1. Personal. In the aftermath of 9/11, a simple switch from F1 Student Visa to H1 work visa became a perfect Kafkaesque nightmare. The consulate denied the visa without giving a reason. After two months of non-response, my company reached out to the congressman's office. Apparently, the consulate wanted a copy of my transcript and they reached out to my university, but did not tell me that. The university would not release my transcript without my permission, but did not tell me that DHS was asking for it. It was an infinite loop that left me out.
2. In 2006-2007, I was consulting for Hormel Foods (this time with a legit green card). There was a raid at one of their plants, and I was talking to a couple of middle managers who commented how difficult the jobs are, and people only last for a short time. Only migrants are willing to do the job. I would later learn that meat packing jobs used to be unionized, and that put limits on the number of animals processed per shift. The deregulation of the eighties did away with unions and regulations, and created an untenable work situation. This can ONLY be done by disposable labor, which happens to be immigrants.
A simple solution to the immigration problem would be to arrest the CEO of the company employing illegals. Perhaps that will percolate down to the line level to make the jobs humane.
The end of undocumented immigration would spell disaster for the Republicans, and they know that. For many red states, it would be literal economic disaster, even if we look past the messaging.
So it's flashy non-solution after flashy non-solution.
The reality is that many rich industries are built on the backs of illegal workers. If countries would punish those who hire illegal workers more than they do the illegal workers themselves, the resulting collapse of the agricultural and food industries alone should prove that the current systems are already being held up by people who do not participate in the welfare system.
The people who would've come through Ellis Island are still coming in, they're just not getting registered anymore, and the people and government have turned a blind eye so they can cheaply dismiss them when they're no longer necessary/when they need to act as a scapegoat.
If anything, expats from Asia come to the US to make a higher salary to support their family back at home. They are not asking for a handout, they are asking for jobs.
1. You were free of contagious medical diseases
2. You were not in danger of "becoming a public charge" (welfare)
That plan is perfectly compatible with your concerns.
And of course, taxing the rich can cover a LOT of people.
People today get a 50$ plane ticket and move straight to the Bay Area.
You don't see why things need to change?
> You don't see why things need to change?
Are you asserting that the current system of legal immigration needs to change, with an unsubstantiated example of a rare $50 dollar plane ticket as if people can easily move to the US by plane? Do those people leave behind most of their belongings, or do they instead make multiple plane trips to move them? And what about all of the paperwork and approval and unpredictable waiting [1]?
If the USA offered food and shelter security, billions would come in
Anyway, I don't think the O-1 / EB-1A is the easiest setting. An even easier setting is to become a tenure-track professor at a reasonable university in a technical field, e.g., computer science. That gives you an H1-B without any drama. An EB-1B green card requires a lot of evidence, but maybe a few pages less than an EB-1A green card.
Finally, getting citizenship is trivial. It's the green card that is hard to get.
Here in the real world, every American I know knows that the only way for "normal" (non-rich, non-connected, non-extraordinary) person to legally immigrate is to marry an American citizen and have them sponsor you. Literally everyone knows the average "illegal immigrant" living in the US isn't eligible for citizenship and couldn't obtain citizenship legally. Exactly zero people think that any (let alone most) "illegal immigrants" could have just "followed the rules" and been able to live here legally. The reason they are "illegal immigrants" is because there's no legal way, other than marrying an American.
A lot of people would prefer if even family sponsorships didn't exist. Many people think of that as "gaming the system" because they allow "average" people to be immigrants. I assume Republicans want to get rid of this.
Do you honestly believe that people who say "Why don't [they] come in legally?" are complaining about a lack of administrative process? Do you really, honestly believe that? Because if you do I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can give you a great deal on.
"Why don't [they] come in legally?" is just conservative doublespeak for for "they don't belong here." It's begging the question and everyone knows that, even the person saying it. They know there's no legal avenue for the vast majority of "illegal immigrants."
"Chain migration" however is more questionable.
I think Republicans didn’t really understand that this existed until recently. And yes, many want to get rid of it, because it’s a loophole in the skilled immigration system. We apply aggressive filters to 65,000 H1Bs or whatever, and hundreds of thousands of low skill people come over because they’re someone’s cousin.
Why does "the skilled immigration system" represent the whole immigration system? What makes family sponsorship a "loophole" to H1Bs, when family sponsorship could instead be framed as an equivalent form of legal immigration with a different purpose?
> and hundreds of thousands of low skill people come over because they’re someone’s cousin.
Accepting the "low skill" framing and setting aside the fact that family-sponsored immigrants can have "high skill" without proving it through the H1B process, I don't think it makes sense to have an immigration system based solely on "high skill", because not every member of a family should have to be "high skill" for the entire family to move to the US.
1. You are going to school? Great! Go to the DMV with reasonable documentation (student ID and registration paperwork?) and you get a year-long visa. Renew each year, welcome to America!
2. You have a job? Great! Go to the DMV with reasonable documentation (a couple pay stubs?) and you get a year-long visa. Renew each year, welcome to America!
3. You don't have a job yet? Great! Go to the DMV with reasonable documentation of self-sufficiency (bank statement?) and you get a 3-month visa while you look for work. Renew each 3 months for as long as you can prove self-sufficiency, welcome to America!
4. You have none of the above, but you are the spouse/dependent on someone who does? Great! Go to the DMV with them, with proof of the relationship (marriage/birth certificate or the person signing an attestation) and you get a visa to match theirs, welcome to America!
5. You have none of the above but you are a refugee? Not great for you, but: go to the DMV to register yourself and get a date for review. With the money we save on enforcement, that review should be within weeks if not days. Welcome to America! (for now, subject to review)
6. You have none of the above and run out of money? I'm sorry about that, please return to your home country.
7. You're on the national list of Certified Bad People? You're going back to your home country, No America For You. And we have biometric information on you to ensure you never come back. Did I mention the DMV gets FaceID and DNA swabs?
His reasons for leaving the UK make interesting reading in current circumstances:
> The USA is putting curbs on surveillance, expanding its national healthcare, and there are mass parental boycotts of standardised testing in its public schools. The UK just elected a Tory majority government that's going to continue to slash and burn the welfare state, attack schools, health, legal aid and teachers, and impose mandatory cryptographic backdoors in the technology we use to talk to each other. They've even announced that merely not breaking the law is no reason to expect that you won't be arrested.
https://boingboing.net/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london.html
Edit: improved wording below and added quote
A lot of his other problems are London specific. Why do people forget the rest of the UK exists?
> London is a city whose two priorities are being a playground for corrupt global elites who turn neighbourhoods into soulless collections of empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, and encouraging the feckless criminality of the finance industry. These two facts are not unrelated.
> My office rent has doubled this decade. We live in 600 square feet, up six flights of stairs, and can't possibly afford anything even remotely larger.
> We've seen the writing on the wall: this is not a city for families. It's not a city for people running small firms. It's not a city for people who earn their living in the arts. We've given it the best we have, and we're getting out because we can.
Your comment is a bit confusing. Did you mean everything except the part you quoted only applies to London? The part you quoted is about the UK not London and seems to contain all that is necessary for someone to understand why a person like Doctorow would have considered leaving at that point in time.
You are right, its pretty much everything except what I quoted.
I would guess he might have misunderstanding the politics - you can get an exaggerated sense of how much difference a Conservative rather than Labour government makes from the media. Maybe also taking a short term view - the prime minister changed the following year, and Labour won last year's election.
The odd thing is that he became a British citizen when the UK had a Conservative government and lived in London for another five years before deciding to move.
I even agree with some of his criticisms of London and how it has developed, but a lot of his reasoning just does not make sense to me
What stuck out to me is that despite obviously being a smart and educated person and having the help of immigration lawyers, the author has made a mistake. Sepcifically this:
> I checked in with our lawyers and was told that the kid couldn't get her certificate of citizenship until she turned 18
When you apply to be naturalized (N400) then your children become US citizens by operation of law as long as they are in your physical custody and are under 18. The "certificate of citizenship" the author is talking about is called Form N600 and it specifically doesn't require the child to be over 18. Go and read the instructions for it [1].
If you know nothing about this, you might be confused because the author says his daughter has a US passport. Isn't that the same thing? No.
This comes up a lot when US citizens adopt children from outside the US. This essentially causes them to become US citizens (there's a whole process) but some parents fail to go through the application and formally recognize their child as a US citizen.
But how does the child travel internationally before any of this happens? There's an allowance for them to get a US passport even though they may not be US citizens. Weird, huh? Some people mistakenly think just having a US passport is proof of US citizenship but it isn't.
So here's my advice to anyone who has a child when they naturalize or adopts a child from overseas: IMMEDIATELY file an N600 for that child so they have proof they are a US citizen. This can be incredibly difficult and costly to reconstruct later when paperwork may have gone missing.
[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/n-6...
It doesn't need fixing, it needs replacing, and replaced by some mythical group that would put long-term good for the country over partisan gain
I became American as a previously British citizen. I had been employed in the UK, by a company in California who wanted to relocate me to the US and did (I was an early H1-B).
I then moved to another company after 18 months. Both my first and second companies were applying for my green card and renewing my paperwork as needed for me.
Later I stopped working for a US company but still had a VISA and married a US citizen. I then handled my green card application, and citizenship, myself without lawyers.
As a highly qualified individual who had already been screened multiple times to get H1-Bs I knew I would pass further screening. I also knew I had no criminal records or adverse history globally.
In short I got my green card and my citizenship without any further professional legal help. I paid nothing but my own costs.
It took a couple of years but it is possible.
The process is torturous and repetitive. You have to resubmit the same information multiple times, and some of the requirements are extremely expensive.
To whit, I was required to produce a “Police letter” from every country I had lived in, signed by the local police, attesting to the fact I hadn’t broken any laws overseas.
I had lived in 4 continents at that point. Thus I had to arrange to send my ID to multiple countries and to pay, in some cases, for letters to be written, delivered as originals on paper and then (hilariously) pay to have them translated for a US government who only wants to work in English and apparently trusts whatever translation you send (this was pre LLM).
So though I could do all this, in one case paying an ex colleague to manage the police in Eastern Europe on my behalf, for many others this would be impossible and require lawyers and the huge markups they would charge for these services. I would guess them hiring another team of lawyers in another country with each stage doubling the costs of the ones beneath them meaning a single police letter ends up costing many thousands.
The system is thus absolutely limited to those with connections, deep pockets or sponsorship.
Also for those who think this is good insurance, I also know Central Europeans who bribed their local authorities to facilitate their green cards, covering adverse information and putting them at the tops of lists. Ie for $50k or so they got essentially instant residency status.
Also the need for people to leave the US before re entering when processing paperwork (so that if rejected you have already self deported) means you need to be able to stop working, or work remotely, and to be able to fund living in your old home country for an indefinite period.
I moved in with my parents but had they not been an option I would have had to rent a place in London - a vast expense - just to comply.
The system is incredibly broken.
It’s not hard. It’s just time consuming and the wait times are very long. But it’s really not difficult to fill out the forms and I never used a lawyer.
Your greencard or documentation may be of no consequence to these masked men, it's up to their mercy or their face scanning app to determine the status you actually have. They may accept your documents at face value OR just deport you no questions asked.
Even though they can technically use your uni degree as proof of English speaking ability that process seems designed to be unworkable. So off we go to do a grade 5 language test…
And yeah also need years of travel history which is a pain in Europe where a cross border weekend getaway is a thing. Or worse via bus and ship. I don’t fuckin know what bus I was on years ago
If I was an acolyte of Freud or Jung I would say that this dichotomy between "easygration" and "immigration" (im is for impossible, right?) is because easygration is the result of sex and being born in a country (yes yes pedants, that's changing now and not universal, but swallow your pedantry presently and persist with this a moment), and the "STATE" in its everquest to control all aspects of human existence, necessarily seeks to control and intermediate sex and all its analogs (as sex is the intimacy of individuals it seeks to control, it must get between there, too). So if sex-migration (by being born) is easy (as some concessions must be made), then the corresponding path must be a gauntlet gated by the difficulty proportional to how much the state wants to intermediate the individual's intimate affairs. The hard path of immigration, is then a mirror of the control the state ultimately seeks to exercise over every aspect of existence, but which for now, it is constrained by the modesty and norms of its people to resist.
TL;DR - immigration is hard because states can't control yet sex and intimacy as much as they want, so they control the next best thing, that thing which is accepted to arise from the result of sex and intimacy - citizenship or right of abode by birth.
Also one can make the obvious metaphors with borders, porosity, and penetration. One might be inclined to say: the state must currently tolerate the annoying promiscuity of its individuals, so it, in spite and compensation, becomes ultrachaste in turn, wrt its own intimate borders.
But I am not an acolyte of Freud or Jung. Tho sometimes I think as above.
WITH THAT SAID, one side-effect of having such extensive laws is that it really depends on how much you enforce them. If you make laws so difficult and hard that anyone can fail them, but remain quite selective on how you enforce them, that means you have a green light to deport the people that are deemed undesirable, while also having the option to turn a blind eye to desirable people.
One small error can easily get some random Indian or Mexican worker deported, even if they've worked in the US for 20+ years, if the state feels so. Meanwhile I suspect they wouldn't do a damn thing if it turns out that some immigration billionaire outright lied on their paperwork.
Also, I hate to pull the fascism card, but one hallmark of fascism is to make laws so rigid (and punishment draconian) that everyone is potentially a criminal, but then very selectively enforce those laws.
I don't think US immigration laws are rooted in fascism, not at all - they're the product of decades / centuries of complex immigration...but how you enforce them, is a different thing.
I'm puzzled how you came to this conclusion since its left completely unsubstantiated in your comment. It's not "enforced equally seriously" in the US itself let alone another country. European citizens for one had no fear of being sent to a detention camp or deported speedily prior to the latest Trump adminstration.
I guess the big difference here is that we don't have immigration officers roaming the streets, snatching up people and shipping them to random holding centers. But you can *absolutely* expect to be apprehended if you've received notice, and don't do anything about it. Same goes for criminals that roam around (which is easy due to Schengen), get caught, and are ordered to leave.
From time to time you'll read stories here about people that came here as kids, their parents lied on the application (said the were from Afghanistan/Iraq or similar worn-torn countries back then, but in reality came from some neighboring countries), and now they too have been order to leave - even though they have zero connections with their birth countries.
In Norway, a country with population 5.6 million, around 2500 people were deported in 2024. Per capita that's around 3-4 times less than the US - but we don't necessarily have the same types of immigrants.
We don't have to guess this. We have evidence. Elon Musk is worked illegally in the US [1] and then later obtained a green card then citizenship. He didn't acquire his green card through marriage to a US citizen (where unauthorized work is forgiven).
So if you look at his original I485 (adjustment of status) and N400 (naturalization), you would need to see how he answered the questions about unauthorized work. If he answered yes, he may have been ineligible. If he answered no, then that's a misrepresentation and the government could denaturalize him on the basis that his original green card was improperly granted.
Will any of that ever happen? No.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/26/elon-musk...
The solution, IMO, isn't "just enter illegally". When you're not a citizen then, quite frankly, the fact that you want to immigrate doesn't matter. It's the country that says whether you should get in or not.
For the true asylum seekers, that feat for their life wherever they're from for example, the laws of the country they're entering just don't matter. If it's a choice between life as an illegal or death I think we would all choose life.
For the economic cases, sure. That's where the legal immigration system applies. And I agree with what you said about rules and each country gets to decide.
1) There seems to be an assumption here that everyone in the US agrees there should be brisk immigration. To me, if the laws in-practice make it impossible to immigrate then that would suggest that the polity might not believe that. There also seems to be a common belief that just because the laws are unfair, stupid, counterproductive or destructive that they can be ignored and that isn't how laws work. If the law is terrible it is still the law. If it doesn't let you do what you want to do then that desired course of action is not a legal option.
2) A big part of the reason that the US is engaging in this (rather terrifying) deportation is because of the appearance that process ran, came up with a basic agreement about how immigration would work and then people started ignoring it on the basis that it was inconvenient. I don't see how a country can be run that way, there has to be a hard choice made about open migration vs. a welfare system.
And while I'm commenting on the debacle that is the Trump anti-immigration campaign, I will just upset everyone and note that people have to accept that governments sometimes go on a rampage. It has happened before, it will happen again and it is really quite important to keep the reins on them and try not to give them control of important things like food, medicine, what people can say to each other, control of the financial system, etc, etc. A bit of principled strategic thinking goes a long way on this stuff.
Well then explain to me how the US Marijuana industry exists despite it being a schedule 1 controlled substance.
Laws are a social construct and their enforcement is based on what society thinks is ok. People don’t want to throw their community members is jail for marijuana. They do want to throw murderers in jail. They don’t want to throw upstanding community members who just don’t have the right immigration status in jail either.
For any kind of acute/emergency care, you don't need "best" hospitals, just good ones are fine. For more complex conditions, you can always travel for treatment/live temporarily.
It's possible it exists in other countries, I don't know that.
As for taxation of income derived from business, these are either completely or mostly tax-exempt in many EU countries (Cyprus, Malta, Greece for 100K a year, Italy for 300K a year, Spain if you do a lot of paperwork, Portugal in some places, probably there's more). There's no US equivalent.