Comment: The problem with legal immigration? It’s broken

By Alex Zaragoza / Bloomberg Opinion

Mass deportations is a Donald Trump campaign promise that could cost the U.S. more than $300 billion dollars to complete, may increase grocery prices and would upend industries and families.

How could a proposal this detrimental to the country resonate with so many voters; including Latinos, who would undoubtedly be affected and yet supported the Republican candidate by an increase of 14 percentage points over 2020? The answer lies in a frustrating misconception about our immigration system.

Many Americans, including well-meaning ones, often like to tout some version of the following: “Illegals should get out and come back the right way.” The notion is that anyone seeking residency, citizenship or asylum in America should do so by strictly following immigration law.

That’s the “perfect immigrant.” But in reality, the current system is too muddled, expensive and slow to produce many of them.

As a border-raised Mexican American, I’ve seen the effects up close; even within my own family. The biggest obstacle for them and others is the government’s massive logjam of pending cases.

The Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review reported a backlog of 2.46 million at the end of fiscal year 2023. Alana McMains, a San Diego-based attorney who has represented people at all levels of the immigration process, led me through the Visa Bulletin, where you can see which visas are being reviewed based on a person’s application date and country of origin.

People can apply for various types of visas to enter the country, including family-sponsored and employment-based ones, with each having their own hierarchy of preference for review. For example, an unmarried son or daughter of a U.S. citizen has one of the highest priorities, known as F1, under the family-sponsored category.

But it’s not smooth sailing from there. “Even if you did it all the right way, have never crossed illegally, never committed a crime, never used a false document, you put in a legal application, paid your money; you’ve been perfect, but if you don’t have the right type of relative to get you in, you [could] be in a line for 30 years,” McMains told me.

Based on the December 2024 Visa Bulletin, anyone from Mexico who applied under an F1 category on Nov. 22, 2004, is now being reviewed. Those applicants have been waiting for 20 years for an unguaranteed pathway to citizenship. (The waitlist is shorter or longer depending on the number of existing applicants from a given country and the type of relation who is sponsoring you, for instance, a spouse versus a sibling.)

If immigrants are allowed to spend part of that long wait time in the U.S., desperation can lead many of them to break the country’s laws, especially if they have dependents to support. Two of the most common crimes are committing marriage fraud by marrying a U.S. citizen solely to bump up your place in line and buying falsified documents or fake papers to secure employment.

While it’s easy to say people should follow the law — and yes, of course, they should — we must recognize that the immigration process is so broken that it leaves many with only the riskiest options.

Maneuvering through long waiting periods goes hand-in-hand with the pricey filing fees for forms. The most common ones range from $520 to $1,440, and individual circumstances determine which combination immigrants need as they try to check all the required boxes. At times, as is the case with work authorization renewals, the same forms need to be filed and paid multiple times. Sometimes, because of financial hardships, there is a lapse in filing, which can be tantamount to criminal activity because you may have now accrued unlawful presence.

Then, there is the added expense of hiring a lawyer, a resource that can make a huge difference in the outcome of cases, particularly for non-English speakers. Some people try to tackle the process without legal representation to save money, but a 2015 study found that those with representation are more likely to be granted legal status and avoid deportation. (That’s if they find a firm that isn’t a scam and only out to prey on people’s desperation.)

The solution would be an overhaul of the immigration system, but bipartisan attempts at comprehensive reform have collapsed or been killed in the legislative process. There’s also been a cultural shift in how migrants are viewed and treated by Republicans and Democrats. Policy that was considered practical and compassionate in the 1980s would now be seen as radical, such as the Refugee Act of 1980 or the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which was the last major overhaul of the system.

What’s left is such a complex mess that, according to Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior advisor for immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, many members of Congress and their staff don’t even understand it. That means lawmakers crafting policies to change it are also navigating a convoluted process. “You don’t necessarily know how to get to the outcome you’re trying to get to in a way that’s workable,” Brown told NPR earlier this year.

Despite it all, the U.S. has hugely benefitted from immigrants economically — undocumented households paid $35.1 billion in taxes in 2022 — and even turned a blind eye when corporate interests exploit undocumented workers for financial gain. That’s why the attacks immigrants face — on their family, livelihood and character — while trying to wade through a herculean process is one of the most shameful stains on this system.

When Trump assures the public that only those breaking the law will face consequences, many will likely be shocked by who counts as a criminal. The exceptionalism that’s being upheld within faulty “right way” narratives will prove to destroy families and this country. Perfect immigrants don’t exist because America doesn’t allow them to.

Alex Zaragoza is a television writer and journalist. She’s a contributing columnist at the LA Times’ De Los section and is developing a TV series based on her upbringing on the US-Mexico border. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion. ©2024 Bloomberg L.P.