Always important to get John “Torture Memos” Yoo’s opinion on constitutional issues, amirite?
Many in the circumstances and age group this policy addresses would likely be eligible to gain legal residency through several existing paths anyway.
Previously that would involve leaving the country to start a visa application and, if they had been undocumented in the US for over 180 days, they would also need to apply for a waiver of inadmissibility at the same time. (ironically the red flag that they were in the country without documentation, branding them inadmissible, only gets raised when they take this step - doing the “right thing” and attempting to leave the country in order to apply for a visa). Assuming no criminal convictions or other factors that would disqualify them they would pretty much all be qualified to re-enter legally if they are under 18, or have immediate family who is a US citizen, or if declining their admission would violate the Family Unity Clause of the 1990 immigration act, among about a dozen other possible qualifying reasons. But the application for a waiver can take years to be processed and they would be separated from their families, missing school or work, etc. the entire time. The process makes it much more appealing to simply remain undocumented and for the most part unknown.
This policy simply allows people who are likely to be eligible anyway to get a visa without being separated from their family for long periods of time and incurring huge travel and living expenses abroad while waiting for approval. It cuts out all the red tape by just presuming almost everyone in the age group and situation described in the policy would qualify anyway, saving a lot of cost to all concerned.
There was already a DHS proposal to change that policy in general for anyone with immediate relatives who are citizens. It would grant a waiver prior to departure from the US, which would mean they would leave the country with pre-approved eligibility to return and could get processed much faster.
This policy just goes one step further for those of a certain age group that meet all the qualifying conditions and seems to be a responsible use of resources in the already stated objective to focus on criminal aliens. It helps the immigration courts concentrate on criminals and terrorists instead of youngsters with existing family ties in the USA, many or most of whom would eventually be granted residency anyway after clogging up the system for years with millions of waiver requests.
I don’t think so. Correct me if I’m wrong, but what we’re talking about here are the children of illegal aliens who entered illegally with their parents. Are there existing pathways where they could remain here while obtaining citizenship?
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See my earlier question.
Like I said…I think we’re talking about children of illegals–not immediate relative citizens.
Obama states the exact opposite–that this is NOT a pathway to citizenship.
ETA: Oh, "residency." That’s different. At least for 5 years. My eyes and compehension skills are wearing out.
Exactly. The administration says this is not a pathway to citizenship.
No end run around the Constitution. Great, huh? 
You picked a very good example to argue against this irrational but all too common sentiment about immigrants. In the past 2 years Boeing has paid about $10 million in salaries to foreign workers (mostly engineers) - people from other countries that Boeing sponsored to get a work visa. And in the past 10 years they have sponsored about 800 foreign workers. And there are calls for investigation into allegations they are using a loophole in the visa system to hire dozens of Russian engineers. And they are a government contractor. Private industry sponsors more legal, foreign workers than they do.
Employers have been complaining for many years that US workers are unqualified and have higher expectations than workers from most other countries. Not just in the fields of science and engineering but basic manufacturing, factory jobs, etc. are hard to fill with US workers that have the desired skills in math, writing, and specific training for the jobs. Yet we come in with high expectations of pay and benefits while there are others with better qualifications willing to work harder for less. Companies are going to try to fill jobs with the most qualified applicants and they will open new factories and warehouses in the countries they can get the best deals. “Foreigners stealing jobs” is a symptom of some major, large scale problems in US regulations, taxes, education, societal expectations, and on and on, but can’t be blamed on immigrants - especially undocumented ones.
The reference to the DHS proposal to grant waivers to people with immediate family who are citizens was just an example that even in those cases the process is so expensive and difficult for families that many choose to simply remain undocumented. In the case of these kids they might or might not have citizen relatives by now - they or their parents could have married citizens. But they don’t need to have a direct relative who is a citizen in order to apply for a visa. It could also be based on a job offer or school enrollment or other reasons.
I don’t know the specifics of how these kids might best approach the inadmissible situation if it weren’t for this new policy (maybe Eva Luna will weigh in again soon - the applicablelaw is very complicated) but I think as long as they met all the general requirements for a work, family, or educational visa they would have no reason to be declined once they got a waiver even before this policy. Having been minors for part or all of that time I think both waivers and visas could have been obtained without it. The issue would have been how much time, travel, money and separation from family and work it would require and whether or not they could afford a good immigration lawyer.
USCIS doesn’t do anything uncomplicated or inexpensive. It is as if they sit around dreaming up ways to make the whole process miserable. :rolleyes:
Friends who went through the process spent more than US$6000 just in travel costs flying back and forth to the Embassy even though there is a US Consular Office right here where we live. The consular office cannot accept any paperwork related to an immigrant visa.
Frustrating thing is that he is a man who could have come and gone from the States without a visa prior to their marriage. After he married an American he is suddenly persona non grata.
Thank you for this excellent post. The idea that letting young people that have been raised in the US stay here and get an education will cause large-scale job losses amongst American citizens is belied by current reality. A much bigger problem is that foreign-born workers are willing to work harder for less, and companies are happy to have the cost savings. If anything, the US-resident immigrant is more likely to have the same difficulties a US citizen would.
The other problem with the Boeing example is that the other part of the company has large numbers of jobs for which they basically can’t hire non-citizens (for security clearance reasons).
You think that’s bad? Call me when your citizenship application is rejected because the distance between your hairline and chin on your passport photograph is 3 mm too great (and INS/USCIS already has umpteen other passport sized photographs of you on file).
Definitely a not very important side issue for this thread, but could there be an explainable reason for this?
According to the link they have since resumed “[accepting] petitions for immediate relative immigrant classification from American citizens…”
No. They dropped that policy shortly afterwards (March 2007, I think) because it created such a massive clusterfuck.
The two are not mutually exclusive. We are talking in many cases about people who have been here a long time, and are now young adults with family relationships of their own. An example: I handled a green card case a year or so ago for a lovely young lady whose parents snuck her across the border when she was seven years old. If you spoke to her, you would have absolutely no idea she wasn’t born here.
Fast-forward a couple of decades, and she has gotten a merit scholarship to an Ivy League school for her master’s degree, and married a lovely young American man she met in college. Under current law, because she entered the U.S. illegally, she would have been ineligible to apply for a green card within the U.S., even based on her marriage to a U.S. citizen. She would have had to leave the U.S. and await a waiver appointment in Ciudad Juarez, which at that time could take more than a year. The moment she left the U.S., she would trigger a 10-year bar form returning because of her unlawful presence of more than 1 year in the U.S., which wwould require a waiver to be granted before she could receive her immigrant visa. But to get a waiver, you need to show extreme hardship to a qualifying U.S. citizen or permanent resident relative (parent or spouse). It’s pretty difficult to show extreme hardship to a 20-something Ivy League grad with no major health problems; the ordinary hardship of being separated from your wife doesn’t generally do the trick.
What saved her in the end? A previous 2001 quirk of law known as 245(i), which said that if a petition was filed for you (or for your parent, if you were under 21 and single) before a certain date, you can apply for your green card in the U.S. Her U.S. citizen uncle had filed a petition for her father, so she was covered.
She is far from alone in having an alternative route to get a green card - but it would have been virtually impossible, or would have taken many years, leaving her without work authorization in the meantime. And no, it’s not realistic for her to have left the U.S. to apply for a student visa; even without the unlawful presence issues, to get a student visa you have to demonstrate that you intend to leave the U.S. at the end of your studies, which is difficult if you haven’t lived in your home country since you were 7 and your entire family is in the U.S.
Generally, you can’t become a U.S. citizen without being a lawful permanent resident first (usually for 5 years).
Sorry. My bad. I misstated. We have a Consular Agency where I live, not a Consular Office. Slight difference.
Our Consular Agency couldn’t quite cope with accepting my passport renewal application (though it is something they are supposed to do!).
For the purposes of this thread, not so important.
So, an illegal alien, who came here at three years old, graduated from high school, and then graduated from college is willing to work harder for less money? Sounds questionable to me, since now they can stay here indefinitely.
And, I would posit that any kind of union would have a big problem with that as well.
I’m not yet convinced of this–specifically in highly skilled positions. (I’m not going to quibble about manual/menial labor jobs.)
Is there some proof somewhere that a recently graduated chemical engineer from Mumbai is:
A) Better qualified than one from Stanford, and
B) Willing to work for less than that same Stanford grad?
The employer has to demonstrate that it can’t hire a US worker (at the prevailing wage for the job) before it can sponsor a foreigner for a work visa, so that situation doesn’t occur.
nm
I think I might underestand what Crazyhorse might be getting at…if he’s saying that, say, the requirements for the position require a Bachelor’s Degree, but the guy from Heidelberg has a Masters, but he’s willing to work for less than a US citizen with the same Masters–is that it?
ETA: But, no, since there was a qualified US citizen candidate for the position, so that can’t be it, can it? You can’t just turn down a qualified US citizen in order to get an *over-*qualified foreign national, can you?
No, you misunderstand me (or, more likely, I was unclear). Currently, workers that don’t live in the US (say, IT pros in India, or engineers in Russia) are willing to work harder for less. They undercut US-born and US-educated skilled workers in many fields.
As you say, the guy or gal that moved here at 3 is not likely to - they will, all else being equal, have the same work ethic and job expectations that a US-born graduate would.
So while they will compete against each other for jobs, they are both at a disadvantage when facing true “immigrant” skilled labor. And employers know that, and will continue their outsourcing as long as it is profitable to do so.
Either way, the idea of raising political ire from US citizens and the expense of their classmates that happen to have been brought here at a young age seems to me extremely unlikely to work. And any sort of attempt to play upon any such fears would completely backfire in the Hispanic community. That’s why Romney isn’t doing everything he can to say absolutely nothing about this issue.
I’ll also add that in many fields it is absolutely true that foreign-born workers will accept far less in pay and benefits than US citizens. They will also work unpaid overtime and submit to other requests from management that a US citizen might balk at. When you consider that their remaining employed is a condition of staying in the US here it’s pretty easy to see why. And why employers love these workers and will cheat to hire more of them than they’re allowed to.
That is a far bigger issue for recent grads, IME.