treatment with regard to visas as a practical solution to unauthorized immigration. I would probably make the same exact argument for Filipinos (or any other nationality) if: (a) Filipinos made up 60% of the unauthorized immigrant and (b) the Philippines and the United States shared a 2000-mile land border that marked the largest income gap between any two neighboring countries in the world.
The persons coming to our country should have a financial sponser an education and a desire to be part of our social system and the will to become an American! As sad as it has become it is still the best there is. Not just come here to take all they can get send it back home. Suck the food banks, free medical care and school systems resources dry because they don’t pay taxes!
Catherine, most people–undocumented immigrants included–pay taxes automatically. Please read my earlier piece on the topic for more information– http://roygermano.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/do-illegal-immigrants-pay-taxes/
Catherine, if you knew anything about the lifestyles of other countries, especially in Mexico, parents have to pay to send their children to school. And without good jobs, most families cannot afford to send their children to school. Therefore, many desire to come to the United States to get better jobs, and if it were easier for them to become legal, they would be able to go to school in the U.S. and receive financial aid.
Why are Americans, many of whom need can barely get by on the wages paid them, supposed to pay for the Mexican elite’s unwillingness to make schooling free for Mexican nationals? Instead of dumping on Americans in general and making the lower income Americans, who have to compete with poorly paid illegals, pay for this injustice, you should be make the Mexican elite change this unfair policy.
From the Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2011:
“The hydrocarbons in the earth’s crust amount to more than 500,000 exajoules of energy. (This includes methane clathrates—gas on the ocean floor in solid, ice-like form—which may or may not be accessible as fuel someday.) The whole planet uses about 500 exajoules a year, so there may be a millennium’s worth of hydrocarbons left at current rates.”
Not to get too far off point, however. I believe the immigration policy should be scrapped and free and open borders be the rule in the U.S.
With the immigration policy as it is the U.S. population
grew from 200 million to 300 million in only 40 years.
If legal immigration were increased to 6 million per
year the U.S population would reach a billion in about
a century. We already consume a fourth of the energy
in the world with only 300 million people. Where is the energy going to come from to support a billion people.
The real problem is Mexico hasn’t developed its’ economy and provided jobs and a descent standard of living.
There are at least 100 countries in the world that are
worse off than Mexico but they are too far away to just walk across the border. Should’t they have the same opportunity immigrate. Mexico has people living
on a $1 a day and at the same time has the richest
man in the world Carlos Slim who is worth $75 billion.
Is it possible that the countries wealth is unfairly
distributed? Mexico gets the worst rating by the
U.N. for the unfair distribution of it’s wealth.
Mexico is a corrupt and dysfunctional country.
100 years from now, the world’s oil reserves will be depleted. We can only hope that a clean and efficient renewable energy source would be invented by then. So I don’t necessarily take your point about energy and population growth. But I think you make a couple of good points, namely with reference to the fact that Mexico isn’t the poorest country out there and that it’s income distribution is atrocious. I hope Mexico can make the changes it needs to so that fewer people have to leave home for the US. In theory, it only seems fair to treat all countries equally with how we allocate visas. This is the basic premise of our current system for allocating green cards. But this system, devised in 1965, isn’t working because it ignores a number of realities I discussed in the article above. I think we need policies that admit that Mexican immigration is different than immigration from other countries (for reasons I also discussed).
My country may be corrupt and dysfunctional as you call it, but the abusive treaties had done a lot of damage too. Yes we are not the poorest country and that is because we are hard working people, I’ve always said Mexico should have been bankrupt a long time ago. Our governments have poisoned us with their greed taking all the money we can make and impunity is a big problem too. As far as dysfunctional I don’t hunk so, we do have a culture of family, we don’t sit waiting for the government to send us a check every month, we work hard because its work or die. Instead you should be thankful for living in a country with a government that looks after you. I myself consider the American system quite dysfunctional as well, with a middle class that works hard to support the burden of millions of lazy people and the Mexican doing the work they should be doing. A system that gives money to people that claim being poor but drive cadillacs. Yes slim is very wealthy but he provides millions of jobs in Mexico as well. The distribution of wealth is not fair in the States either, with CEOs making millions and people living in trailer parks. We should look at the problems of our own country before we point at others, there is no perfect country, I think Marxism left that clear a long time ago