Why Illegal Immigrants Ignore the Law

I just received my third 3-year work visa for Japan. My Japanese wife has a permanent residency in the USA. Here is a breakdown of the costs of my three visas vs her green card:

Item	My three Japanese work visas (combined)	Wife’s green card
Dollar cost (1)	$325	$16,000
Hours spent (2)	30	200
Days taken off work	1.5	30
Processing time	8 days (renewal) or 3 weeks (initial)	3-5 months (visa) or 6-12 months (green card)
Pages of documentation	20	400
Forced unemployment (3)	0	4 months
TSA-style security screenings	2	15
Very thorough health screenings	0	1
Forced international trips	0	5
Immigration office visits	Any office, any time within a broad range	Time and place mandated by USCIS
Immigration officer behavior	“Welcome back” – in English	Hostile questioning about technical immigration details – in English
Senatorial interventions(4)	0	1
Times anyone was reduced to tears upon (re)entry	0	1

Why do immigrants flout our rules? Because our rules are utterly ridiculous. This, and not "security porkulus in exchange for amnesty" should be what our immigration debate is about.


..............................................................................................................................................


1: Total dollars or yen spent by myself, my wife or my employer on application fees, medical or biometrics screenings, documentation, legal fees, and travel
2: Total time spent by myself, my wife, or my employer's staff
3: This results from the time gap between arrival in the US and receipt of a work permit that all family-based immigrants must endure, unless they have a work permit for independent reasons
4: Thank you, Senator Brown of Ohio and staff, for making this process "easier" than it otherwise would have been

What real immigration reform looks like

So the immigration debate has heated up a bit again. Unfortunately, the "security pork in return for amnesty for illegal immigrants" monstrosity that is being debated in the Senate is a million miles from what I believe real immigration reform would look like, and is in fact so bad that I cannot even support it even though I love legal immigration and want far more of it. Below, I have summarized what kind of immigration reform bill we should be discussing.

1: Amend the 14th Amendment by adding the words "of an American citizen" after the word "born" in Section 1. Only children of American citizens should automatically qualify for American citizenship under the Constitution. As a matter of policy, children of permanent residents should also qualify almost automatically, but this should be at our discretion. Jus soli "birthright" citizenship is at the core of our immigration problem, and is a policy which almost all nations have rejected as being impractical and abusive. The rest of my plan would only go into effect on passage of the amending amendment.

2: A national ID policy. Our fragmented system makes enforcing immigration laws difficult, as well as mucking up voting and facilitating fraud. This would be coupled with a national voter ID law once the IDs were nearly universally in place.

3: A path to permanent residency for current illegal immigrants. This should be slower than the path for legal immigrants, and come with substantial fines in the form of something like a 10% payroll tax for ten years. The current Senate bill has fines, but they are so small (~$2000) that they aren't any higher than the application fees and legal bills illegal immigrants skipped out on. As part of the amnesty deal, these folks would forgo any chance at citizenship.

4: A 50% increase in the number of green cards awarded every year, to approximately 1.5 million. This would include the reinstatement of the green card lottery. The remainder would be granted on a points-based system that considered skills, age, education, income, family connections to the US, English skill, and time previously spent in the US.

5: Work visas would be sold, not granted. Each month, a fixed number of 3, 6, 12, 24, and 36 month visas would be auctioned off. Obviously, passing a security screen would be required before placing bids. Once won, the visa could be activated any time within the next year and last as long as noted. Bidding for new visas while under a current one would be allowed, thus making it possible for someone to stay in the US indefinitely if they are willing to pay for it and obey our laws. This would cause the price of residency to be bid up high enough that there would be little advantage in "importing" cheap foreign workers. It would also ensure that the companies that really needed to bring over some guru for a rotation in the US would have little trouble doing so. Note that under this system, H1B's would no longer exist. Immigrants who won work visas would be free to work for any employer during the period of their visa, or not work at all.

6: Use the several billion dollars per year generated above to speed up USCIS processing times and iron out any inconveniences that it inflicts on immigrants due to lack of funds (such as the inability to do biometrics processing overseas).

7: Get rid of the "travel permit" system. In a modern world, USCIS should recognize that immigrants to America will often need to move about the globe. As long as the immigrants are paying their taxes and obeying the laws of both the US and whatever country they find themselves in, USCIS shouldn't bother them...and certainly shouldn't force them to come back to the US repeatedly at USCIS's whim, as is the case now. Additionally, any US immigrant who is abroad for any length of time should be considered to be maintaining their US immigration status if they are living with their American citizen spouse or child, or if they or their spouse is working for an American company or its international affiliate. Currently, such people are constantly threatened with having their immigration status revoked for "abandonment", requiring them to repeatedly travel back to the US and spend a fortune on legal fees (it cost my wife and I, as well as my employer, something like $20,000!).

8: Family-based visas should include a temporary work permit and a Social Security card. Currently, these people arrive in the US and are promptly forcably unemployed, as they can't work in the US until their work permit application comes through in 3-4 months, and they can't leave the country without voiding their green card application. This is just a waste of human capital.

9: Get tough on illegal immigrants and their employers. Rapid deportation should be the norm for the former, and crushing fines the norm for the latter. Illegal immigrants and their children should qualify for almost no public services, including schooling or identification.

10: Increased border security...to the extent Republicans are willing to raise taxes to pay for it, and not one penny more.


There. Plenty of pain on both sides...but everybody wins except future illegal immigrants.

Immigration, Foreign Family Members, and the Globally Mobile

There are a number of gaping holes in our immigration system. One is that their is no non-Kafkaesque solution for foreign-citizen family members of globally mobile American citizens. This is particularly ironic precisely because such mobile citizens are much more likely than average to have foreign family members in the first place.

When it comes to family members immigrating to the US, our system is permanent residency (a green card), or nothing. A would-be resident applies for a visa based on a family status such as marriage, and after receiving it generally has six months to arrive in the US and another ninety days to apply for a green card once he or she arrives. Assuming everything is in order, they get a green card a few months later, and everything is great - unless they ever want to live outside the US. In this case, USCIS throws a hissy.

If you want to live outside the US while holding a green card, you need to obtain a special travel document before you leave, and periodically come back to the US in a pair of closely-spaced trips or one extended trip in order to replace your travel permit if it is about to expire. USCIS also refuses to grant serial travel permits. While there is no fixed standard, spending more than half one's time outside the US as a permanent resident is likely impossible. If a permanent resident fails to maintain their travel permits, USCIS will strip their residency and green card upon entry to the US. This ends up creating tremendous headaches for the foreign family members of US citizens, forcing them to spend thousands of dollars in filing and legal fees, not to mention the cost and time of repeated trips back to the US from abroad at USCIS's whim.

Is there a solution to this costly, pointless issue? In fact, there are at least two, as exemplified by Canada and Japan.

The Canadian system simply allows its permanent residents to live abroad if they are living with their Canadian citizen family member, or if their Canadian employer moved them abroad. From the Canadian perspective, the maintenance of one's Canadian work or family ties is sufficient to protect one's residency, even if abroad for years at a time.

Japan is also very relaxed about its "permanent residents" living abroad. However, it has an additional feature - long-term family visas. In Japan, one does not jump straight to permanent residency. Instead, family members, like workers and students, start with 1-5 year visas that provide residency and work rights. These generally are indefinitely renewable unless there is a cause to deny them, and in many cases, Japanese foreign residents never bother to obtain their "permanent" residency and are content to remain in Japan on a series of family visas. If such people want to leave Japan for a few years, it is no big deal at all. Just leave. If your visa expires while abroad, apply for a new one before you come back. Or even after you come back, as unlike the US, you can apply for visas in Japan while in the country as a tourist. Given that Japan's visa applications require half the documentation, cost five times less, and are adjudicated in less than half the time than the US, it is perfectly possible to land as a tourist and get your visa after the fact.

It's a globally mobile modern world, yet our immigration policy is still based on archaic rules set in an area where coming to or departing from the US was a long, expensive one-in-a-lifetime event. It's time we moved our immigration policy out of the stone age and made it simple for our permanent residents to move in and out of the country.

Our Immigrant Journey...

There are a number of reasons the US has a lot of illegal immigration. One of the largest is that our legal immigration system is one of the most complex bureaucratic nightmares on the face of the planet, mostly consisting of a contradictory hodge-podge of decades-old or even centuries-old law that have little bearing on the modern world. This is our story of obtaining and protecting my wife's green card, a process that started about four and a half years ago.

Feel free to skip all the stuff between the dotted lines...the kicker is at the end.

.........................................................................................................................................

First we had to get a special "fiancée visa" for my wife. This is rather silly in and of itself, as Japanese citizens are visa exempt and can come to the US freely. Getting the fiancée visa requires planning almost a year in advance in order to match up your fiancées arrival with the wedding, costs around $500, and requires two in-person interviews and a mountain of paperwork.

Once we were through that hurdle, my wife arrived, we got married, and we applied for her conditional green card. This took about four months, and cost another $500. At this point, we hadn't need a lawyer yet, at about $1000 per petition, because I was stubborn and wasted a lot of weekends sorting it out myself. Another issue that crops up at this point is that your fiancée cannot work, because they won't get their work permit until about the same time as their green card. Also, because they have a pending green card application, they can't leave the country. So they are simply forcibly unemployed. This is true of almost all family-based immigrants. In January, four months after our wedding and a year after we started the process, my wife received both her work permit and her conditional green card (conditional on being married to me...after two years, she could apply for her own permanent residency unrelated to me).

Now the fun begins. I am assigned overseas. My wife needs a special "reentry permit" to live overseas. You MUST be in the US to file and you have to do biometrics at the USCIS office a few weeks later. Our company pays for the lawyer and filing fee, she receives her reentry permit, which lasts as long as her condition green card, and we are good to move to Japan.

Fast forward a year and a half. My wife applies for her permanent green card. The mere act of applying extends her residency for a year, or until USCIS makes a decision. But we get put in an "overseas hold" because were are, well, overseas. She also needs a new reentry permit, because her old one will expire before we come back. So there is two trips to the US, merely for the purpose of "being present" and getting fingerprinted for the fourth time. Oh, and all of these are costing us or my employer $500 to apply, $1000 for the lawyer, plus travel expenses and time off from work. Since my wife's temporarily-extended residency is only for one year, the reentry permit lasts only until her residency expires. That's all good, because we are coming back a few months before it expires...

Oh wait, maybe not. The company asks me stay another year. Now she has to go back to extend her residency, merely showing up at the USCIS office to get a stamp in her passport. Oh, and to "be present" in the US when we file for yet another travel permit. Of course, she will have to make a second trip to be fingerprinted for the fifth time. At this point, Senator Brown's office is helping us too, but even they wilt before the insanity of USCIS. More money, more time. Who needs vacations when you can spend all your paid holidays and spare cash flying to the Cleveland USCIS office over and over?

So we are up to the present. If all goes well, the third reentry permit will be approved, we will return to the US safely next year, the "overseas hold" will be lifted, and my wife will finally get her green card. It will only have cost us or my employer something like $40,000 in cash and lost wages, and a few weeks' of vacation time. Pretty sweet deal, eh?

Oh, and did I mention that even though she has spent less than one year of her life in the US, she has to pay US taxes on the income she is earning here in Japan (as do I)? The US is one of the few countries that does this. Not only is it costly, but it is a huge pain for both us and my company.

........................................................................



Now I want you to imagine a world where everything is reversed. I go to Japan to marry my wife, she is transferred to the US to three years by her employer, and I follow, both with the intent of returning to Japan afterwards. Here is what we would have done.



xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I fly to Japan on a tourist visa and we get married. No planning necessary other than for the wedding itself. I apply for a spouse visa, which costs under a hundred dollars, requires half the paperwork of the US, and would have been received within the 90-day tourist window. Of course, I could have flown back to the US and worked in the interim if I wanted. My choice.

After receiving my first spouse visa, probably one year, I would be free to live and work in Japan, and travel in and out of Japan to my heart's content. When my wife were assigned to the US, all I would need to do is...nothing. Just turn in my visa and alien card on the way out of the country. That's it. About six months before our return, I would need to apply for a new spouse visa, using pretty much the same documentation as before. I could whip it together in a couple hours, and when combined with the interview at the consulate, you are looking at about one day's worth of bureaucracy.

Once back in Japan, I would apply for new spouse visas whenever the old ones ran out, which would eventually be extended to three or five years at a time. After three years, I could also apply for permanent residency. Or I could just keep rolling the spouse visas. Either would be cheap and easy. Oh, and Japan only charges me taxes on money I earn in or bring to Japan.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

And THAT folks, is why the US has such problems with illegal immigration - we make it hell to do it the right way. Unfortunately, the Senate's immigration bill does almost nothing to change this.