Alright, fine.
I pop back in every so often, just to see what's up in the world of tokusatsu; today, I decided to see what threads are hot here.
And, pardon my profanity, but what the F*CK.
How many of you have actually faced the US' immigration system? How many of you actually know the process to enter this country legally?
My wife is a permanent resident. She came here legally with just a passport, as her home country is on the visa waiver program, and we married shortly after, thus enabling her to follow what is by far the fastest, cheapest, and surest way to permanent residency and citizenship in this country: a sponsoring spouse.
It took us over $1000 in USCIS fees and associated costs (such as the $300 physical), and a great deal of nerve-wracking waiting, for the better part of a year, before we got her *conditional* permanent residency. It'll be next year before she can apply for unconditional permanent residency, and thus be able to leave the country without having an emergency (such as the death of a family member) and petitioning the Reichs... er, I mean the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees USCIS.
By then, she'll have been here for three years.
Oh, and she cannot collect any kind of need-based public assistance until she's been a permanent resident for five years -- if she does, as her sponsor, I have to pay it back. Nor can I collect public disability or similar need-based assistance, because, if I do, I'm no longer eligible to be her sponsor.
Let me make this clear: if I am hurt on the job (unlikely, given what I do for a living, but there are many kinds of jobs where risk is quite high) or have some kind of serious or life-threatening illness, and am found eligible for SSI, Social Security's disability system, or anything of that nature, if I do not find someone who is willing and able to be a co-sponsor until 2011 (just to be on the safe side), there is a significant chance she will have to leave the country.
Oh, but she does pay FICA taxes, which are what pays for all those social services.
Never mind how long it would take her to be eligible for her to sponsor her family memembers to come here, if she were of a mind to do so.
And, I reiterate, comparatively speaking, this path is fast, cheap, and sure. $1000 isn't chump change, but neither is it a backbreaking amouont to most Americans or other people living in developed economies (hell, $1000 USD is, like, change in the couch for most people in the Euro-zone, thanks to current exchange rates).
Most of the legal routes for immigration are brutally expensive, even by the standards of the aforementioned member of a developed economy, and have a startlingly finite amount of slots each year. Every year, when they become available, H1 and similar employment visas are snapped up instantly -- I'm talking a matter of *hours*, not even *days*, before they're exhausted. Student visas are similarly limited, and the green card lottery has a mere 50,000 available slots each year -- compared with the total number of people who immigrate to the US every year, legally or not, it is a drop in the bucket.
There's a couple of other routes, such as refugee status (not an easy thing to do unless you come from the right country, and lot of people die fleeing that kind of situation -- those who make it here are often the lucky ones), or military service, and they're not sure things, either. That's right, not even serving in the US armed forces is a guaranteed path to citizenship or even permanent residency after discharge, even if it's honorable.
The reality is, the overwhelming majority of people who come here illegally do not do so because they don't care about the law -- they come here illegally because it is completely unfeasible for them to do so legally. That $1000 I mentioned (which, I might add, has gone up since we went through the system on our first pass) is a *hell* of a lot more in Mexico than it is here, especially with the corruption, graft, and politics that keep Mexico's economy from growing the way its neighbors to the north have; when a Mexican family scrapes together enough money to pay a coyote to get them into the US, they come here with just the clothes on their backs because they've had to give up literally everything else to get that money. And the conditions of transport, when they do use a coyote? Lethal.
The reality is, no amount of hate-mongering is going to ever solve anything. Even with the risk of death, deportation, or succeeding in building a life here but with the real possibility that you could lose it all, and your kids could be forced to return to a home they've never known, and working jobs with abominable conditions and horrible pay because worker protection laws, including minimum wage, OSHA, the ADA, and a host of other federal and state laws, regulations, and agencies *do not apply to you*, it is still worth more to them to try to come here than to stay in Mexico. And, on top of that, all this talk of them leeching off of social assistance? A crock. Most illegal immigrants are terrified of trying to use public assistance -- they're scared of being caught. Similarly, when they're victims of crimes, they often will not call the police for the same reason. But, with all that, the possible gains from coming here illegally are worth enough to risk all of that. And it is going to continue to be that way for the foreseeable future.
Yes, they're technically criminals. So is the guy who steals food out of McDonald's dumpster to feed his family. It's just about exactly the same thing.
Oh, and the reason the USCIS fees are so high? The USCIS does not get one dollar in taxes, not *one red cent*, to pay for its operation costs. All costs are paid for by fees collected from applicants.
Furthermore, there is no -- none -- meaningful accountability if USCIS screws up. Someone gets deported because USCIS screws up? Well, sorry, we regret the error. Can't let them back in, though -- they got deported. Can't come back into the country for ten years, even if the deportation was an error in the first place.
You really want to fix this? Make it truly fast, cheap, and easy for someone to come here to work, so that they're actually protected by the various laws those of us who live in the US enjoy when we work, and so that they can actually use the services their tax dollars pay for. (Oh, and if you think they don't pay taxes? They may not pay income or FICA taxes -- and sometimes they do -- but they still pay sales taxes, property taxes, fees, and lots of other things into the system.) Give them a viable path to citizenship if that's what they want.
And end this hateful, ignorant, racist rhetoric, not just about immigration, but about offshore outsourcing; I work for a company that maintains call centers both here and in the Phillipines. Our Filipino employees make something like a tenth of what we do, if that, but there's a reason that the majority of our workforce, as a whole, is American: we are better educated, and better able to do most jobs, than the average person in developing economies like China, India, or, heck, the Phillipines. If you really want to end the offshoring? Stop the brain drain -- open up immigration not just for low-end work, but for professionals as well. We're losing out to the Big Two developing economies simply because we don't have enough H1 visas for their best and brightest to come here and work as they would so dearly love to.
In the future, if you're going to try to contribute some sort of meaningful input on this topic, don't parrot some dipshit politician like Ron Paul; go out, do some research -- just look over the information on the USCIS' and the US Census' websites, for gods' sakes, if nothing else -- and find out what the hell the reality is before you start spouting garbage about THEIR TAKNG OR JERBS.
