When 16-year-old Hefzi Lopez said goodbye to her parents, José and Cecilia Lopez, in 2008, she felt betrayed. She was a U.S. citizen by birth, but her parents had been unsuccessful in their efforts to become citizens as well. After nine years of legal battles in the immigration court system, background checks, three lawyers, and thousands of dollars in legal fees and appeals, a judge delivered the final verdict: Mr. Lopez was approved for residency status, but his wife was not. An expired visa had thrown a wrench into the process, and there was nothing the couple could do but return to Mexico and wait for a decade, after which they could reapply for residency and then citizenship. Faced with the court’s decision, José and Cecilia decided to take Hefzi’s younger sister, Kirsten, also a U.S. citizen, with them back to Mexico.
Hefzi, now married to Adam Fillion, a Canadian-American, said her parents told her they would send for her once they sorted everything out. “They were so terrified of losing me over there,” she said, as the threat of kidnapping—particularly for females 16 to 25 years old—was extremely high. “I actually thought they didn’t want me. I thought I wasn’t good enough or smart enough.” It’s an experience she wouldn’t wish on anyone.
According to the Pew Research Center, 76 percent of the immigrant population in the United States—about 65 million people—has entered the United States legally. Of these, more than 1 million are green card holders, making them legal permanent residents. More than 230,000 people successfully became citizens last fiscal year, as reported by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). But what is the legal immigration process actually like for the people who go through it?
Legal Pathways
An immigrant must complete a number of steps in order to become a U.S. citizen. Among the requirements are documents for proof of birth, legal status, travel, and a host of other information. All would-be citizens must register for Selective Service, be residents of the United States for three to five years, take a biometrics test, be fingerprinted, and pass an English and civics test.
Regardless of what category they fall into, immigrants first must obtain a green card—also known as an immigration visa—which allows them to become permanent residents of the United States. Various ways to obtain a green card include being a relative or spouse of a citizen, sponsorship by a U.S. company, entering an annual green card lottery, founding or investing in a U.S. company, or filing for asylum or refugee status.
If an immigrant has a family member who is a citizen, is engaged to marry one, or is the minor child or the parent of a citizen willing to sponsor them, the green card process is usually easier, although still complicated. These types of visas are processed the most quickly, typically within a year.
If an immigrant is over 21, however, or is the sibling of a U.S. citizen, the process takes a lot longer. The waiting list for this type of visa can be anywhere from eight to 20 years to process, depending on the country of origin. Countries with the biggest backlogs are China, India, Mexico, and the Philippines, so anyone seeking to immigrate from these countries will have to wait the longest amount of time to find out if their application was approved or not.
Cathleen Farrell, director of communications for the National Immigration Forum, an immigration advocacy group, said that the current process is a challenge for legal immigrants. “That’s really the big issue, when you hear people say, ‘Why don’t they get in line? Why don’t they just work out their papers?’ There’s just not a path for everybody,” she said, noting limited approaches and numbers of visas permitted per year. “The idea that [immigration] is easy is a complete miss. It is very hard.”
According to USCIS, immigrants from a country that doesn’t send many immigrants to the United States can enter their names in the annual green card lottery. (Last year, 19.3 million people entered, and 50,000 green cards were distributed, meaning an entrant’s chance of being selected was a quarter of 1%.). They can invest $500,000 to $1 million to start a company in the United States or have a U.S. company sponsor them. This is a challenge as well, as companies usually prefer to hire U.S. citizens.
To qualify for asylum or refugee status, applicants must prove that they are in danger in their home country because of their politics, religion, or social group, among other things. A year after being granted this status, they will be able to apply for a green card.
The fee for obtaining a green card can cost anywhere from $750 to $1,225, depending on the age and status of the applicant. This doesn’t include lawyer fees or other expenses incurred during the process, which can easily number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars. And immigrants had better hope they have a good lawyer, or they could be out the cost of their legal fees with nothing substantial to show for it.
Obstacle Course
The Lopez family found this out the hard way when their first lawyer didn’t seem to do much more than take their money. Their second lawyer, Fillion said, lost his license. She recalled, “[From age 7 to age 16] I was always in court, as if I was headed for juvenile.” She interpreted court proceedings for her parents.
“My parents thought everything was lost,” Fillion said. “But the judge was gracious to us and let us extend. My mom developed a lot of health issues, a lot of anxiety, because we were under so much pressure. At any time, we could have been deported throughout the whole process. We wouldn’t have had enough time to pack anything; we would have had to directly leave the country right then.”
They finally found a reputable lawyer, only to have him tell them that winning their case was next to impossible. The only thing he could do, he informed them, was to get them an extension on their stay in the United States to head off their 10-year wait to return because of the expired visa. What little money they had left after their protracted legal battles was stolen from them when they returned to Mexico.
When Fillion was 17, her parents tried to reunite the family. They planned to file for refugee status in Canada but found the Canadian immigration system no easier—and perhaps even harder—to navigate than that of the United States. Eventually, they received the bad news that Canada had also denied them residency.
“I was in Canada for seven years total,” Fillion said. “In Canada, so many people misuse the system. We were trying to do the right thing, and we couldn’t stay.”
She described how many people trying to gain Canadian residency status hired others to carefully craft fake cover stories and documents, in many cases successfully gaining status with these methods. In contrast, her parents tried to do everything by the book, but were unsuccessful in gaining admission.
The Canadian immigration system is overtaxed, Fillion said, because of lax immigration laws. Despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s official liberal stance on immigration, he has been forced to tighten immigration restrictions recently to conserve resources.
By the time Fillion’s parents’ appeal for Canadian residency was denied, she was engaged to marry her current husband, Adam. He was able to convince Canadian immigration agents to extend the parents’ stay long enough to attend their wedding. Her wedding and honeymoon were “bittersweet,” she said, because five days after her marriage, she was again saying goodbye to her parents, who had to return to Mexico once more.
She also has an older brother who lives in the United States, whom her parents haven’t seen in 10 years.
“My parents not being able to see their grandchildren, it hurts,” said Fillion, who is pregnant with her first child. “I had this crazy thought: Why don’t I just give birth in Mexico, so they can be there [for the birth]? They have paid a long price; they want to be with their family.”
She doesn’t completely blame the United States, though.
“The real problem here is the Latino governments,” Fillion said, “and the U.S. is expected to clean up the mess. I don’t like calling my parents and hearing them cry, because they can’t make ends meet. The [Mexican] government doesn’t take care of the people; they only care about themselves.”
She and Adam currently live in California. They visited her parents in Mexico for the first time in July. Both her parents’ health has declined due to the overload of stress.
Bureaucratic Behemoth
“The immigration system is actually this horribly bureaucratic monstrosity,” said Alex Nowrasteh, a senior analyst for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C. “It’s really… a Kafka-esque nightmare. There’s lots of different ways to get green cards, and some of them are very expensive. Including lawyer fees and government fees, a … green card can cost between $10,000 [and] $35,000. The government fees themselves usually range from up to $2,000, but the lawyer fees are also very expensive. And most people need a lawyer. It’s really a monstrosity of a system.”
Adding to this monstrosity, according to David Inserra, an immigration policy analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation, is the number of people who deliberately break U.S. immigration laws, clogging the system for legitimate immigrants.
“There are a good number of people who will show up at our border who actually have been persecuted, based on their race, their religion, their political opinions,” Inserra said. “There are other people, however, who know that our policies that we currently have in place are fairly generous toward people who are able to claim asylum. There’s a good chance that if they claim asylum, and they can get past a couple hurdles, then they’ll be able to be released into the United States and await an immigration court hearing maybe several years in the future. If you claim asylum, there’s a decent chance that you’ll be released, and then you may not show up at your immigration court hearing in the future, so it might just be a pathway to stay illegally in the United States as well.”
Daunting Backlogs
In June 2018, the Office of Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), issued an immigration report stating that it currently had close to 350,000 asylum cases backlogged in its system, partly due to the increasing number of people claiming asylum, including those whose claims may not be valid. For example, the report states that DHS is now receiving more than 8,000 applications per month, up from 2,400 in 2009. This can make the waiting list up to four years long for those who truly need asylum.
One asylum seeker affected by both the case backlog and the bureaucracy of the immigration system is Mexican journalist, Emilio Soto. Last year, Mexico ranked as the third most dangerous place for reporters, behind only Iraq and Syria. Soto fled to the U.S.-Mexican border back in 2008 with his son after receiving death threats for his reporting. Because of his lack of documents, he and his son were sent to a detention center, before finally being released seven months later.
After waiting for 10 years for his case to come up for consideration, Soto was re-arrested and scheduled for deportation, because of a mistake his lawyer made in appealing the ruling against him. After supporters, including the National Press Club, brought attention to his case, his appeal was finally granted. Meanwhile, he and his son are still being held in an El Paso, Texas detention center while they wait for the court to try his asylum case.
The wait for a green card is even longer, depending on an immigrant’s country of origin. For instance, applicants from Mexico who are the unmarried children of citizens currently have to wait about 21 years for their request to be processed because of the astronomically high demand for green cards from that country, according to an article in Atlantic magazine.
Part of the reason for the long wait is the sheer volume of people eager to emigrate to the United States. In the 1820s, when the government first began record-keeping, the number of immigrants was less than 150,000, amounting to a yearly average of slightly over 14,000. Ever since, the numbers have steadily risen. The first decade of the 21st century saw nearly 14 million U.S. immigrants, a yearly average of almost 1.5 million. According to the Center for American Progress, 43.3 million people living in the United States were born elsewhere, a number that is expected to grow to 78 million by the year 2065. According to the Pew Research Center, the United States leads the world in the number of immigrants accepted by far, accepting four times as many immigrants as Germany, which has the second largest immigrant population. One-fifth of the world’s immigrants currently reside in the United States.
Sometimes, during the lengthy green card application process, a person’s legal status will expire, Nowrasteh said, making that person an illegal immigrant and further complicating the process. Mistakes made or documents inadvertently missing can add even more time to an already lengthy process.
Dotting I’s, Crossing T’s
Once a person finally has a green card, though, the processing time to become a citizen is relatively short, because there is no set limit on the number of people who can become citizens in any given year.
A citizenship applicant must have had a green card for three to five years before applying. The form for naturalization citizenship—an N-400—costs $725, and the citizenship process takes from six months to a year to complete. At every stage, though, a mistake can throw a wrench in the process, leading to the rejection or even denial of the application.
Almost 10 percent of applications are rejected or denied because of errors or for another reason. If this happens, an immigrant must either file a new application or appeal the decision. Sometimes, immigration forms are lost by the immigration processing facility as well.
After filing the N-400 form, there are three other steps to the citizenship process: a biometrics screening, in which the applicant’s fingerprints, signature and photo are taken; a naturalization interview, which includes a U.S. civics and history test; and finally, the oath of citizenship is taken if all goes well with the rest of the process.
Other ways of entering the United States legally include obtaining a tourist, business, or student visa. Sumeyra Afsar, an international student from Turkey, obtained a student visa, called an F-1, to study at the University of Houston. It cost her $200 to apply, which doesn’t guarantee a visa. The student must be accepted by the school in advance, and the visa lasts for the length of the student’s studies. A student visa also doesn’t permit students to work, except at the school they attend, which often presents financial burdens.
“Coming here as an international student is expensive. It’s a huge difference. I pay three times more [than] citizens pay [for tuition],” Afsar said. “All the [school] services are more expensive, too.”
Since her family is still overseas, living here by herself is difficult, she said. Interacting with other students is sometimes hard as well.
“I don’t understand, because I want to live here and learn about the culture and everything,” Afsar said. “Basically, I changed my country. I came here, I’m alone and trying to do things by myself. Sometimes people seem to feel superior to international students.”
However, not everything about being an international student is hard, she said. “People can be so helpful, because they understand your situation.”
“Turkey is a third-world country,” she said, explaining why she wanted to come to the United States. “It’s basically a dictatorship right now. There aren’t a lot of opportunities there. I always wanted to come to America, even in middle school. My father is very encouraging. I probably wouldn’t be as successful without my father.”
Maintaining Proof
Even having legal documents doesn’t guarantee that an immigrant won’t have a run-in with immigration agents. According to a 2016 story in the Los Angeles Times, the Obama administration reported deporting 2.5 million people who were termed “undocumented” or “illegal” immigrants, even though a number of them did possess green cards or other legal status.
There are even reports of American citizens being detained for long periods and threatened with deportation. Unfortunately, in immigration-related cases, unlike criminal cases, a defendant is often guilty until proved innocent, and, if so decided, deportation is often carried out immediately, leaving little chance for an appeal. It is difficult to find out exactly how many legal immigrants are deported each year, since their numbers are not reported by the U.S. government. There is also a risk of arrest by immigration agents for immigrants applying for green cards or naturalization, for reasons like expired documents, mistakes in the process, or a misdemeanor that may have been committed decades ago.
The Washington Post published a story this year about a Polish-born doctor arrested by ICE who not only had a green card but had lived in the United States for 40 years. He was threatened with deportation after being accused of child abuse, a charge that was eventually dismissed by a judge.
In April, the Associated Press published a story about a Kansas family whose adopted daughter from Korea may not be allowed to remain in the United States after her application for citizenship was rejected. This is not a unique case; there have been other instances of adopted children of citizens being deported or threatened with deportation. Being the spouse of a citizen doesn’t guarantee that an immigrant won’t be arrested and deported, either.
According to Nowrasteh, the current immigration situation started with a quota system enacted in the early 20th century.
“It was the Immigration Act of 1921 that put quotas on Europeans for the first time,” he said. “That really created this monstrosity of a bureaucracy that we’re dealing with today.”
There were other bad immigration laws before that one, he continued, including laws excluding Asian and African immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These laws were linked to eugenics, a philosophy that started gaining popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to eugenics, people of Nordic descent were the most superior, followed by other Caucasians, then Eastern Europeans and Indians. Jews, Arabs, Native Americans, Africans, and Asians were considered to be the most inferior races. (Curiously, Native Americans, who were not American citizens at the beginning of the 20th century, were also treated as illegal aliens, although there was no available country to deport them to.)
Even after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and the subsequent persecution of European Jews and other ethnic and religious minorities, eugenicists used their influence to keep the quotas in place, preventing thousands of Jewish refugees and others from finding refuge in the States. Other countries followed suit, leaving many of the refugees with nowhere to flee.
After World War II, eugenics’ popularity dramatically declined, leading to changes in U.S. immigration policy. In 1948, a new law was enacted specifically for admitting refugees. Other reforms removed the racially-based restrictions and replaced them with per-country limits instead.
Under President Ronald Reagan, Congress passed a one-time amnesty bill, granting legal status to illegal aliens in the country at that time. It also established the migrant category for agricultural workers and made it possible for some immigrants to enter the United States without visas. Under President Bill Clinton, further legislation was passed, raising immigration caps and loosening restrictions, as well as allowing the U.S. attorney general to again grant legal documents to illegal aliens. However, the immigration system as a whole is badly in need of further reforms.
Zero Tolerance and Impact
In mid-June, President Donald Trump commented, “We’re stuck with these horrible laws. What’s happening is so sad,” he said, referring to the separations of undocumented parents and children at the U.S. border because of a loophole known as the Flores Agreement, which has been in place since the Clinton administration. The agreement mandates that children of parents that illegally cross the U.S. border must be released after 20 days, whether or not their parents are still being detained by immigration authorities.
This situation is further complicated by the heavy volume of child trafficking, child abandonment, drug or weapons trafficking, and other illegal activities around the U.S. border, according to Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen.
In June, Nielsen said that out of 12,000 minors recently discovered crossing the U.S. border without documents by DHS, 10,000 of them either crossed alone or with adults who were not their parents.
In a three-month period alone, from October 2017 to January 2018, almost 14,500 unaccompanied children were caught crossing the U.S. border without papers, according to the Migration Policy Institute. From 2013 to 2016, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended more than 200,000 unaccompanied children.
So what can be done to fix the immigration system so it works for legal immigrants, while keeping the U.S. borders secure from those intent on breaking the law?
Hiring more immigration staff, including judges, would help, but this by itself won’t solve all the immigration system’s problems.
Inserra said that the current immigration laws need to be enforced more consistently, to avoid extremely long waiting periods for those trying to follow the laws, and to free up more resources for immigration services.
Nowrasteh said that he would like fewer restrictions on immigration, and for immigrants to be able to sponsor themselves. Currently, the United States accepts almost 2 million legal immigrants per year.
Farrell said that the United States should allocate more resources specifically geared toward helping immigrants become U.S. citizens. “We need to listen to each other, and we need to figure out what this country needs and what’s best for the American worker,” she said. “The average American has to realize how much immigration affects [us], … helps [our] standard of living; and helps the country be strong and competitive on the world stage.”
Rachel Schultz is a staff writer for Homeland411.
© 2018 Homeland411
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