TheAgitator.com
“Get in Line?” There Is No Line!
Thursday, September 25th, 2008From the current issue of reason, an illustrated flow chart showing how absurdly difficult it is to become a legal immigrant in America.
Worth trotting out when anti-immigration activists explain how illegals should “follow the law.” Note that it’s virtually impossible for unskilled workers to come to this country legally, despite the obvious demand for them.
The current quotas on immigration are utterly ludicrous, as are the rules–both written largely by Ted Kennedy a number of years ago.
Still doesn’t make illegals ‘legal.’ But major reforms should be on the table—NOT ‘amnesty.’
My wife and I are still trying to get visa’s for our children (ages 2 & 4). It’s been over a year now, and currently their petitions have been sitting on the same persons desk in the US Embassy in Manila for nearly two months and that person is just “too busy” to get to it.
I don’t understand how we can have such a need for unskilled workers – the public school system has been doing wonders pumping them out for decades.
I’ve argued this for a long time. Immigration is a sign of beurocratic failure. There is a need for this labor, the smart thing to do would be to help fascilitate it legally. It’s an easy way to screen out gang members and other people you don’t want by simplifying the process, make them more likely to pay income tax, and make sure we fill the labor needs of this country. But it’s hard to do that when the process is more difficult to figure out than the tax code.
Thanx for the chart. I think that to some extent you are preaching to the choir. As a US citizen, people are suprised to hear about the hoops that I went through to get my wife a green card, and then citizenship. 9 years after we were married. She had a job, and an O visa. It wasn’t just all of the hoops that we had to jump through, we also ran into inept personel, improper spellings, improper date stamps, and a generally careless system. It wasn’t until my wife was at the final meeting and test for her citizenship that she was treated with any respect. It was an appalling experience.
I’ve been in the US since May 1995, still without a permanent visa; only with a mix of F-1 (student) and H1-B visas. My current H1-B expires in May 2010. I expect not to have my employer file for a permanent work visa (the H1-B application process was already too much paperwork for our small legal department), but with my work experience and American university diplomas, I won’t have much of a problem finding a job back in Europe. The only real loser here is the US, as yet another tax payer moves elsewhere.
I agree that the immigration system needs to be reformed. I know the hassels that a friend went through to get his wife into the US and they were both engineers.
I disagree with the need for so called “unskilled labor”. There is plenty of unskilled labor availible. How about addressing the real issue. Illegals work cheap. That’s it plain and simple. Employers know that they can get away with paying illegals almost nothing, have them work in crap conditions, because who are they going to complain to? It isn’t that they can’t find people to do these jobs, its that they would have to pay more for somebody who can legally work in the US to do them. If they were to grant amnesty to the current batch of illegals, it wouldn’t take long for these employers to ditch them and import a fresh batch of illegals to take their place.
I kinda disagree with the length of time for getting a green card. I moved from an H1-B to GC in 6 months started labor cert in Nov and received green card in May. I also personally know 5 other people who moved from H1-B to GC in in less than 2 years.
The times provided for “skilled workers” on the chart are for persons born in India, China and a few other countries that have an overwhelming numbers of immigrants coming to the US.
am noticing an undertone of (to paraphrase) “it’s *wrong* that it’s so hard to legally immigrate here.”
as if the USA had some sort of moral/ethical obligation to allow/facilitate immigration. why is that? why is hindering immigration a bad thing? more to the point, why is hindering immigration **when immigrants seem to qualify for public aid instantly upon arrival** a bad thing?
to borrow your recent ‘what about the renters’ arguments:
1) why should i, who pay taxes in this country, be forced to absorb the costs for social/welfare programs associated with new and poor immigrants who’ve never paid a cent into the system?
2) what sort of message does this send to the native-born taxpayers? more importantly, what message does it send to the throngs who’d just love to come here and get a check from every aid agency they can?
i’m all for easier *controlled* immigration, providing the newcomers *don’t cost me money*. but that’s not the way the system is set up. (thanks so much, ted kennedy.) until that changes, i say let’s put *more* barriers and obstacles in their way. and deport the living crap out of each and every illegal we find.
I don’t see a problem here.
The US _shouldn’t_ be importing quantities of unskilled immigrants. To the extent one can value a human being, that’s precisely the best measurement of the least valuable sort. Unskilled work can be replaced by robotics and high school kids who need to learn a work ethic.
Instead what we’re doing is importing a criminally prone permanent underclass.
@ #10
Criminally prone because they’re unskilled or criminally prone because they’re brown? Isn’t that just another myth? I remember reading that incarceration rates for immigrants was significantly lower than for nativer-borns.
I wonder when it’s going to get bad enough in the US that people no longer WANT to come here?
I still think we should open a hot dog stand at the border. Take a finger print. Run it through the FBI database. If not a criminal, hand them a tax id card and let them through. It shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes. The hot dogs should offer good revenue too!
@xyz123:
What’s wrong may be a number of things, but facilitating immigration is NOT wrong. You refer to aspects of a welfare state as reasons that immigration shouldn’t be easy, but the problem is not immigration but rather that welfare / social programs funded by tax dollars exist at all (I realize you may agree with this and your argument is based on current conditions).
Nevertheless, preventing immigration DOES impact the freedom of Americans. If I want to hire a foreigner to mow my lawn or babysit or let them rent property from me or even buy property from me and that person wants to do business with me, then why should the government be able to say I can’t enter such an arrangement? Should I only be able to do business with individuals licensed by the government to be here. If so, I think that sucks.
hmm. mr. alien, that’s an unusual argument there. “facilitating immigration is NOT wrong”…because you say so. you “should be able to hire an immigrant if you want to” because….well, just because.
gonna need a little more detail there.
[...] (link via Radley Balko) [...]
This is more a problem with bureacracy than it is with anything else. Just because some is against illegal immigration doesn’t mean they think the current system is good or working.
Actually, the most radical anti-immigration people (see VDARE) do not want ANY people applying for citizenship. They see almost all immigration as a problem. They would love a Japanese style (i.e. virtually no immigration at all) system. Still, good chart.