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The Immigration Crisis You Never Hear About

By Robert Stacy McCain on 1.7.09 @ 11:06AM

Law-abiding people who want to play by the rules are put through the wringer, as in the case of an American who wanted to bring his pregnant Polish fiance to this country:

I met Justyna while studying abroad in London in 2005. She is Polish by birth but had been living, working, and attending school in the United Kingdom for over two years at the time. With only an easily obtained student visa, I enjoyed the same privileges, including England’s national health care system — a resource that proved especially useful when Justyna became pregnant in the spring of 2006.
We decided that I would return to America and finish my degree while she would go home to Poland to have the baby near her family. With the intention of bringing my wife to America after the birth of our child, I filed an I-129f Petition for Fiance(e) visa in October 2006. Thus began our protracted and degrading experience with the United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS.

“Degrading” being the key word here. The necessary corollary to boundless tolerance of illegal immigration seems to be a process for legal immigrants that is humiliating and expensive. Ask any Canadian or Brit who’s tried it.

There is a passage in Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation where a foreign-born friend talks about the difficulty of bringing over his mother, and Brimelow advises: “Just get her a tourist visa and let her overstay.” It’s very practical advice. The enforcement mechanism is broken and, even if La Migra came for Mum, the appeals process can delay deportation almost infinitely. It’s easier to break the law than to obey it.

Deprived legal immigrant| 1.7.09 @ 12:50PM

It's about time journalists started to cover such stories which are not unusual at all. It's just that no one ever hears about it and Americans don't care. If you want to hear of an even worse story, contact me. I am currently suing USCIS and Chertoff for the wrongful denial of a green card. Such abuses are so extensive that USCIS even has an Office of Immigration and Litigation with 250 lawyers to fight cases all the way, even though denial has arisen from abuse of power and incompetence on their part, like losing a key piece of paper from your file. Now that's a story of millions of dollars of wasted tax payers money, never mind the humiliation, suffering and financial costs caused to perfectly law abiding, highly educated people whose mother tongue is English and followed the law!

Austin Scott| 1.7.09 @ 1:00PM

The US immigration system is a scandal. I spent 13 years, and my bosses and I tens of thousands of dollars, before I could get a green card. All despite holding 4 advanced degrees and being in demand from employers. Citizenship takes a futher five years, so (being more or less a refugee) I am still in a kind of legal limbo.

In the UK I would have become a British subject, without much drama or cost, in five years. I have been legally employed under a series of F, H, and O visas the entire time I have been in the US, nevertheless had to spend many days and dollars obtaining re-entry visas when travelling abroad. I've missed more important international events than I can calculate. Illegals, on the other hand, seem able to work, earn licenses, travel, even vote as they please -- and then get amnesty.

Seems like a scam on the middle classes to pay for a bureaucracy that repeatedly fails to do what it is tasked with.

J David| 1.7.09 @ 3:20PM

It is important to notice, as in the case above, who is being treated badly by our gov't. The person relating his experience is a highly educated professional(or soon to be), US citizen trying to bring his own child and the child's mother back with him to his home. He not an illiterate lawbreaker carrying drugs on his back into the country to pay a gang-connected, drug-running coyote to help him break immigration laws, so he can eventually STEAL citizenship, and US citizens' tax remittances.
Our gov't doesn't want educated, independent thinkers who can make their own way, and raise educated citizens themselves. They want ignorant, illiterate peon classes to vote the way Massa Big Bro' tells them to vote. I include the RINOs in with the commie-li Dems on that accusation...

Wanda| 1.8.09 @ 7:54AM

Add me to the list of degraded. Our K-1 was refused at a U.S. Embassy abroad and our case still languishes at USCIS for 'review' for over a year now. I found a good attorney and refiled, those boobs at USCIS didn't even notice the second petition and we were approved the second time around; but this scenario is rare. My husband is here now, but we are caught up in the 'waiting game' again for an EAD and AOS so he can work. I guess they don't care that he's sitting at home when he could be paying taxes....but we have to wait our turn. I advise anyone to take immediate legal action, using an EXPERIENCED immigration attorney, if you experience the slightest delay with USCIS. With them, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and they make it impossible to communicate with an immigration officer who can give you any more information other than "call back in 60 days". And to think, we are paying for these services!!!!

James Fulford | 1.29.09 @ 5:04PM

The exact quote is a little different, though making the same point--Peter Brimelow wrote
blockquote>Some country queues are astonishingly long. Applicants now receiving permission to enter the United States have waited in some cases for as long as sixteen years.

Obviously, from these countries, no skilled would-be immigrant without family connections need apply.

But even immigrants who do apply with family connections have trouble, because of those country queues. Talking about immigration on David Newman's KXYT Detroit-area radio show, I once had the heart-rending experience of a call from an elderly European widow in great distress because she couldn't bring her sister, also widowed and her only family in the world, to America to live with her. How could this possibly be, when the borders plainly were out of control?

Ever since, I have regretted that I flinched from saying on air what I believe immigration lawyers say in private: bring her in as a tourist and overstay, no one will do any thing. It's the Great American Immigration Paradox again—the law is enforced against those who obey the law.[Alien Nation, 1995, p. 81]

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