While the national immigration crisis has raged across the headlines in 2014, I’ve been dealing with my own personal immigration crisis. Namely, my wife’s application for legal residency.
As someone who spent the past 15 years living in California, Texas and Latin America, I’ve long cared more about this debate than, so far as I can tell, the vast majority of my fellow countrymen. But two recent experiences have lately ratcheted up my level of alarm.
The first is that, since moving back to the states last fall on the heels of two years abroad, I’ve ended up watching a lot of Fox News. So much, in fact, that I had to significantly slow my intake in the past few weeks because the network’s sensationalist coverage has incepted a seed of anger and simmering outrage in the pit of my soul. That said, the far right “pundits” have the better overall logic on the immigration debate so, along with the constant Obama-bashing, I’ve been subject to some valuable data and emotional lighter fluid there.
But the second and more relevant experience is my wife’s eye-opening, seven-month long and counting immigration journey since the two of us moved here from Argentina. If I had one suggestion for Americans to help them appreciate the nuance of the larger immigration conversation, I’d encourage everyone to marry a foreigner (this recommendation would double as a solution for social security, but I digress).
The time, money and mind share required to navigate this labyrinthine process is not for the armchair wannabe resident. By my estimation, my wife (G, for brevity’s sake) and I have spent around $3,000 and at least 100 man hours in research, preparations and appointments for the application process itself—and this is without hiring a lawyer, which is strongly recommended.
Thin-skinned and lazy need not apply
These totals may sound insane, but are no exaggeration. The end-to-end process involves doctors, lawyers (or at least a $50 legal consultation) and bureaucrats, interviews, examinations, phone calls and paperwork and, in our case, the application itself, which was actually five separate multi-page applications and their supporting materials. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we were obligated to submit an I-130 Petition for Alien Spouse, I-485 Application for Adjustment of Visa Status, I-864 Affidavit of Support, I-131 Application for a Travel Document and the I-765 Application for a Work Permit. If you like vicarious pain, take a quick look at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (formerly the INS or, to Hispanics, “la migra”) forms page here. Take note of the fees next to many of these applications—yes, you have to pay for this stuff.
In addition to the money and forms, the immigration process for newlyweds is mostly about establishing your bona fides as a legitimate couple and proving to Uncle Sam that you aren’t out to defraud the government—in a rapidly growing entitlement state like ours you can see why this is important, but I’ll get to that momentarily.
Proving your integrity necessitates a fact-finding investigation that would make Phillip Marlowe lift a glass. You need birth certificates, school transcripts, marriage licenses, tax records, pay stubs, bank statements, ID cards, travel itineraries and other materials. Anything that exists in a foreign language must be translated by a licensed translator and notarized by a notary public. Then there is a need for more “personal” evidence to validate the relationship, including photos, romantic dinner receipts, joint accounts, residential leases with both names on them, love letters, mementos, familial references and anything relevant and helpful up to and including social media profile comments from years past. That the government employee reviewing your application might be checking Facebook, too, should come as a surprise to no one.
Sprinkle in the hours of reading government websites and instructions, researching the process on the internets, physically filling out applications and then organizing all the documents into tabulated, color-coded folders…well, you are talking about a LOT of effort. Maybe not Herculean, but substantial by any definition.
And yet, none of what I’ve written even begins to address the more challenging portion of the immigration experience—the emotional adventure, along with the constant learning and cultural adaptation that goes on simultaneously while awaiting the application. G has taken hours upon hours of English classes, despite years of grammar school language studies back home. I’ve personally spent entire days teaching her driving laws, explaining local customs, showing her the city, or waxing philosophic on American politics and lifestyle (God have mercy on her). She also passed several months doing volunteer work without pay because it was illegal to work and she needed something to do. Legal applicants can’t actually have a job; imagine that. All of this she managed while traversing Atlanta via one of the cruddiest public transit systems of any American metropolis. She was denied the right to a driver’s license, of course.
Just as I learned while living abroad, every day for G is an adventure; running simple errands can be foreign, scary and intimidating. What we Americans sometimes fail to recognize is that our culture is unique. Our people are loud, aggressive, confident and self-sufficient. And we don’t use the metric system. Yes, we can be kind and polite, but as a somewhat geographically isolated nation, the average American has little concern for where you come from. We care more about what you bring to the table.
This is a big departure from many other parts of the known world, and there have been days when G just breaks down and cries for no other reason than because she is exhausted and overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all.
The crush of unchecked human waves
Now take a step back and think about all I’ve just described, keeping in mind that my wife is an educated adult with money, means and an existing family and friends support system. And she has me there every step of the way. Can you imagine what this transition process must be like for just one lonely child? How about 10? Now think about the 50,000 or so that have come to the U.S. from Central America since the beginning of the year. These are kids without money, education, language ability, marketable skills or respect for and understanding of American laws and culture. Do most Americans even fathom the significance of this kind of burden and what it does to our institutions?
The reality is that most of these children will never have near the experience of G. They are far more likely to slip through the cracks. At worst they’ll join branches of the most nefarious kind of criminal street gangs and narco-trafficking networks that already exist here. Most of them, though, will probably end up poor, uneducated and facing the same sad, isolated experience as my wife, but without the light at the end of the tunnel. I don’t enjoy the thought of it, but by every rational indication, this vast relocation of children will do little more than compound and accelerate America’s ongoing immigration catastrophe.
But don’t get me wrong. I want to be clear that I am not complaining about the immigration process that G went through. I don’t think, for example, that it was some kind of unnecessary bureaucratic inconvenience. G doesn’t feel this way either. She feels privileged to have the opportunity to be in a great country where you can make enough money to save some, and your savings account doesn’t lose its value due to ever-spiraling inflation (she is Argentine). Both of us understand and respect the challenge of immigration and that there is a need for a high bar to entry. Though it could be improved in a number of ways, the process described above is not a bad thing. There are dishonest people in this world—like the kinds who enter into fake marriages for a green card—and we have a responsibility to weed them out and deny them entry.
I’m also not making one of those “it’s unfair that my wife played by the rules while others jumped the line” arguments (even though I would be justified in doing so.) I get it that everyone’s circumstances are different, and many of the immigrants who came here illegally not only did so out of economic desperation, but also because bad legislation and an elaborate system of government handouts incentivized them to do so. That’s not to excuse breaking the law, but I’m reasonable enough to understand it isn’t always as cut and dry as bad guys and good guys.
Finally, I don’t want to trivialize the plight of the less fortunate, or compare my wife’s situation to the perilous odyssey of scores of starving, terrified children fleeing violence and sexual predation. I have a great amount of concern and compassion for the humanitarian angle. Having traveled widely in Central America, I can create a mental picture of the desolate world these kids and their families face, and I shudder at what goes on as young boys and girls trek their way across hundreds or even thousands of miles of lethal elements and human hazard toward a flickering glimmer of hope in a distant land. Yes, it is a terrible thing and only a sick, sociopathic individual would not understand the importance of eliminating and preventing mass scale suffering like this.
The root problem is that the system is breaking down. No, not the immigration system; the American system. Sorry, don’t mean to rant, but would any sane person argue that our public schools, healthcare system, job market or middle class economy are getting stronger? Never mind the state of the American family or the role of religion and morals on society as a whole—those are trickier issues to quantify. Perhaps I’ll attempt to take a look at American breakdown empirically in a future article, but suffice to say that many of the institutions that have traditionally propped up American communities are in a state of decay. Adding tens of thousands of new wards of the state on top of these troubled institutions does not a solution make. And if the trend continues, it’s realistic to think that this country could cease to be that beacon of hope for the world’s afflicted.
The corruption, crime and violence in Central America is not unprecedented. We have seen it before. And there are equal if not worse conditions in other parts of the world (northern Nigeria? Syria, anyone?), where people are persecuted, oppressed and butchered on a seemingly regular basis. Our presidential admin says that America cannot police the world. But can it care for the world’s sick and poor?
In addressing our current immigration crisis, the executive branch has been slow to move, indifferent and totally unimaginative in finding solutions other than asking for more money. This striking ineptitude has been matched cynically with the usual gridlock and political mud-slinging by the U.S. Congress. The sad part is that the issue impacts everyone, and ultimately affects America’s middle class the most. After all, the influx of these children primarily affects border towns, rural communities and blue collar neighborhoods, and the people on the front lines dealing with the crisis are everyday working folk, not Washington D.C. suits.
Keeping history in some perspective
Let‘s be fair about the context of our current “refugee” dilemma. America has always been a country that puts a strong value on liberty and human rights relative to the rest of the world. So to the extent that we can help police the world and care for its sick and poor, we should. I am a firm believer in this. But we must do so while keeping two important considerations in mind.
First, our strength as a humanitarian force and symbol for peace and justice on the world stage is positively correlated with the fundamental integrity of our domestic institutions, security of our border and health of our economy. In other words, we must be strong at home in order to project power abroad. Demonstrating the truth of this axiom, recent American foreign policy failures in theaters ranging from Libya to Ukraine have coincided with stumbling GDP growth, eroding social institutions (see above) and an ongoing immigration crisis. Shaky leadership from the federal government has been a wet blanket on the fires of progress.
The second consideration is that our ability to affect positive change must be viewed through a modern lens, not the fog of history. When America took on untold legions of immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries, our economy was based on agriculture and industrial manufacturing, respectively. That meant more jobs for unskilled labor fresh off the boat. There was also more open land, and fewer regulations about where people could live and what they could do—which meant people often settled in their own communities and made their own rules, with minimal impact on neighboring towns or the greater populace.
Technology was different, too. With no internet, phones or rapid transportation, communities were more isolated. This meant that law and order was maintained on a local basis, with limited federal involvement. Communities solved their own problems, rather than looking to the President and Congress for handouts. Recently-arriving immigrants were forced to adapt and assimilate with the local culture if they wanted to thrive, or face being left in worse shape than in the old country. They kept to foreign customs in the privacy of their homes, but they quickly learned that in a free enterprise system like America’s, hard work and keeping your nose clean led to prosperity. This “immigrant work ethic” allowed new Americans from around the known world to become so successful that they were willing to line up in droves to fight and die for America during two world wars.
But perhaps most importantly, when previous immigration waves reached America, there was no social welfare system other than that which was provided by churches and small time charities. For many generations after the Immigration Act of 1882 and ensuing laws, entrants to the country were actually taxed upon arrival. In essence, new immigrants were incentivized to come here based on the promise of self-determination, but there was a cost to it: both literally in the form of a fee and figuratively in the level of hard work required.
If this sounds familiar, it may be because it is very similar to the experience that G has gone through. However, in a monumental historical turnaround, a large share of immigrants to America today face precisely the opposite experience. The immigrant pays locally just to get out of their home country (via payments to coyotes or smugglers) and is rewarded upon entry to the U.S. with the fruits of a cradle-to-grave social welfare system that offers schooling, healthcare and housing assistance to (arguably) millions of illegal, undocumented or underaged foreigners. Ironically, applicants petitioning legally for resident status must receive an economic sponsor, to demonstrate to the federal government that they will not be on the dole. Meanwhile, illegal arrivals face no such restriction to public aid. This state of affairs represents a near total inversion of the very principles that undergirded American immigration since the founding of the republic.
It was recently revealed that the Obama Administration is looking to redefine the United Nations standards of what constitutes a refugee in Central America, and wants to begin spending time, money and resources actively searching for candidates who meet the new definition in their home country. Ostensibly, they will then be brought back to the good ol’ US of A and given a chance to shine, on the taxpayer dime, naturally. Where this program goes from there is anyone’s guess. But after supporting my wife in her arduous ongoing effort to become a functioning member of this society, reading this news makes me a little sad. If this is the best we can do, what was the point of ever setting up such a high barrier to entry?