I'm sure you've heard this phrase before.
"I support immigration, but only LEGAL immigration.
I love immigrants, but I think they have to come here LEGALLY."
And while this can sound reasonable, it actually demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of immigration
policy and why people immigrate.
First of all, legal immigration is not easy.
For many, it's not even possible.
It's not like if you're a good person, you can just apply to immigrate, and they'll let
you come on in.
I think people have this idea that immigrants look at their options, immigrating with documents
or immigrate without documents, and just go, "Hm, I guess I'm eligible for legal immigration,
but that's annoying and hard.
It'd be so much easier to just immigrate illegally."
But that couldn't be farther from the truth.
Immigrating without documents is extremely dangerous, and people have no guarantee of
their safety during their journey or even once they're in the US, since they'll
be afraid to go to the police.
The decision to immigrate without documents is not one that is made lightly.
It's a huge decision with a lot of risks; it's not an easier path by any means.
But for some people, it can be the only path.
Many wonderful people are not eligible for immigrant visas.
The kinds of visas the US issues are very narrow and meant to only take in a certain
kind of person, generally wealthy people -- like people who can afford to get a high-level
education that gets them an employer-sponsored visa, or people who can afford to buy a $1
million dollar EB-5 visa.
And some might choose to immigrate without documents because it's faster and they don't
have time to wait.
Legal immigration is often a years-long process.
It's incredibly difficult and convoluted, it includes hurdles that not everyone can
get over, and there's no guarantee of a visa at the end of it.
So you might end up spending years working towards a visa that you're ultimately denied.
If someone has to leave their country right now for whatever reason, they don't have
years to wait around.
If their safety is threatened, or they're starving, they can't just wait years for
a visa to be approved.
They might not make it that long.
And on top of that, our system for legal immigration is not an objective reality devoid of any
sort of biases.
It's a system made by people, their biases included.
And historically, it's been incredibly racist.
The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barred virtually all immigration from China.
Then, the 1907 "Gentlemen's Agreement" did a similar thing for immigration from Japan.
The 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act expanded this ban to other Asian and Middle Eastern countries.
The Immigration Act of 1924 brought all of this together and barred immigration from
most Asian countries.
In 1943, the Magnuson Act ended the ban on Chinese immigration... by allowing a whopping
105 people from China to immigrate to the US every year.
The Immigration Act of 1965 finally ended bans based on country of origin -- kind of.
Because there are a bunch of different types of visas, and each of those has a different
cap on how many can be given out each year.
But across the board for family-sponsored and employment-sponsored visas -- the two
main forms of immigrant visas -- no country is allowed to have more than 7% of the total visas available.
So every country has the exact same cap, regardless of their population.
Guess who that hurts?
Anyone from a high-population country, like India or China, or countries where there's
a high demand for immigrating to the US, like Mexico or El Salvador or the Phillipines.
Meanwhile, some countries with low populations and low demand for immigrating to the US,
like Sweden or France, never use anywhere close to the percentage of visas that they're allotted.
So that means that every year, thousands of available visas are not claimed because they're
allotted to countries that don't need them, instead of countries that do -- because of
this arbitrary 7% rule.
And what that ends up doing is creating a backlog or a waitlist for countries with high
populations or high demand for immigration.
Visas for "immediate relatives" of US citizens -- so spouses, unmarried minor child,
and parents -- are usually processed within a year.
But visas for "extended family," like adult children or brothers or sisters usually
take around 10 years, and in some countries can take as long as 20 years.
Visas for extended family are capped at about 226,000 per year, each broken up into smaller categories.
While visas for immediate family members are technically unlimited, there's a "worldwide
cap" on family-based immigration of 480,000 people per year.
So if extended family members use 226,000 visas per year, that only leaves 254,000 visas
per year for immediate family members.
That's how backlogs get created.
And then there are employment-based visas, which are capped at 140,000 people per year.
That's really not a lot.
And it hasn't changed since 1990, even though the world's population has exploded in the last 27 years.
There are also diversity visas, but only 50,000 of those are given out per year, and they're completely random.
It's just a lottery system.
Plus, many of the countries with the highest demand for immigration to the US, like Mexico,
El Salvador, and the Phillipines, are not eligible.
And then there are people who are let in through the refugee program.
It's a really complicated, long, thorough process that I can't fully go over in this
video, but I'll try to simplify it as much as possible.
Basically, if you're in a country where the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
is working to resettle refugees, you can try to apply for resettlement after you've fled
to a second country.
From there, typically less than 1% of these people are identified as the "most vulnerable"
and allowed to apply for resettlement in a third-country.
You don't get to choose your third country, and the process can take years while you wait
in a refugee camp.
Then, if all of that is approved, you might go to the US.
The US had been accepting more refugees recently -- in 2016 they brought in about 85,000 -- but
the Trump administration cut that down to 50,000 this year and put a 120-day ban on
accepting any refugees back in March of this year.
So your chances of getting to the US as a refugee are extremely slim.
You can also try to come to the US and apply for asylum, but that's also a really risky move.
Less than half of asylum applications are granted, and it can depend entirely on the
judge and what they think of your situation.
If you don't have tons of paperwork and hard evidence that you were fleeing persecution,
you could be denied.
And if you're denied asylum, they will deport you back to the country you were fleeing from
-- which is most asylum-seekers' worst fear.
In 2015, only about 21,000 asylum applications were granted.
Not to mention that all these different types of visas and caps and systems are arbitrary
and invented by the same kinds of racist old white men who banned all Asian immigration
just a few decades earlier.
Lots of people need or desperately want to come here who aren't "high-skilled" workers
in the fields that the visas require, or who don't have family members here.
That means they can't immigrate here legally.
The immigration system was designed not to create a path for anyone who deserved it,
but to let in a small number of people who could benefit the US without changing its
demographic too much.
You see, until 1965, immigration heavily favored people from Western Europe, so white people.
The only reason so many racist assholes think this is a white country is because white people
were in power and deciding that way more white people should be allowed to immigrate here
than people of color.
Even in 1965, when the quota system was officially scrapped, the 7% rule has a similar effect
of capping immigration from countries that largely have people of color, while allowing
easier immigration for people from countries that largely have white people.
But, the 1965 Immigration Act did change the demographics of the US quite a bit.
We're a much more diverse country now because of it.
But that wasn't the intention of the people who created it.
Even Lyndon B. Johnson, when he signed the bill into law, said, "This bill that we
will sign today is not a revolutionary bill.
It does not affect the lives of millions.
It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or, really, add importantly to either
our wealth or our power."
Because this was a common fear at the time for many white people and particularly white legislators.
They were afraid that revamping the immigration system could eventually lead to a demographic shift.
In other words, they were afraid that too many people of color would come here.
They were threatened by the idea that they wouldn't be the majority any more, that
they wouldn't be able to make all the rules and call all the shots.
And so their immigration policy reflected that.
While it did do a lot of good, and it did change the landscape of the US quite a bit,
it's still pretty racist.
It still has that fear of people of color immigrating here built into it.
It is in need of a massive overhaul that it's definitely not going to get with the current administration.
And we're supposed to expect that the immigration system lets in everybody who deserves to be let in?
We're supposed to trust that system?
We're supposed to funnel everybody into that system regardless of their situation?
That's bullshit.
It's a bad system intended to keep out anyone who these old racist white people were afraid of.
And that includes people of color, but it also includes other marginalized groups.
Did you know that gay people were not allowed to immigrate to the US until 1990?
That's only 27 years ago.
If you were gay, but otherwise qualified to come to the US, you would have been denied
a visa prior to 1990.
So if you were gay in 1985 and absolutely needed to escape your home country because
of poverty or violence or discrimination, what would you do?
Most likely, you'd come to the US anyway, and you'd have to do so without documents.
But you know what, the law that was keeping you out was a shit law.
You should not be branded a criminal or an "illegal alien" for the rest of your life
simply because one time you broke a shit law.
Laws that allowed slavery to exist were shit laws.
Jim Crow segregation laws were shit laws.
Anti-sodomy laws were shit laws.
The last of the US's anti-sodomy laws weren't struck down until 2003.
If you're a man and you had sex with a man before 2003, you broke a shit law.
Breaking shit laws is good and sometimes necessary.
Sometimes horrible stuff is legislated and 100% legal.
Civil rights leader John Lewis called it #goodtrouble when he was arrested for using a whites-only bathroom.
We shouldn't demonize people who break shit laws or who break laws out of necessity.
People do what they gotta do.
People who are about to starve to death will steal food.
That's okay.
You can't tell someone that they should starve to preserve their morality.
People who are going to be beaten to death in their home country will flee and seek safety
in a new country.
You have to be understanding.
People who have nowhere to sleep at night will sleep somewhere where it's illegal to
loiter or sleep or whatever.
That's okay.
People will do illegal things in desperate times, and the only reason you haven't broken
the law is because you haven't been in their situation.
I know so many good, decent, law-abiding parents who would do anything to protect their children
and give them a better life.
And the only difference between them and the parents of Dreamers are that they are fortunate
enough to not have to flee their country.
So many parents would, if they had to, make the exact same decisions that the parents
of Dreamers have made.
You can only sit on your high moral ground because you were fucking born there.
It's sheer luck.
So yeah, maybe someone coming here without documents was illegal,
but that doesn't make them illegal.
So many drunk ass frat boys have DUIs on their records but they're not branded as "illegals"
for the rest of their lives.
Most Americans drink before the legal age of 21 but they're not branded "illegals".
But they broke the law, so why not?
Because the term "illegal immigrant" or "illegal alien" is meant to dehumanize immigrants specifically.
Doing an illegal thing once in your life does not make you illegal.
Plus, there is legal precedent for granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants.
In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act
granted legal status to 2.7 million undocumented immigrants.
That bill was signed into law by Ronald Fucking Reagan.
That's how bipartisan treating immigrants with compassion used to be.
I mean, don't get me wrong, Reagan was a piece of shit, and the IRCA had really shitty parts
too, but the GOP is way worse now.
The only difference between an undocumented immigrant who got legal status in 1986 and
an undocumented immigrant today, is that Congress actually fucking did something in 1986 and
granted them legal status.
For some reason, I can't see that happening any time soon, even though undocumented immigrants
today still deserve amnesty -- just as they did in 1986.
The only reason undocumented immigrants are "illegals" to you is because congress is too
useless and heartless to grant them legal status.
But amnesty is the only way forward.
You can't just send all of the 11 million undocumented immigrants who are currently
living in the US back to the countries they came from.
It's not only logistically impossible but also immoral as fuck.
These are people.
Human beings with lives.
If you'd send somebody back to a country that they risked everything to get away from, then
you don't have an ounce of compassion in your body.
No one comes here because it's easy or fun or a free ride.
They come here because it's the only choice they have.
And we can't look down on them for making that choice and that sacrifice.
Undocumented immigrants are braver and stronger than most Americans.
They know turmoil many of us couldn't dream of.
We have to support the Dreamers, but we also have to support their parents and every undocumented
person in this country.
Our immigration system is shit and people do what they gotta do to live and prosper.
We can't fault them for that.
You should support all immigration -- legal or "illegal".
These are human beings.
We have room for them.
They deserve to be here.
Try to extend your compassion beyond your borders.
People need your support even if they were not born in this country.
Anyway, that's all I had for you today.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.
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