Thread: 10M Illegal Immigrants in U.S.: Push is on for Faster Legal

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10M Illegal Immigrants in U.S.: Push is on for Faster Legal Immigration
Some wait 22 years for permission to live in U.S.
TUCSON (By Claudine LoMonaco, Tucson Citizen) July 4, 2005 - About 700,000 immigrants will celebrate the birth of the United States, a country built by immigrants, for the first time today as legal residents.

But 10 million immigrants, including 33-year-old Inez, will celebrate from the shadows because they are here illegally.

Ambitious and buoyant, Inez came to the United States from Hermosillo, Son., to study English more than 10 years ago.

She fell in love and married Chico, a gardener and illegal immigrant. Today, the couple have a successful business, a beautiful home and two American-born daughters. Chico finally got a green card, but Inez is still without papers.

Groups such as the Minuteman Project say illegal immigrants such as Inez are criminals and should get in line like everybody else to enter the country legally.

But a growing number of conservatives, President Bush among them, are acknowledging that for millions of essential workers who mow our lawns, build our homes and pick our vegetables, there is no line to get in. The current immigration system is broken, they say, and must be reformed to match the country's economic and security demands.

The Tucson Citizen's policy is to name sources whenever possible. However, to fully tell this story and serve the public's right to know, editors decided to identify Inez and her husband by first name only.

Inez is part of the growing number of illegal immigrants in the United States, who have nearly doubled over the past 10 years to about 10.3 million people, according to the Pew Hispanic Research Center.

Needed by U.S. economy

Tamar Jacoby, a researcher with a conservative think tank, The Manhattan Institute, said the economy needs those workers to grow.

"I don't come at this from the point of view of human rights or compassion," she said. "I come at it from the point of view that what's good for America and with a strong belief that we need to get control."

To do that, the country needs to create more legal channels of immigration, she said.

Immigrants today enter the country under two principal categories, family-based immigration and employment-based. Another group of visas allows additional workers to enter the country, but only temporarily.

The bulk of new immigrants come in as the minor children, spouses and parents of American citizens. There is no limit for this category, and last year it accounted for nearly half a million new immigrants. The paperwork takes about a year and half to clear.

At least another 226,000 immigrants enter through slots set aside for additional relatives of citizens and immediate family members of legal residents. Each country is allowed about 27,000 slots a year. The more requests from any given country, the longer the wait.

Last week, the wait for a citizen to bring in an adult child from Mexico went up to 22 years. Legal residents must wait up to seven years just to bring in a spouse or child. The waits are so long, they are impractical, Jacoby said, and many people give up trying to enter legally.

Irene Ayon Velazquez waited five years for a visa so she could visit her husband, a legal immigrant and mushroom picker in Pennsylvania. The desperate couple finally decided she would leave their village in the state of Mexico and cross into the United States illegally.

Velazquez entered the desert east of Douglas on July 23, 2003, according to the Mexican Consulate's office in Douglas. A couple of hours later, she died of heat exposure. Her husband flew down from Pennsylvania the next day and found her body after searching a remote mountainous area all night.

Easy to cross in 1992

Inez's husband, Chico, crossed the Arizona border through Nogales in 1992, when it was still a relatively easy and safe matter of jumping a fence and hopping a ride to Tucson.

He came to join his two sisters, who were legal residents. Today, his sisters are American citizens and have the right to petition for their siblings, though with the current backlog, they'd have to wait 22 years.

Chico found work as a gardener. He was one of millions of illegal immigrants who fill low-skill jobs that few Americans take.

There is virtually no way somebody such as Chico could have entered the country legally, said Los Angeles-based Carl Shusterman, one of the country's leading immigration lawyers.

Of the 140,000 permanent, employment-based visas allowed each year, only 10,000 are set aside for low-skilled workers. To obtain one, an employer first must prove that he couldn't find an American to fill the position, which often takes about two years.

After that, the employer could apply for a visa, but the current backlog runs four years. Last month, the government closed the category entirely. When it reopens, Shusterman estimated the backlog could be 10 years. Shusterman's practice most often uses the low-skilled worker visas to help families obtain legal nannies.

During the wait, the desired employee has to stay in the foreign country.

"What American is going to apply for a nanny that's not currently taking care of their kids?" Shusterman asked. "'My kid is 1, and by the time we get you in, he'll be 10, but we'd like to apply just in case.' It's just not going to happen."

Bill seen as best hope

Tucson immigration lawyer Tarik Sultan holds up the recently proposed McCain-Kennedy bill for comprehensive immigration reform as his clients' best hope.

"I get employers in my office all the time who want to straighten out the status of their workers," said Sultan. "It's very, very frustrating. And all I do is give them a copy of the bill, and I say, 'Write your congressman and write your senator and tell them you support this bill,' and I send them on their way. Because there's really nothing that can be done."

Much of Sultan's work focuses on temporary H1-A visas for professional workers with advanced degrees. During the computer boom in the 1990s, Congress increased the cap to 195,000. Last year, in a post-9/11, anti-immigrant climate, Congress let it slip back to 65,000. Requests filled the cap in October 2004 on the first day it was available. It set off a crisis in the high-tech industry because companies couldn't hire enough skilled workers.

The cap on professional workers doesn't lead to illegal entry as much as it slows economic growth and encourages outsourcing, Sultan said. Employers merely keep the workers in their home countries, where they don't pay U.S. taxes and earn much less.

A temporary worker program also exists for agricultural workers. Known as an H-2A visa, it has no cap on the number of workers it can cover, but employers say it is so bureaucratic and expensive, it's pointless. Of the estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million illegal agricultural workers in the United States, only 14,000 were granted the visas last year. Arizona farmers applied for only 324, according to the Arizona Department of Economic Security.

The lack of a legal mechanism gives employers little choice, said Jasper Hempel, executive vice president of Western Growers, the largest agricultural trade organization in Arizona and California.

"We know that there are undocumented workers working for us," Hempel said. "We have tried numerous times to get Americans to take these jobs in the fields. And it just doesn't work."

In November 2004, lettuce farmers in Yuma experienced a critical shortage of workers because the U.S. Border Patrol stepped up checkpoint inspections. Western Growers' executives stepped in and requested that the Border Patrol ease off until farmers could get enough workers to make sure the multimillion-dollar crop wouldn't perish.

For the most part, Western Growers' members don't have a problem getting labor, but they still want a legalized work force, Hempel said. The organization has been pushing for passage of a bill known as Ag-jobs, a guest worker program designed to legalize the status of farm workers.

"We are like every other American," Hempel said. "We want to make sure that our borders are secure against terrorist and drug smugglers."

Keeping labor costs down

Mark Krikorian of the conservative Center for Immigration Studies believes industry argues for increased immigration as a way to keep labor costs down.

"The idea that a huge, developed economy like ours needs to import high school dropouts from overseas to function is economic gibberish," Krikorian said.

Contrary to Jacoby, Krikorian believes low-skilled immigrants hold America's economy back. Fewer available laborers such as Chico would drive up wages and benefits for American citizens and encourage technological innovation to transform labor-intensive low productivity, he said.

Krikorian agreed that the family-based immigration system is broken and needs to be reformed to do away with the lengthy waits. He would limit it to spouses and minor children.

"We ought to define what groups of people we want to let in and then let all of them in every year."

Earning enough to survive

In the 1990s, Chico's sisters became U.S. citizens and petitioned for their parents to join them. By that time, Chico had built a successful commercial and residential gardening business with four employees. He and Inez met in English class at Pima Community College.

Inez had been working as a journalist in Hermosillo while finishing her undergraduate degree but was barely earning enough to survive.

"There were times we didn't eat for days. Sometimes all we had was tortilla crumbs," she said.

She thought studying English for a while in Tucson would help her get ahead in Mexico. But then she met Chico. They married in 1994. They bought and renovated an abandoned, dilapidated house on an otherwise nice block on the East Side. Today, the house looks new. It's artfully landscaped on the outside and bright and airy with colorful Mexican tile and rustic furniture on the inside.

From the kitchen window, Inez can watch 9-year-old Nati and 6-year-old Itza race around a bright pink tree-house shaded by an enormous mesquite.

Chico's parents live in a guesthouse he built in the back. He is their sole means of support.

A couple of years ago, a Border Patrol agent arrested Chico while he was reading a newspaper in one of his pickups.

Sultan successfully fought his deportation on the grounds that it would have caused extraordinary hardship to his legal resident parents and his two American citizen children.

The only one in the family without papers, Inez doesn't work for fear of getting caught. Instead, she volunteers at her daughters' school, but she holds her breath every time she drives them to tennis class or approaches a red light.

"If I slip up," she said, "if I do one thing wrong, that's it. I know I'm back at the port of Nogales."


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This article is a "Blood Pressure Rising" (BPR) article.

AG goesn't need additional workers. They are farming less acres every year therefore need less workers every year.

I can assure the Manhattan Institute that our economy does not need more workers to grow. Our economy does not need to grow in population.

Our economy needs to grow in:

1) savings

2) wages

3) salaries

4) manufacturing

Our economy needs to shrink in:

1) population

2) debt

3) unemployment

4) illegal aliens

Then, we will all be happy people once more.

America does not need to loosen immigration law it needs tighter enforcement. If there is desire to reunite families to such an extent that they break the law to accomplish it they should go back.

Right on Richard, they should ALL go back together!!

You got that right Richard.