COMMENTARY
The waiting game of legal immigration
The road to American citzenship can be bumpy, depending on who you are and who you know
BY TARA MALONE
Daily Herald Staff Writer
September 13, 2006
Zenaida Valero measures her life in dates: her children's birthdays, her wedding, her arrival in this country and the day she applied to bring her Filipino daughter here.
April 19, 1995.
Today - 11 years, four months, three weeks and four days later - Valero still waits.
Her daughter's petition winds its way through an immigration system clogged with requests by other mothers, husbands and daughters.
At 75, the Woodridge woman is tired.
"It's a long, long wait," said Valero, who came to this country from the Philippines in 1994 and became a citizen seven years later. Her son who'd settled here and become a citizen brought her and her late husband over. Parents of citizens skip to the head of the immigration line.
"I ask people, mothers like me who petition their children, and it's the same," Valero said.
Confronted with delays that can last up to 25 years, many sidestep the legal process entirely. Visa backlogs and restrictions within the legal system exacerbate the problem outside it.
Therein lies the crux of the illegal immigration controversy unfolding in suburban city halls, police departments and Congress.
An estimated half-million people come illegally to this country every year. Nearly 12 million undocumented people now live and work in this country, fueling a highly charged debate about who comes here, where they come from and how long they stay.
Official channels do exist to settle in this country. Their history is as old as the country itself. Working through them takes time. How long depends on who you are, who you know and where you're from. Money doesn't hurt, either.
"If you have an immediate relative, a spouse especially, it's a clear and quick process," said Marilu Cabrera, a spokeswoman with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' Chicago office. "But if you don't have any ties to the U.S. and you just want to come live here, then it's not possible."
'It takes forever'
Fording legal immigration channels takes connections and patience.
Without them, maneuvering an immigration system defined by national quotas and personal relationships is all but impossible, experts say.
Current law limits how many people every nation can send. No more than 7 percent of the visas issued every year can go to a single country. The cap is universal, applying to Mexico and Mauritius alike.
Immigrants from China, India, Mexico and the Philippines - four of the five largest immigrant communities in the Chicago area - wait longest.
"They are oversubscribed," said Matthew Bernstein, an immigration attorney with the Chicago-Kent College of Law. "More people from those countries want to immigrate than there are spaces available."
So, too, are they and immigrants from a dozen other countries barred from a diversity lottery that doles out 55,000 visas yearly to people from under-represented countries. More than 5.5 million people applied during the 60-day window last fall.
"There's a reason they call it a lottery," quipped Steve Navarre, an immigration attorney in Des Plaines.
Complicating matters further is a visa system defined by relationships.
Spouses, parents or unmarried children of citizens skip to the head of the line - as did Valero, at her son's behest - entering the country in an average six months after applying for a visa.
Yet restrictions determine how many engineers a company can recruit abroad or how many children of U.S. citizens can come to this country.
A citizen trying to bring over an unmarried, adult child from Mexico, for instance, faces a 14-year wait.
If you're from the Philippines, the line extends 15 years. Petitions submitted Oct. 22, 1991, now are due for processing, according to the U.S. State Department.
"When there's a backlog, they have to readjust dates. ... I have one client whose priority date was reached, and then it retrogressed two years," said immigration lawyer Mary Carmen Madrid-Crost, who has offices in Chicago and Manila.
Federal officials handed out 42,455 visas to people who cycled through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' Chicago office between October 2003 and October 2004, the most recent figures available.
Of those, 84 percent, or 35,663 visas, went to immigrants sponsored by a relative or employer.
Investing in America
Money alone will not buy entry into this country. But it can crack open the door.
A physician from India vying for legal permanent residency has far more options than an unskilled rice farmer from the Philippines.
The white-collar, professional worker can more easily shoulder the cost of a visa and an immigration attorney. Sponsoring a relative runs $645. Employers looking to recruit abroad face a $2,190 basic filing fee.
"Money raises you in the list of preferences," said Donna Gabaccia, of the University of Minnesota's Immigration History Research Center. "You get closer to that visa."
Prudent investing also quickens the process considerably. Entrepreneurs looking to sink $1 million into a new U.S. business can essentially buy a visa.
Immigration officials hand out 10,000 investment visas yearly. Investors looking to create a new business with at least 10 workers, buy a business or expand a business by 140 percent qualify. This sounds like a better deal than it is, experts caution.
"Ninety-nine percent of the time, I can find a better or easier way for them to immigrate," Bernstein said. "... They don't just take a million (dollars) and dump it into a business. Generally speaking, that's not the way people do business."
Backlogs for many professional workers vying for work visas stretch back four years. For uneducated, unskilled workers, it's worse. Without employers to vouch for them, the odds of getting a visa are slim.
"There's no mechanism for unskilled workers to come here legally at this point," Bernstein said.
A historic balance
Immigration is not new to this country. Nor is the struggle to control it.
For the first 99 years of its history, America flung open its doors. Anyone who traveled here, got in.
Until 1875.
The first restrictions on who could enter the United States debuted, laying the cornerstone of an immigration system complete with visa backlogs and illegal entries that remain today.
"As long as there have been restrictions, there have been waiting lists," Gabaccia said. "Each group that was restricted attempted to violate the law. In some cases, it was because their family members were in the U.S. In other cases, it was because they knew there was a job for them."
In 1875, the first round of quotas banned prostitutes and criminals from entering.
Seven years later, the door was shut to Chinese workers. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 signaled a shift toward restrictions based on where immigrants came from and the skills they brought with them.
The do-not-enter list broadened to those with communicable diseases in 1907.
In 1917, racial quotas broadened to include nearly anyone of Asian descent. Japanese were the lone exception.
Others, too, were targeted. An influx of Italians and Jews from southern Europe during the 1890s ignited concerns that rivaled those that greeted Irish Catholics during the 1850s.
"Every time immigration into the U.S. has surged, so has opposition to it," Gabaccia said.
The roots of today's immigration system emerged more clearly in 1965.
A year after lawmakers enacted sweeping civil rights legislation, they made immigration color-blind. Racial restrictions ended, replaced instead with limits by country.
The Hart-Cellar Act created a blanket cap on how many people could immigrate from every nation in the world, including America's neighbors spared from earlier restrictions.
Four decades later, that universal limit essentially remains unchanged. Yet pressures on the system have skyrocketed.
In 2005, immigrants represented 1.7 million of Illinois' 12.4 million residents. An additional 520,000 immigrants now live in the state illegally, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
"What we're seeing now is the long-standing distinction between legal and illegal immigration entirely blurred if not obliterated," said John Keeley, with the Center for Immigration Studies. "That distinction is important, it's long-standing in law and it's genuine."
The 1986 Immigration and Control Act further obscured the line in the sand.
Some 2.7 million immigrants who'd settled here illegally were granted citizenship. Two decades later, "amnesty" is a lightning rod as lawmakers again face immigration proposals.
"The U.S. has the world's most generous immigration policy, to a fault," said Dave Gorak of the Midwest Coalition to Reduce Immigration.
Zenaida Valero listens to the debate occurring around her.
As she quietly waits for her daughter's visa petition to work through the legal system, content with visits to the Philippines every other year to see her daughter Aida, now 28, she is alarmed to hear words like "legalization" or "amnesty."That someone who came here illegally might get their papers before her daughter troubles Valero.
"We have been waiting long, long years legally and still we are not knowing when our loved ones will be able to come," Valero said from the Woodridge home where she lives with her son's family. "It makes us feel very sad."
- tmalone@dailyherald.com
- Article at: http://www.dailyherald.com/story.asp?id=226836
- The Daily Herald is located in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
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