"Reward!!! Lost wallet with green card - No questions asked! We just need card" by Steve Rhodes is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The U.S. immigration system is kind of like that scene in the HGTV home renovation shows where they start ripping up the crappy carpet or linoleum flooring and find that beautiful original tile underneath. Only instead of finding tile, it’s just more and more layers of shoddy garbage all the way down. The laws that make up the system, starting with the INA, are outdated, obtuse, and intentionally frustrating for most types of immigrants. Nowhere is this more evident than in the process to obtain a green card. Once you get the green card, however, everything is great! Well, not so much. This week lets take a look at some myths about the green card, both in terms of how you get one and what it does for you once you have it.
Myth number 1: Anyone can get a green card!
Well, yes, in the same sense that anyone can become a millionaire or write the next Great American Novel. In reality the path to a green card varies a lot based on where you are coming from, the law under which you are going to apply for it, and whether you apply in the United States or overseas. A great example can be found this week in these comments from David Bier at the Cato Institute on the Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act:
“The discrimination against Indian skilled immigrants mean, as I’ve estimated before, that new Indian green card applicants will almost certainly never receive green cards in their lifetime. More than 200,000 of the 700,000 Indians in line will likely die before they receive their green cards.”
A quick look at the Visa Bulletin will….confuse you…..but in a nutshell there are glaring inequities in the amount of time people have to wait for a green cards based mostly on things that we claim we don’t discriminate toward in the United States, like national origin or family relationships. It’s important to keep this in mind when politicians talk about “getting in line” and “doing it the right way”. To give a few examples, most Mexican nationals who hold green cards in the United States would have to wait over 20 years to bring over a adult sibling or adult son or daughter. Indian and Chinese skilled workers are forced to work for a single employer for 5-10 years (for the most part) during the prime of their professional lives before they can obtain a green card and enjoy the flexibility to seek better opportunities elsewhere. This is a freedom we expect and take for granted as Americans.
In a larger sense, these backlogs come down to two things: quotas and bureaucracy. These people are *eligible* for green cards, they meet the requirements. The system just tells them “you have to wait!” While Congress occasionally takes action to fix glaring inequities (goaded in the case of S. 386 by what looks to be a well-financed astroturfing operation on social media), as long as the system is set-up this way these inequities will continue to exist. Next week we will look at some big picture ideas on how to address these issues.
Myth Number 2: Green card holders can’t be deported!
This is a big one, and it involves a lot of sad stories. Anyone who follows immigration related topics on Twitter will often be treated to posts like this, which highlight cases where unfortunate green card holders land in deportation proceedings:
This is the story behind the statistics for a lot of the “we should only deport criminals” crowd. Thanks again to Mr. Bier at Cato for pointing this out:
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has for years worked tirelessly to portray its duties as working to protect Americans from criminals. Yet from 2009 to February 2017, only about half of ICE’s removals were of people who had committed any crime at all.“
Among those who did actually have a conviction, the vast majority were for non-violent offenses like shoplifting and property damage.
As we talked about a few weeks ago in our post on student visa fraud, the immigration system, particularly the enforcement arm, is driven by the need to juke their stats and show constant improvement in their numbers and efficiency. Who do you think is lower-hanging fruit in this scenario: a violent felon or a generally law-abiding green card holder who has fallen afoul of the criminal justice system for a non-violent offense?
This obviously runs counter to most people’s understanding about what is happening with deportations. They imagine violent felons and murderers being swept up in raids and quickly removed from the United States. They certainly don’t imagine a college student who grew up in the U.S. getting sent back to a foreign country by themselves for a bad decision like shoplifting.
Now of course the government is always going to have the responsibility to remove dangerous criminals from our midst, whether by locking them away in prisons or sending them back to their country of origin. The system as currently constructed simply puts the wrong incentives in place to do this effectively. Instead of conducting what amounts to a public relations campaign to appeal to the preconceptions of their respective voting blocs, politicians in both parties need to reorient the immigration enforcement arm of DHS to focus on investigations and apprehensions only for those criminals who are truly a public safety risk. With the reputation of ICE and CBP in tatters after repeated incidents of politicization and abuse, this kind of shift is critical to restore faith in those agencies and to recognize the truly important work they do when their resources are not being wasted on frivolous nonsense like this.
Myth Number 3: Once you have a green card, you keep it forever!
This one is virtually an article of faith among most applicants for permanent residence status so they are often in for a rude awakening when they are forced to give up their green card years later. Excluding the deportation issue mentioned above, there are a number of ways to lose your green card.
The first one, which is fairly common, is simply living outside the United States. After all, you are a “permanent resident”. The reasoning of the law goes, “if you aren’t living in the U.S., you aren’t a resident anymore”. Generally this will come into play if you are living and working outside the United States for a year or more. CBP has the power to yank a green card at Customs if they believe you have fallen afoul of this requirement, and they tend to be pretty arbitrary in enforcing it. Older folks who divide their time between the U.S. and another country seem to get a pass for the most part, while working age people tend to get looked at closer. We don’t have any definitive proof, but this discrepancy probably has to do with tax code enforcement more than anything else.
While this may seem like a reasonable requirement to some extent, it is really quite limiting. Remember that many of these people have immigrated to the United States from another country already, and they still have family and professional ties there. No American would accept a limitation like this on their ability to come and go from the U.S. and explore professional opportunities elsewhere. Especially when you consider how difficult it is to receive a green card in the first place, telling people you have to remain in the U.S. in perpetuity to keep it seems excessive, especially in the world we live in today.
The next area where people have issues relates to their “conditional” status. When certain types of green cards are issued USCIS gives them a shorter, 2 year duration and requires another form to be filed later on to remove the “conditional” status. This mostly affects couples that have been married for less than 2 years at the time they receive their green card (though certain investor categories also have this status). At the two year mark the adjudicator at USCIS basically gets a second pass at the green card holder, and people who have divorced in the interim receive additional scrutiny (especially if the adjudicator suspects the marriage was only performed for immigration purposes). If it is found that the relationship was fraudulent or an error was made in the initial application the official can pull the green card and put the person in removal proceedings at their discretion.
That brings us to the final case, which is in many cases the saddest of all. When you apply for U.S. citizenship the immigration system (USCIS in this case) gets one final review of your entire immigration history. Remember that this step can occur years or decades after you received your green card. If they uncover any information that would have rendered you ineligible for a green card, even if the mistake involved their own failure to identify or resolve an issue (by failing to require a waiver, for example), they can not only reject your citizenship application but can also make a finding that you received your green card improperly and take that away as well. As with our example above, this can mean that you land in deportation proceedings as without citizenship or a green card, you no longer have any legal status in the United States in most cases.
While these types of cases are relatively rare, it really puts the applicant in a bind. If they apply for citizenship, this issue may lead to their removal. But there is no way to resolve the issue without applying for that final benefit. Sadly this kind of scenario can make it impossible for a person to naturalize permanently, even if they live in the United States for most of their lives and meet all other requirements.
Well, we hope that this was enlightening. Next week we will, per the normal pattern, talk about some changes we’d like to see for the ol’ tarjeta verde. Thanks for reading!
In the news:
Court’s DACA ruling welcome news, but immigration reform needed, advocates say - It’s been very interesting to follow the DACA story since we started the newsletter last summer. Another major development last week, and people are hopeful for the program’s future again. I think the point made in this article is very important: relying on executive orders and rearguard actions fought in the court system is not enough. There is broad public support for a pathway to legal status and citizenship for this group, lawmakers need to see that manifest itself in the form of activism and advocacy to get over the finish line. Until then, as the person interviewed in the article mentions, there really won’t be any relief from the stress and uncertainty.
DHS nominee vows administration will ‘roll up sleeves’ and reform immigration on Day 1 - Starting to hear more from Mayorkas, though light on specifics. Still, he is hitting the right notes in this appearance. Near the end of the article is a theme that we expect to become very prominent next year, namely, whether immigration legislation is to follow the CIR (comprehensive immigration reform) or “piecemeal” model. While there are detractors and proponents for both approaches, the ultimate outcome of this debate will probably determine how immigration is handled legislatively for the next few decades. Stay tuned.