I haven’t been much of a fan of House Minority
Leader Pelosi since she first rudely turned her back on Prime Minister
Netanyahu when he came to address Congress about the Iran deal in the spring of
2015 and then tetchily exited the chamber before he even left the podium. But I
do have to say I was impressed by marathon oration she delivered in the House
last week on behalf of the so-called Dreamers, a speech in which she read
personal accounts written by young people facing deportation if no way out of our
nation’s immigration quagmire is found, quoted the Bible at length, and
attempted to cast the issue as a moral issue rather than a political one, let
alone a legal matter best assigned to our nation’s criminal justice system for
handling. Man, she went on! The speech lasted more than eight hours, possibly
the longest speech ever in the House of Representatives and definitely the
longest since 1909, when a representative from Missouri spoke for more than five
hours about some now-long-forgotten issue related to tariffs and taxes. I was
impressed, and not solely by her apparently iron-clad bladder (although by that
too): I was also impressed that was able to remain standing in four-inch high
heels for the length of her entire speech. And, yes, also by her rhetoric, behind
which were lurking the various issues that I’d like to write about this week,
and foremost among them the issue itself of the Dreamers, which term has become
the almost universally used name for individuals brought to this country
illegally as children and now facing deportation as illegal aliens unless
Congress can find some sort of solution to what has become one of thorniest and
intractable issues facing the nation.
As everybody surely knows by now (even without listening to Minority Leader Pelosi’s speech), President Obama announced in June of 2012 that his administration was going to stop deporting undocumented immigrants who meet the criteria set forth in the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, a legislative proposal first introduced in the Senate by Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) in 2001, but which has never been enacted into law. The criteria are few and simple: to qualify under the act, a young person would have to have been under age 16 when arriving here, to have lived here for more than five years before the enactment of the bill into law, to have been between 12 and 35 at the time of the bill’s enactment, to be of good moral character (which the act leaves undefined but which appears mostly to mean that the individual has never been arrested and/or charged with too serious a crime), and to be enrolled in school if not already a high school graduate or in possession of a GED.
So that was then. But now that program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is coming to an end. Last September, President Trump announced that the Obama-era program was going to be wound down and instructed the Department of Homeland Security to stop processing new or renewal applications. The President then challenged Congress to deal with the issue by passing legislation that would incorporate a program for dealing with the Dreamers, which sympathetic name the President himself uses all the time in public discourse. That, as everybody knows, hasn’t happened. And so the first of those who were eligible to stay under the DACA program are facing deportation as early as next month.
The issue is a complicated one for all of us, but particularly for people like myself.
On the one hand, I myself am descended from immigrants who came here not to escape war or to save their lives per se (although it can’t be considered irrelevant that they would almost surely have been murdered with the rest of their Jewish neighbors had they stayed home in Nowy Dwór), but merely (merely!) to seek a better life in a free land characterized by almost unlimited opportunity for all. So to claim that the siren call of everything that truly makes America great—our prosperity, our values, our rigorous dedication to the promotion and preservation of human rights, our justice system, our lack of a national religion that by its nature condemns the faithful of all other religious groups to outsider status, our representative democracy, and the impartiality of our justice system—to declare myself simply unable to seize why anyone would want to leave his or her homeland and settle here instead is to deny the reality of my own family’s story. How could any patriotic citizen not understand why others would want to live here?
On the other hand, however, I am not only descended from immigrants but also married to one. And to bring Joan here—and to procure first a Green Card and then full citizenship for her—that, was no simple undertaking. There were, as most readers probably don’t know from first-hand experience, a gazillion hoops to jump through: countless forms to fill out, affidavits to attest to, oaths to take, interviews to schedule and then successfully to complete, and years upon years of waiting until it was finally Joan’s turn to appear in Citizenship Court to take her oath of allegiance to our nation and then proudly and enthusiastically to register on the spot to vote. We followed all the rules…so at the same time I am influenced by my forebears’ history I am also influenced by my own family’s experience.
Does it matter to me that it cost us a fortune in lawyers’ fees to make this all happen correctly and in as timely a manner as possible? The truth is that that detail works on me in both directions at once, both making me irritated with people who opt to save their money (and we are talking about a lot of money here) by just skipping the whole procedural nightmare and instead choosing to live here illegally, but also making me sympathetic to people who simply cannot afford to hire an immigrant lawyer to smooth their path forward and who therefore have no choice but to attempt to negotiate this truly impenetrable thicket of confusing rules, picayune details, and nearly-incomprehensible forms on their own and, for the vast most part, in a second or third language they may not even speak perfectly fluently. Yet, you are theoretically allowed just to fill out the forms on your own without a lawyer’s guidance. But saying that is the equivalent of saying that you are allowed to fill out your income tax forms on your own (and with your own soon-to-be-non-deductible pencil) and mail them in without any help or advice from an accountant…or at least an on-line tax-bot programmed to review your work and point out all the errors you made.
The endless harping on the moral character of the Dreamers strikes me as hugely irrelevant: one of the glories of our republic is supposed to be the blindness of a justice system that treats everybody fairly and equally, specifically not allowing extraneous details to influence the decision of a judge or jury with respect to an accused person’s guilt.
Far more relevant, in my opinion, is the fact that the initial illegal act in question here—a non-citizen coming to this country without permission and settling here illegally—was by definition undertaken by DACA-eligible young adults as children in their parents’ care. Some were babies, but even those who were toddlers or older children can hardly be made to suffer forever because of their parents’ bad deeds. Indeed, the real reason the Dreamers’ plight is so popular to talk about is precisely because it is so much easier to imagine their dilemma being resolved than their parents’, not to mention the other 11 million or so undocumented foreign citizens living illegally in this country, none of whom can claim that they were brought here by someone else and all of whom made the conscious decision to see if they could get away with breaking the laws that govern immigration to our country.
For the Dreamers, though, I have a solution to propose.
The rule—the entirely sensible rule—is generally that citizens of other countries have to apply to come here as would-be immigrants while still residing in their countries of origin. But what if that specific rule were to be relaxed in this one instance? What if we were to require Dreamers to acquire passports from whatever country they are actual citizens, and then to apply to “emigrate” from their home country but without insisting that they actually set up residence there? That would require bending the rules a bit. But it would lead to two good things: requiring the Dreamers themselves to own up to the fact that they are citizens of the countries that they actually are citizens of (it’s a sign of how strange this whole situation is that that sounds like a radical idea, even to me) and requiring that our government exert itself to solve a problem tearing our nation apart merely by bending a procedural rule slightly. Just for the record, Joan applied for her Green Card both times while resident in the U.S., something permitted to her because on both occasions—when we first married and then when we returned here after sixteen years abroad—she was here fully legally. So it’s not like it doesn’t happen ever. It’s just not supposed to happen to people who aren’t here legally. That’s the detail I am proposing we relax in this one instance.
After that, the process should be the same one that applies whenever anyone applies to come here as an immigrant. For persons deemed worthy, the path should open up to acquire first a Green Card and then, eventually, to become a citizen. Persons not approved for immigration should be helped, financially if necessary, to return home…and that should be the rule even if that person doesn’t think of that country as home at all. What can’t go on forever is this ever-burgeoning numbers of illegals: we need to find a way either to make the undocumented among us into citizens or to help them find their way back to their home countries. Hoping the problem will go away if we ignore it long enough is not a rational plan forward for our country.
As everybody surely knows by now (even without listening to Minority Leader Pelosi’s speech), President Obama announced in June of 2012 that his administration was going to stop deporting undocumented immigrants who meet the criteria set forth in the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, a legislative proposal first introduced in the Senate by Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) in 2001, but which has never been enacted into law. The criteria are few and simple: to qualify under the act, a young person would have to have been under age 16 when arriving here, to have lived here for more than five years before the enactment of the bill into law, to have been between 12 and 35 at the time of the bill’s enactment, to be of good moral character (which the act leaves undefined but which appears mostly to mean that the individual has never been arrested and/or charged with too serious a crime), and to be enrolled in school if not already a high school graduate or in possession of a GED.
So that was then. But now that program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is coming to an end. Last September, President Trump announced that the Obama-era program was going to be wound down and instructed the Department of Homeland Security to stop processing new or renewal applications. The President then challenged Congress to deal with the issue by passing legislation that would incorporate a program for dealing with the Dreamers, which sympathetic name the President himself uses all the time in public discourse. That, as everybody knows, hasn’t happened. And so the first of those who were eligible to stay under the DACA program are facing deportation as early as next month.
The issue is a complicated one for all of us, but particularly for people like myself.
On the one hand, I myself am descended from immigrants who came here not to escape war or to save their lives per se (although it can’t be considered irrelevant that they would almost surely have been murdered with the rest of their Jewish neighbors had they stayed home in Nowy Dwór), but merely (merely!) to seek a better life in a free land characterized by almost unlimited opportunity for all. So to claim that the siren call of everything that truly makes America great—our prosperity, our values, our rigorous dedication to the promotion and preservation of human rights, our justice system, our lack of a national religion that by its nature condemns the faithful of all other religious groups to outsider status, our representative democracy, and the impartiality of our justice system—to declare myself simply unable to seize why anyone would want to leave his or her homeland and settle here instead is to deny the reality of my own family’s story. How could any patriotic citizen not understand why others would want to live here?
On the other hand, however, I am not only descended from immigrants but also married to one. And to bring Joan here—and to procure first a Green Card and then full citizenship for her—that, was no simple undertaking. There were, as most readers probably don’t know from first-hand experience, a gazillion hoops to jump through: countless forms to fill out, affidavits to attest to, oaths to take, interviews to schedule and then successfully to complete, and years upon years of waiting until it was finally Joan’s turn to appear in Citizenship Court to take her oath of allegiance to our nation and then proudly and enthusiastically to register on the spot to vote. We followed all the rules…so at the same time I am influenced by my forebears’ history I am also influenced by my own family’s experience.
Does it matter to me that it cost us a fortune in lawyers’ fees to make this all happen correctly and in as timely a manner as possible? The truth is that that detail works on me in both directions at once, both making me irritated with people who opt to save their money (and we are talking about a lot of money here) by just skipping the whole procedural nightmare and instead choosing to live here illegally, but also making me sympathetic to people who simply cannot afford to hire an immigrant lawyer to smooth their path forward and who therefore have no choice but to attempt to negotiate this truly impenetrable thicket of confusing rules, picayune details, and nearly-incomprehensible forms on their own and, for the vast most part, in a second or third language they may not even speak perfectly fluently. Yet, you are theoretically allowed just to fill out the forms on your own without a lawyer’s guidance. But saying that is the equivalent of saying that you are allowed to fill out your income tax forms on your own (and with your own soon-to-be-non-deductible pencil) and mail them in without any help or advice from an accountant…or at least an on-line tax-bot programmed to review your work and point out all the errors you made.
The endless harping on the moral character of the Dreamers strikes me as hugely irrelevant: one of the glories of our republic is supposed to be the blindness of a justice system that treats everybody fairly and equally, specifically not allowing extraneous details to influence the decision of a judge or jury with respect to an accused person’s guilt.
Far more relevant, in my opinion, is the fact that the initial illegal act in question here—a non-citizen coming to this country without permission and settling here illegally—was by definition undertaken by DACA-eligible young adults as children in their parents’ care. Some were babies, but even those who were toddlers or older children can hardly be made to suffer forever because of their parents’ bad deeds. Indeed, the real reason the Dreamers’ plight is so popular to talk about is precisely because it is so much easier to imagine their dilemma being resolved than their parents’, not to mention the other 11 million or so undocumented foreign citizens living illegally in this country, none of whom can claim that they were brought here by someone else and all of whom made the conscious decision to see if they could get away with breaking the laws that govern immigration to our country.
For the Dreamers, though, I have a solution to propose.
The rule—the entirely sensible rule—is generally that citizens of other countries have to apply to come here as would-be immigrants while still residing in their countries of origin. But what if that specific rule were to be relaxed in this one instance? What if we were to require Dreamers to acquire passports from whatever country they are actual citizens, and then to apply to “emigrate” from their home country but without insisting that they actually set up residence there? That would require bending the rules a bit. But it would lead to two good things: requiring the Dreamers themselves to own up to the fact that they are citizens of the countries that they actually are citizens of (it’s a sign of how strange this whole situation is that that sounds like a radical idea, even to me) and requiring that our government exert itself to solve a problem tearing our nation apart merely by bending a procedural rule slightly. Just for the record, Joan applied for her Green Card both times while resident in the U.S., something permitted to her because on both occasions—when we first married and then when we returned here after sixteen years abroad—she was here fully legally. So it’s not like it doesn’t happen ever. It’s just not supposed to happen to people who aren’t here legally. That’s the detail I am proposing we relax in this one instance.
After that, the process should be the same one that applies whenever anyone applies to come here as an immigrant. For persons deemed worthy, the path should open up to acquire first a Green Card and then, eventually, to become a citizen. Persons not approved for immigration should be helped, financially if necessary, to return home…and that should be the rule even if that person doesn’t think of that country as home at all. What can’t go on forever is this ever-burgeoning numbers of illegals: we need to find a way either to make the undocumented among us into citizens or to help them find their way back to their home countries. Hoping the problem will go away if we ignore it long enough is not a rational plan forward for our country.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.