Waiting for Immigration Reform
GLASS, ANDREW J.
A Cruel Lottery Waiting for Immigration Reform By Andrew J. Glass Washington The last time George W. Bush had anything to say about illegal aliens, back in March, he argued that the time...
...In due course, our relatives were killed...
...House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas told reporters Bush "admitted that he hasn't done a very good job in being clear to the American people where he's coming from and he's going to try to do better...
...About 10.3 million of this cohort are here illegally, and approximately twothirds of them have arrived within the last decade...
...In the late 19th century, another period of high immigration, both Germany and Ireland each accounted for more than 30 per cent of the immigrant population...
...It calls for hiring 10,000 more Border Patrol agents over the next five years, plus $2 billion in fresh spending for such high-tech surveillance equipment as unmanned vehicles, cameras and sensors...
...Still, they had somehow managed to fend off the Nazis, the Communists and the Japanese...
...Nativist rants and ethnic rage litter the media scene...
...Clearly, change is desperately needed...
...Thus an estimated 1 in 28 persons living now in the country is "unauthorized...
...The Congressman made a few calls...
...immigration policy reveal that neither my fami ly nor my wife's would fall into any approved category...
...Whatever the facts, there is a widespread perception that a huge influx of illegal aliens is diffusing what it means to be an American...
...You can sense the whole mess in microcosm by looking at the lottery the State Department runs, entered last year by some 10 million people, including "unauthorized" ones...
...is a veteran Washington observer...
...To be sure, even with Bush pulling back there has been forward momentum on the issue...
...More than 75 members ofthat body, led by Tom Tancredo (R-Colo...
...MY father graduated from Warsaw University's Law School in 1934, shortly before an anti-Semitic Polish tide made it all but impossible for Jews to practice law...
...The computer that generates the random numbers caps each eligible country to no more than 5,500 slots...
...Fortunately, near the end of World War II...
...steadfastly oppose any kind of guest-worker program...
...The lawmakers sitting on the sidelines are there out of political calculation...
...Between them, the two Senators lift lots of legislative heft: Cornyn chairs the Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship subcommittee...
...They fell victim, though, to the shifting tides, as often happens to immigrants awaiting the outcome of appeals...
...and John McCain (R-Ariz...
...Rather, they would be candidates to join the ranks of newly arrived illegal migrants who, more often than not, eke out a living as taxi drivers, farmhands, domestics, non union construction workers, and the like...
...Shortly before my citizenship papers came through, I enrolled at the Bronx High School of Science...
...So we were prime candidates for rapid deportation...
...In 1946, her mother had gone to Italy to aid war-weary relatives...
...They had no pull with big shots...
...Andrew J. Glass, a longtime NL contributor...
...Overall, it reports, some 85 per cent of newly entering migrants are, as we were back then, "unauthorized...
...immigrants, making Mexico by far the largest country of origin— at more than five times the next largest foreign-born population...
...Only then would Bush return to the thorny question of whether to issue work permits to border jumpers...
...IT becomes easier to see why that is so when you look at the various ways you can be "authorized...
...Fifteen "high admission" countries are excluded: Canada, Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Philippines, Mexico, Dominican Republic, China, El Salvador, Jamaica, Colombia, Haiti, South Korea, Russia, and the United Kingdom (except if you are from Northern Ireland—that's okay...
...President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that let some illegal aliens with otherwise clean records claim the unused quota slots of people—in our case fellow Poles—still trapped overseas...
...Once in Japan our assigned destination was the Dominican Republic via the United States...
...population annually...
...Well-funded advocates fly the banner of "reform"—albeit with diametrically opposed ideas of what requires reforming...
...The program awards 55,000 visas by lot annually, with 5,000 of them fenced off by Congress forNicaraguans...
...Census figures, that number had risen to 10.6 million...
...Cornyn characterized his plan as "work and return,' as opposed to "work and stay...
...The Pew study says about half the Mexicans now living in the United States are "unauthorized...
...Those quotas (but not annual caps) were swept away by the landmark Immigration Act of 1965...
...At least 60 Senators support a bipartisan bill, the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act, introduced in May...
...I suspect that kind of outcome occurs less often today than it did in those more clubby days, even when the aggrieved party has access to savvy immigration lawyers who have access to sympathetic editors at the New York Times...
...It costs nothing to play, though some scam artists try to game the system...
...When his plans to revise the law stalled, Bush tacked to the Right, telling his recalcitrant legislative captains in June that he needed to change course...
...We're trying to replace an illegal flow with a legal flow," says John Gay, cochairman of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, a group that embraces the U.S...
...My parents were broke...
...But advocates have conflicting notions on what to do about it...
...From on high the word went back to Naples: Let her return...
...Immigration currently contributes over 1 million people to the U.S...
...The measure deals more or less squarely with reality by acknowledging that huge numbers of illegal workers are here already, mostly employed in lowprofile, low-skill and low-wage jobs...
...citizens, for example, several Filipinos finally received their green cards this year...
...Her parents, her sister and most of her brothers had been born in Italy...
...The White House would begin, DeLay confided, where Congress left off in May—with a big push to enhance border security...
...He let him know that no one had asked his brother Dominic whether he too was "illegal" before he fell in Normandy...
...During July, while Congress grappled with broader issues of immigration reform, the folks in Kentucky notified the lucky entrants, including some 40,000 who will go on a waiting list and will get in only if lower numbered slots fail scrutiny or go unclaimed—as did my parents...
...You must leave at once...
...Six months later, when she was ready to return, consular officials in Naples claimed she had entered the United States with false papers...
...It must have a digitalized picture that meets rigid specifications...
...One of my wife's elder brothers knew a senior Congressman in Washington...
...You can't stay," an immigration officer told them after we had crossed the country by train to New York...
...When we debarked from the Kamakura Mani in San Francisco, the Mexicanborn population in the United States stood at 377,000...
...Think tanks spew out reports...
...In crossing the White House, the GOP worthies on Capitol Hill made sure their initiative would not be vetoed by tying it to emergency funding for Iraq and Afghanistan...
...Under a quirky formula, the world is divided into five regions plus North America, where only Bahamians can roll the dice...
...Chamber of Commerce and other corporate organizations...
...Then, in McCain's words, they "get in the back of the line for a green card and eventually become citizens...
...As his English improved over the course of our immigration hearings, my father stood fast, gaining successive delays while being paroled to work in a defense plant...
...Having been trained in the Napoleonic code, he could not hope for a legal career in the United States...
...But under the law, then as now, we could be deported only to our homeland, Poland, firmly under the Nazi heel, orto the country we had come from, Japan, with which the United States was at war...
...All this is of more than passing interest to me...
...But being caught in a sweep by USCIS—having made it past U.S...
...Measured against what they had been through, being sent to purgatory on Ellis Island, the historic entry point for tens of millions of foreigners, seemed relatively painless...
...On all sides, one hears that the status quo is unacceptable...
...Instead, they passed legislation that tightened the legal and physical screws on illegal immigrants— making it nearly impossible for them to obtain drivers' licenses...
...My parents were Polish Jews who arrived in the United States on brief transit visas with their only child...
...But chances are it will take a long time...
...But despite the flurry of activity, it has proven hard for observers to get a good grasp of what is really at stake...
...There is only one way to enter: online...
...There are five categories of people who can legally obtain permanent residency in the United States, with varying degrees of difficulty: immediate relatives of citizens, other family members, employment-based immigrants, refugees, and a small number of so-called diversity immigrants...
...Republican Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Jon Kyi of Arizona have a competing measure that would create a guestworker program requiring participants to eventually go home...
...Backers of the McCain-Kennedy bill—big business types, organized labor, immigrant-advocacy groups—believe the illegals in the United States are a vital part of the economy and should be allowed to obtain green cards, which bestow permanent residential status...
...There I met a pretty ninth-grader from Brooklyn, the youngest of six kids...
...In March 2004, according to the Pew Hispanic Center's tabulation of U.S...
...The present foreign-born population in the United States is 36 million...
...In an early era, the United States had an "open door" approach toward immigration...
...Officials issue rules that are ever in flux...
...Executive inaction has of course not stopped scores of lobbyists from stirring the immigration cauldron...
...Primers on U.S...
...Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), now an arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is at best a chancy business...
...Since then, however, he has shown little resolve in pressing ahead on his "compassionate" agenda...
...Safeguarding national security is hardly a post-9/11 cause...
...But you do not need to take a survey to divine that a good many of these people crossed the border to seek a better life for their kids—just as my wife's parents had done...
...Polls show that my niece-in-law is not at all unique among Americans who oppose welfare for foreigners...
...It is not clear, at least to me, how, say, Sangospeaking Muslim applicants from Chad scan their ID photos onto the Internet or, for that matter, how State Department consular officials, based in Williamsburg, Kentucky ("Gateway to the Cumberland Mountains"), decide whether the Chadian headgear is "religious in nature...
...Although the law has since been amended several times, the changes have been at the policy edges...
...Another member of my wife's large Italian family also married a doctor...
...But Hong Kong, ruled by the British until 1997, falls into the Asian cluster...
...In 2004, Bush had called for the first comprehensive immigration overhaul in nearly two decades, an approach that promptly won him bipartisan backing...
...Kyi chairs the Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security subcommittee...
...In historical terms, that is nothing new...
...Political pundits predict immigration will be a hot-button issue in 2008...
...After waiting 22 years to immigrate as siblings of U.S...
...For his part, DeLay insists that any changes must come after imposing tougher security measures—a key feature of the Cornyn-Kyl proposal...
...He said Bush now believes his goals could best be accomplished more gradually...
...Aside from the notorious Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it was not until 1924, with the passage of the National Origins Act, that the United States adopted a country quota system— tilted in favor of northern Europeans...
...He contends that this approach enjoys the support of Mexican officials, who are worried about the economic impact of a permanent exodus...
...In the spirit of the President's last statement on the subject, it both rewards illegal immigrants for their work and penalizes them for their unlawful entry...
...But Republican leaders in Congress failed to heed the President's words, claiming his proposals to reform the nation's immigration laws would reward lawbreakers...
...To be sure, a wrong answer on Ellis Island or the diagnosis of a contagious disease could send you packing— yet that was the fate of only some 2 per cent of new arrivals...
...Supported by outfits favoring a more restrictive immigration policy, they hold that the guest-worker approach amounts to an unjustifiable amnesty...
...I entered the United States in 1941 as an illegal alien through California, Ground Zero on today's immigration landscape...
...In return, they would get three-year work visas (renewable once and capped at 400,000 a year...
...Last year, they included the remaining twin legs of President Bush's "axis of evil": Iran (820) and North Korea (1...
...Even as millions perished, my family won the survival lottery by receiving three of the 2,200 transit visas issued by Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul general in Soviet-occupied Lithuania...
...As my future brother-in-law suggested, this wasn't the time to raise such questions with his mom...
...Given the stiff numerical caps, the long administrative backlogs and the enhanced emphasis on national security, these legal migration streams amount to something of a crapshoot...
...A Cruel Lottery Waiting for Immigration Reform By Andrew J. Glass Washington The last time George W. Bush had anything to say about illegal aliens, back in March, he argued that the time had come to bring "millions of hardworking men and women out of the shadows...
...Macau, a Chinese enclave since 1999, is lumped under the European quota because of its Portuguese heritage...
...Assuming you filled out the exacting application form properly, the odds of winning this year's lottery are about 125-to1. The odds that the nation's lawmakers will take meaningful steps this year to mend the nation's badly frayed immigration quilt are not nearly as good...
...are the bill's chief proponents...
...She tells me that poor blacks are unable to get good care there because illegal Hispanics, mostly Mexican-born, have swamped the facility...
...Well, not exactly everybody...
...Senators Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass...
...They would be placed on a six-year regimen toward permanent legal residency that entails paying at least $2,000 in fines, fees and back taxes, mastering English, and taking civics lessons...
...While they know the system is broken, they focus on polls that show most voters want fewer immigrants...
...Getting on the short list of the agency that since last March has been known as the U.S...
...You can submit just one application, and it cannot be downloaded...
...She is an African American and works in a bigpublic hospital in San Diego...
...Assuming you did not screw up the application—as some 3 million people did—just about anybody with a high school diploma is eligible and everybody has an equal opportunity to win...
...But that door closed when new rules barred such prospects to anyone with close relatives in Nazi-controlled areas...
...Customs and Border Protection, another arm of DHS, with help from the FBI—is also a matter of chance...
...In 1942, the official logic held that if we were not in fact spies we were at risk of being turned into enemy informants to protect loved ones...
...Years later, she became a medical doctor—and my wife...
...Mexicans currently account for about a third of U.S...
...Indeed, times have changed: As recently as 1970, Mexico was merely the fourth-largest source of newcomers—behind Italy, Germany and Canada...
...Briefly, it looked as if we could go to Canada and return with valid visas in hand...
...Under a companion program, the bill would allow foreigners to enter as temporary guest workers and apply for permanent residency...
...Ten years earlier, there were more Britons, Russians and Poles...
...There is no simple way to change that simplistic mind-set...
...Photos with tribal headgear are an automatic bust, unless the headgear is "specifically religious in nature...
...Your [one-week] transit visa has expired...
...Their bill's main emphasis is actually on beefing up border security...
...But even if a Bush-approved compromise immigration bill clears the Senate, the situation remains murky in the House...
...Together, their respective states cover roughly 85 per cent of the country's southern border...
Vol. 88 • July 2005 • No. 4
