The Grass is Always Greener (Part 1)
A green card is the holy grail of the U.S. immigration system, but is there more to know?
"Green Card" by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Your average American doesn’t know much about the U.S. immigration system, but they do know what a green card is. Or do they? Green cards are worthy of discussion because in the public imagination they are a bit of a talisman, with magical powers to paper over all the other faults in our system. When we started this newsletter the goal was not just to dissect immigration topics in general but also to take aspects of it that are usually misunderstood and try to make them approachable for anybody who is interested, American or otherwise.
As any immigration professional will tell you, the “green card” (or more accurately, “legal permanent residence”) is too complex of a topic for a coffee table discussion. The laws that govern who can receive a green card and under what circumstances are incredibly complex, and they are constantly modified by legislation, executive orders, and policy changes within the agencies that adjudicate them. Suffice to say, most people pay an immigration lawyer to figure it out for them in all but the simplest cases. This has created an industry worth nearly 5 billion dollars a year offering various consulting and administrative services related to immigration processing. Not all of that is directly related to green cards, but you better believe a lot of it is involved with getting people on their way to one. For anyone who wants a general overview see below (please don’t really try to read this, it’s impossible).
For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that there are four main ways to get a green card:
1) Via a family relationship with an American citizen or existing green card holder
2) Based on your employment at a company located in the U.S
3) As a refugee or asylee
4) As a diversity visa winner (the “visa lottery”)
There are all kinds of other country-specific or situation-specific green card programs, Iraqi and Afghan translators who worked for the U.S. military are one example. For the purposes of our discussion these cases are too specific to be of general interest, except to say that the more specific programs usually involve fairly small numbers of people compared to the big categories listed above.
So what kind of numbers are we talking about here? I imagine if you ask a person on the street how many people get green cards each year the answer would vary pretty widely, to some extent tied to their political beliefs about immigration policy. I think both sides of the immigration debate may actually be surprised. According to the most recent report from the Department of Homeland Security we welcomed over 1 million new green card holders in 2019, which is fairly consistent with what we have seen over the last two decades. For anyone who wants to dig into these statistics in depth DHS actually does a pretty good job putting the numbers together, see here. Let it never be said that *all* your tax dollars are going to waste.
A bit over half of these people were already in the United States when they filed to receive their green card, most of them as family members of U.S. citizens or residents. The other 40 percent or so applied from overseas at U.S. consulates and embassies and received their green card shortly after entering the U.S. Many of those who apply from overseas have to wait years or decades before they are eligible to actually receive their visas and green cards. The top destinations for incoming permanent residents are pretty easy to guess: California, New York, Florida and Texas. The top sending countries are also pretty easy to predict: Mexico, China, and India (with Mexico ahead by a considerable margin). These people tend to skew a bit younger than the median age of U.S. citizens and that contributes to a lot of demographer’s belief that incoming immigration is vital to maintaining a healthy age distribution in the U.S. population.
A little more perspective can be found in comparing how the U.S. does on minting new residents compared to other countries. As you might expect, the U.S. has the highest raw numbers of migrants as a portion of its population (around 14%) at about 44 million. Paired with the million new residents we bring in each year, and about an equal number of people becoming citizens each year, the numbers look pretty impressive. No other developed country can match that, though Germany in recent years has been giving it a try.
That’s not to say, however, that we make it easy for them. Through a complex series of country quotas, inefficient and bureaucratic processing, and a profoundly flawed foundational law in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) we have managed to make the process a true nightmare and those who make it to the finish line probably feel a bit like those who just made it through a Tough Mudder marathon (without the T-shirt). We have made this point in other parts of the newsletter but it bears repeating, the immigration system could use a true table flip, if only our political leaders could be trusted to pick up the pieces and put them back together in a way that wouldn’t make the whole thing ten times worse.
On that note we will stop here for this week. Next week we want to tackle some myths about the green card that are widely held, even in the media and legal circles. Hopefully by tempering expectations and talking about how green card holders still live under a sort of second-class status we can identify some areas where we can not only improve the process to receive this immigration benefit, but also improve what it feels like to live with one, as many people do for years or decades.
In the news:
Immigrant advocates to Biden: Be better than Obama - We wish these advocates the best of luck, we truly do. But the expectation that Biden is not going to return to something resembling Obama-era deportation policies, in particular, seems far-fetched. Trump has conveniently created lots of space for this administration to simply rollback what he has done over the last four years and call it “progress”, when in fact it is a return to the pre-Trump status quo. It should also be noted that a return to a functioning DHS bureaucracy not obsessed with electioneering for Trump will inevitably lead to a bounce-back in actual work being done, which will make those numbers surge up next year, even if Biden follows through on his 100 day deportation freeze promise.
LOCAL COUPLE CHALLENGING COMMUNITY WITH $30,000 DONATION MATCH FOR LUM IMMIGRATION CLINIC - Great local story here that caught my eye. The idea that we should be doing something more for residents and new citizens than charging them exorbitant fees has often occurred to me. Maybe we, as a nation, should put our money where our mouth is if we actually care about “assimilation” like we say we do. Putting all the onus on the incoming arrivals to adapt is a little unfair and counterproductive. Great to see caring individuals like this family stepping in to help make up the gap.