Fox News Latino, a site with over two million unique visitors each month, yesterday published a commentary from me on how to address the decades-long feud over illegal immigration. If you follow this blog, you’ll know I write on immigration plenty, towards a common ground resolution of a more open and welcoming legal immigration process.
When I tell Americans that the immigration process is like dealing with DMV, they laugh. Actually, it’s far worse. Not only do immigration officials have guns and want to invade your privacy with any sniff of nonconformity, they seem to take pleasure in humiliating those who seek to enter the United States.
In almost all cases, approval for either employment or residence in the United States is both unnecessarily time-consuming and expensive. And that is only when a legal route exists.
If you are “unskilled” and do not have immediate relatives residing in the United States, good luck. Your wait time for a green card approaches infinity, and the token gesture of the Diversity Lottery sees one tenth of one percent of applicants successfully immigrate. Even the lottery has education requirements and excludes the very countries where people most wish to come from: Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador, for example.
It’s no wonder then why so many individuals, primarily out of economic desperation, have chosen to disobey immigration laws and come anyway.
