Family Immigration Could Be Radically Reduced

What we need now are the stories. One year ago, hundreds of thousands of Americans, undocumented and documented, poured out onto the streets of America, raising their faces to the sun. Their faces told a story of small lives, humble, hard-working lives, raising families, cleaning homes, building America. It was hard to ignore those stories, to dismiss them as illegal. Those stories killed House Bill HR4437 that would have turned the storytellers into criminals.

But the future of immigration reform remains murky, caught up in the House and the Senate, ensnared in Presidential election politics. Now comes news that the White House is floating a new immigration proposal. While the public debate still remains focused on the how-do-we-solve-the-problem-of-12-million-undocumented, the White House proposal tears down another pillar of immigration policy – family reunification.

Every year thousands of Americans with legal papers wait patiently for their families to join them from the homeland. Wives, parents, adult children – all wait anxiously in Manila and Mumbai for the call to the American embassy for that immigration interview. It’s an excruciatingly slow process but it still moves. Instead of cutting the red tape and bureaucracy
that keeps families apart for years, the White House is moving in the other direction, warns advocates like Karen Narasaki, president of the Asian American Justice Center.

How about cutting the parents quota by half, capping it at 50,000? Never mind that almost 100,000 petition to join their children every year.

How about completely eliminating entire categories of family immigration? Sibling and adult children of American citizens are just out of luck, turned by a stroke of the pen from family members into strangers in the eyes of the law.

And here’s an effective way to shorten the queue. Let’s arbitrarily set May 2005 as the cut-off date. Anyone who applied after that date, it’s as if they never applied at all.

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