“Why don’t they just go to the back of the line?”

Today, my organization had their annual fundraising luncheon.  This is an event some of our staff spend months preparing for.  The rest of us (or at least me) spent yesterday and today getting drafted for last-minute tasks, preparing everything beforehand and cleaning up afterwards, and trying to represent the importance of our work to partners, donors, and funders.  We had stories from clients, a speech from a Senator, and a wonderful and inspiring keynote address.  So with today's inspiration, I want to write about immigration.

I've been wanting to write about immigration issues since I started this blog, but honestly, I hardly even know where to start.  I’m so involved and invested in the many, many injustices and abuses within our immigration system that once I start, I could go on indefinitely.   But today, I want to talk about this idea that an undocumented immigrant could have “gone to the back of the line” instead of entering the country undocumented.

It seems so simple, doesn’t it?  Instead of entering the US illegally, you wait in line like all those good, law-abiding immigrants, and eventually get your just reward in a visa, legal status in the US, and eventual citizenship!  Except it doesn’t work that way, not even close. 

For most immigrants, there is no line.

If you are an unskilled worker – and believe me when I say that can mean somebody with more education, experience, and job skills than I have by a long shot – and have no U.S. citizen spouse or immediate relative, and are lucky enough to have suffered no major persecution in your home country, there will probably never be a way for you to get permanent status in this country.  Anyone's shot at legal status can be largely out of your hands – you could come for years on a valid employment visa, only to be laid off when your company has to downsize or collapses completely, or have to leave a job and a life in the US when your visa expires.  Even if you do have a path to citizenship, the difficulties can be near unreasonable.  Even if you fell in love with a US citizen and were planning to marry (assuming, of course, your fiancé is of the opposite sex,) your fiancé could break up with you, or pass away.  Or you could be stuck in a job that makes you miserable and mistreats you, but is your only path to legal status in this country so you stick with it.  And even if you do have one of the rare options for legal status, this so-called “line” still requires vast resources in time and money.

Take, for example, a marriage-based visa and green card.  The “easy” way in, right?  So you are Maria, a young woman from Mexico, and while you are studying for your Masters in the United States, you fall in love with and marry a US citizen, Steve (not Stacy, mind you, because then you have no shot at legal status.)  After your wedding, you decide to apply for a green card.  So you and Steve shell out the money and consult with an immigration attorney.  Because (having worked in marriage-based immigration law, I can assure you,) if you can in any way afford it, you want an attorney for this process.  Your attorney outlines everything this application will entail, and reluctantly, you and Steve decide to forgo your dreams of a down payment on a house this year, and pursue your green card.  So you prepare to shell out literally thousands of dollars in fees to the US government and your attorney.  Your attorney (you've been lucky enough to find a good one - some of them are terrible) helps you fill out form after complicated form – and lucky for you that you have an attorney, because even though you are fluent in English and Steve grew up speaking it, it’s hard to figure out what many of the fields on the forms are actually asking you for.  You painstakingly try to recall the addresses you lived at as a child in Mexico, Steve fills out and signs a form promising that he will financially support you if you lose your job so you don’t have to apply for public benefits, you review the forms over and over to make sure they are all correct.

And then you begin to collect the documents to prove your marriage is valid.  Once again, lucky you have an attorney, or you might never have realized just how much documentation is required.  You copy your marriage certificate, of course.  Then you copy your joint gym membership, adoption papers for your dog, your joint lease.  You call your phone company for the last two years of your phone records, and highlight every call you have made to Steve’s number and he to yours.  You print out your personal e-mails to each other – you’re going to let these strangers in the government read your silly and romantic notes to each other while you were at work or apart for a few days.  You photocopy pictures from your first vacation together, the Christmas you spent with your parents in Mexico, you holding Steve’s niece, your wedding, your honeymoon.  You ask your family and friends to write letters stating that you two are a real couple.  You copy a Christmas card from Steve’s godfather addressed to both of you.  You make a copy of a check from your joint account.  You collect everything you can get on paper to show that you and Steve really are in love.  You pass it on to your attorney, who reviews, who asks you for more details, who finally compiles a thick packet and sends it to US Citizenship and Immigration Services.  And after a wait of a few months, you have your interview.  You and Steve talk to immigration officers who question the details of your life together, who examine your interactions in the immigration office, who try and find any crack that might prove that you’re faking  your love, that your marriage isn’t “real.”  And after all that, you finally get your green card – valid for two years.

And in two years when your conditional green card expires, you do it all again.  You pay more fees to the government and your attorney.  You file more forms.  You collect more documentation.  You might even get called for another interview.  All to show immigration that yes, two years later, you are still married, still in love, still a real couple.

And then, after another year –because this is, of course, the fastest track, and you only have to wait three years – you can apply for naturalization.  This, of course, entails more forms, more fees, more documentation.  You take a test which a significant number – I don’t have any real statistics, so I won’t give them, but I feel 100% confident that it is a “significant number” – of US born citizens could not pass, to prove that you know and understand this country you’re trying to pledge to.  And at long last, you can take your oath, and you are a U.S. citizen.

And this, folks, is the “fast track,” this is the the best possible scenario for the easiest of the “lines”, if you’re lucky enough to have a chance to get in a “line.”  To see what all the other "lines" look like, check out this great chart from Reason magazine, detailing other paths (or lack thereof) to legal immigration.

Entering the US as an undocumented immigrant is difficult; people risk their lives, their freedom, and their life savings to do it.  They work at low wage jobs and get taken advantage of because they don’t have legal status.  If they are lucky enough to become successful, they live with the constant threat of being deported and separated from their home, their family, their US citizen children, and the lives they have built here.  Trust me, if there were a “line,” people would be getting in it, not suffering through entering undocumented. 

So if someone tells me that undocumented immigrants should have just “gotten in line,” that's when I know they have no idea what they're talking about.