BY INVITATION ONLY
Levy, Deborah M.
By Invitation Only America's gatekeepers won't let you in unless your name is on the guest list BY DEBORAH M. LEVY March 28, 1938 My dear uncle, I suppose you will be astonished to receive a...
...the door (or even the window) of a U.S...
...Many immigrants would probably return to their native lands...
...Look: It's not broke, don't fix it," says Joseph Trevino, executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens...
...God knows we've benefited from them in the past...
...Under the labor-certification procedure, an employer wishing to bring in an immigrant must go through a cumbersome process of domestic recruitment under Labor Department supervision, supposedly to ensure that no domestic workers are available for the job...
...Others say we don't yet know enough about the effects of immigration on the quality of life to draw a line based on those efforts...
...As many as 30 per cent of all immigration applications based on marital relationships involve fraud, according to studies cited by David Martin of the University of Virginia Law School...
...People don't move for no reason, and they are highly motivated...
...But opposition to immigration is based more on emotion than on data...
...Deborah M. Levy is an attorney with the firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, D.C...
...The worst thing about it may well be that U.S...
...consulate is no longer open...
...Not all the ideas being proposed will withstand scrutiny, nor are many politically feasible...
...You've got to come down on one side or another...
...Hard-liners in this school say we know enough to establish justifiable ceilings, and if there are doubts we should limit first and justify later...
...Now for your information I want to tell you thefollowing...
...For people who don't fit into one of the preference categories, "nonpreference visas" exist, but only in the statute books...
...The reason these critics of the existing system are not pressing for reform is they don't want to push their luck...
...A spokesman for a population-control group advises, "We shouldn't tinker with legal immigration...
...If Scrap the preference system for one that evaluates potential immigrants with points or "productivity characteristics...
...The spouse of a legal resident alien qualifies, for example, but the waiting list for that category of immigrants from Mexico is ten years long...
...My wife and two girls of 12 and 8 years...
...Till now it was not my intention to go away from Germany, but the present circumstances force me to do so...
...Separately, the Administration has begun circulating new proposals to expand police powers at the borders and wherever else illegals may be found and to narrow the rights of people subject to those powers...
...At present, 40 to 50 per cent of population growth is attributable to immigration...
...But Representative Rodino, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, blocked the move...
...These days, the frustrated would-be immigrant must ford a river, board a rickety boat, or engage in a sham marriage with a U.S...
...The numbers are arbitrary, according to a recent Brookings Institution study by Milton Morris, who is now director of research at the Joint Center for Political Studies...
...When Arnoldo Torres, then the executive director of LULAC, proposed in a 1981 Senate hearing that legal immigration could be set at a million persons a year, his suggestion was met with laughter...
...citizenship...
...Allowing in a million persons legally would certainly not reverse the trend...
...It would also have cut back on some of the family-preference categories, deprived "professionals" of their automatic eligibility, given greater eligibility to business executives, and relegated unskilled workers entirely to nonprefe-rence status...
...In these articles I am absolute expert and without boasting I can say, that my business friends call me diligent and fit...
...In 1984, legal immigration totaled about half a million, and the flow of illegals may have been about the same...
...I am earning a good living here, but unfortunately the circumstances force me to give it up here...
...In a time of shifting international trade and investment patterns, the movement of people across borders should be treated as part of a more comprehensive framework, including cross-border flow of goods, services, and data, as well as people...
...We benefit from these people...
...You will surely also know, that Abe has taken my brother Max and his wife over to Detroit, which makes it impossible for him to do something for me...
...Give me your tired, your poor' has turned into 'Give me your families, your skilled laborers.'" Today's immigrants face a complicated, misunderstood, highly detailed structure that determines who gets to come to America legally and who is turned away, with a worldwide yearly cap of 270,000 immigrant visas and per-country ceilings of 20,000, not counting political refugees and the "immediate relatives"—minor children, parents, and spouses—of U.S...
...most of the categories describe applicants related in one way or another to people who are already here...
...Even modest estimates put the yearly total of legal and illegal immigration at more than 750,000...
...By Invitation Only America's gatekeepers won't let you in unless your name is on the guest list BY DEBORAH M. LEVY March 28, 1938 My dear uncle, I suppose you will be astonished to receive a letter from me but I am sure you will have already heard from my dear brother Abe that I have the absolute intention to go to U.S.A...
...with my family...
...Until some of the pressures are relieved, immigrants at their wits' end will resort, as my grandfather did, to windows and other cracks in the system...
...The process, says Martin, is "game-playing...
...A highly skilled professional geologist or systems analyst from a Western European country qualifies under a different category but cannot know whether three months or three years will pass before the backlog in that one is worked off...
...immigration policy have been exposed by experts and experience and attacked by legislators and lobbyists...
...But Congress and the Executive miss the point by focusing on traffic control at the border...
...consular posts, and estimates of illegal immigration differ by hundreds of thousands of human beings...
...Proposals that paraded under the name of "reform" in the Ninety-seventh and Ninety-eighth Congresses might more accurately be labeled "reaction...
...I. Salzburg Isaac Salzburg was my grandfather...
...They point up sharply, however, just how little "border control" has to do with "immigration reform...
...I'm not sure current law does...
...Don't let me wait too long and for to day take my best regards and hearty kisses for you both, certainly also from my wife and children...
...family ties— who fall into one of two groups: professionals and people with exceptional abilities in the sciences or arts, and workers-skilled or unskilled—in occupations where jobs go begging...
...Almost two million applications for immigrant visas are piled up at U.S...
...citizens...
...Even those who qualify under one of the preference categories must endure long, uncertain waits for visas...
...And that peculiar oversight is not confined to Congress...
...The myth is over of the immigrant who sells the farm and buys a steerage ticket to come to the United States," says T. Alexander Aleinikoff, who teaches immigration law at the University of Michigan Law School...
...Its bills in 1982 and 1983 included Senator Alan Simpson's proposals to change both the numbers and the selection of new permanent residents...
...others say a million is about right...
...Morris found that every time Congress has established or adjusted authorized levels of immigration, in laws passed in 1921, 1924, 1925, and 1965, it has acted without regard to "any assessment of the country's absorptive capacity or explicit growth targets...
...Recipients of the 270,000 visas available each year are selected through a system of six "preference categories" based on family ties...
...For a start, policymakers could consider some ideas that have surfaced during the debate over the past five years: H Allow much higher levels of legal immigration...
...The streets aren't paved with gold here, and immigrants must make it in a society and economy that demands more and more self-reliance of its residents...
...Senator Simpson described his proposals in 1983 as "not nativist, not racist, not mean...
...He got the visas and left Hamburg six hours before the Gestapo came to his home to arrest him...
...immigrant visas in hand, and began a relatively smooth transition to immigrant life and, before long, U.S...
...But it's a serious idea...
...Yet, after five years of study, the Ninety-ninth Congress is seriously considering an immigration bill that does not touch the legal immigration system, and many of the critics are not complaining...
...Six months later, he and his family sailed into New York harbor on the Queen Mary, U.S...
...Neither Torres nor Morris uses the phrase "open borders," but their suggestions point in that direction...
...I think it's wrong," says Roger Conner, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), "for the U.S...
...Congress replaced it with the current cap of 20,000 per nation, an impartial approach that nonetheless ensures remote prospects for natives of such high-demand countries as Mexico, the Philippines, India, Korea, and China...
...It is still a control measure...
...citizen...
...Hoping, that you will help us, in giving us the necessary affidavit, I want to thank you in anticipation and you may be sure that also my wife and my children will be thankful to you their whole life...
...Also difficult to answer is whether we should distinguish among nations in some way...
...The trick is to tailor the job description to fit the desired immigrant and no one else...
...Although they were defeated, immigration reform has given way to immigration control...
...I am living here in Hamburg for over 20 years...
...laws are being devalued and that the immigration bureaucracy is being overwhelmed by enforcement demands...
...After 1982, the drama subsided, but the refrain of immigration "control" persisted...
...Congress and the Administration emphasized employer sanctions to deter the hiring of illegals and a limited onetime program of amnesty for those already here...
...And that peculiar oversight is not confined to Congress...
...It's Alex Aleinikoffs pet peeve: "There ought to be some room for them," he insists...
...We simply don't know what overall effects an open immigration policy would have on labor markets and the economy...
...Today, with a totally rewritten set of immigration laws on the books, things are much different and the old-fashioned visa is still elusive...
...The rest go to "independent immigrants"—people without U.S...
...There's a very fundamental conflict between family reunification and control over numbers of people," says Eugene Pugliese, assistant counsel to the House immigration subcommittee...
...Once here, the certified immigrant does not have to stay with the job but is free to move over into one for which he or she could not have been certified...
...On the reform of legal immigration, the Administration had little to say...
...Any system subject to such pressures is bound to cause trouble...
...A de facto open-borders system is at work right now...
...A "ceiling" of a million immigrants a year would probably accommodate any alien who is sufficiently motivated to come to the United States...
...Adds FAIR'S Roger Conner, "What the occupational preferences are, really, are an invitation to deceit...
...The United States might insist on including the immigration and foreign-labor restrictions of our trading partners in discussions with them on international trade and investment...
...The shortcomings of U.S...
...Perhaps the country should consider prescribing a level much closer to the actual level of total immigration," says Morris in his Brookings study, "since that level probably reflects the country's real needs more than the politically derived ceilings now do...
...His organization, however, is also deeply concerned about immigration levels, and in a rather different way than LULAC...
...Early in the Reagan Administration, then-Attorney General William French Smith set the tone when he announced, "We have lost control of our borders...
...Citizens of other countries, particularly the developing ones, look askance at a system designed to skim the cream of their professional and educated population...
...so I must try and find a new existence somewhere else...
...Illegal immigration may be stanched by border-control measures, but illegal immigration and its handmaidens—cynicism and fraud—will persist as long as the current system of legal immigration fails to take account of such basic factors as supply of and demand for would-be immigrants...
...For people from the wrong countries, with the wrong family ties or the wrong job skills, the barrier to immigration is simply not one a sympathetic consular attache can lower...
...But it's no secret that LULAC views the numerical ceilings in the bill as un-realistically low...
...Therefore I must ask you, dear uncle, would you be willing to help me and my family to come to U.S.A...
...His bill would have capped all immigration, except by political refugees, at 425,000 a year...
...reform" is a vestige...
...The pre-1965 immigration law used country quotas to discriminate against certain nationalities and ethnic groups...
...The Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy recommended new quotas in 1981, but did so, says Morris, "not on the basis of a reasoned appraisal of the country's capacity to absorb immigrants but on an arbitrary judgment about what the country would find acceptable in 1980...
...Common sense suggests that the level of immigration would be moderated, after initial disruptions, by the simple fact that immigration to the United States takes hard work, motivation, and ingenuity...
...The size and shape of our guest list, not the size of the Border Patrol, is the key policy question...
...Some argue that the United States ought to imitate Canada's policy of requiring potential immigrants to earn a certain number of points awarded on a range of criteria that indicate an ability to become a productive member of society...
...Independent immigrants generally must have an offer of employment and certification from the Department of Labor that no American workers are available for the job...
...Assuming that net immigration continues at 750,000 or so a year, the U.S...
...Other considerations transcend the traditional immigration debate...
...population will increase to 300 million by 2085...
...The Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy recommended new quotas in 1981, but did so, says Morris, "not on the basis of a reasoned appraisal of the country's capacity to absorb immigrants but on an arbitrary judgment about what the country would find acceptable in 1980...
...In the summer of 1981, he proposed legislation whose main points were drastic curtailment of the rights of aliens seeking to remain in or enter this country and beefed-up enforcement of the laws providing for apprehension and exclusion of aliens...
...After the dust cleared, what was left on the legislative agenda was a bare-bones Immigration Reform and Control bill now in its third life in as many Congresses...
...citizens obviously believe there is too much immigration already...
...Neither is independent immigration free from taint...
...H Coordinate immigration policy with a national policy of population stabilization, environmental protection, and resource conservation...
...But, he says with some satisfaction, reform of legal immigration has been "knocked out with an ax" from the immigration bill by his boss, Representative Peter Rodino...
...My business is agencies in hosiery, braces and garters, and principally modern articles, such as belts for ladies and gentlemen...
...The Senate went further than either the Administration or the House on the question of legal immigration...
...But a point system is merely an instrument for applying the results of hard policy decisions that still haven't been made about whom we want to invite into the country...
...The current version passed the Senate last September and is pending in the House (where it is called, with more accuracy, the "Immigration Control and Legalization Amendments Act...
...to meet its need for cheaper facelifts by bringing in doctors who are desperately needed in their home countries...
...The tough job is agreeing on the characteristics we ought to recognize for immigration purposes...
...Policymakers and many U.S...
...Relatives account for 80 per cent of the visas...
...To accomplish this, my grandfather had to get from his uncle an "Affidavit of Guarantee that Aliens Will Not Become Public Charges," file visa applications with the American consul in Hamburg, take his family to the consulate the Saturday morning before their sailing date, and threaten-quite convincingly—to leap out a window if their visas were not issued immediately...
Vol. 50 • August 1986 • No. 8
