The Politics of Immigration (2nd Edition). David Wilson
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needed benefits.
But that doesn’t mean resettled refugees have it easy. They have often spent years or even decades languishing in refugee camps with no opportunities for employment or higher education. Many arrive speaking little or no English, and some have limited literacy or education in their native language. Others are highly educated but unable to make use of their qualifications in the United States. Despite these impediments, resettled refugees are required to find employment quickly after arriving; most benefits run out after ninety days. Like many other migrants, they are forced to accept physically challenging jobs with low pay, low status, no benefits, and long hours.
Refugees who are resettled in the United States are assigned to specific communities where they are “hosted” by nonprofit organizations working under contract with the federal government. Many of these communities are smaller cities, often with high rates of unemployment, where arriving refugees may face discrimination and resentment. After arriving, refugees are free to relocate on their own to anywhere within the United States, but when they do so, they may lose access to resettlement services and benefits. Still, many do move, especially to follow jobs. The meatpacking industry actively recruits recently arrived refugees.78
Are refugees sent home when their countries become safer?
In the United States, refugee and asylum status are supposed to offer permanent protection. A year after entering the United States, refugees must apply for permanent resident status; people who win asylum status may also seek permanent residency after a year but are not required to do so. After five years of residency, refugees and people who have been granted asylum can apply for U.S. citizenship.79
If they don’t become citizens, and are convicted of certain criminal offenses, even longtime permanent residents who came here as refugees can be sent back to their countries. This has happened, for example, to hundreds of Cambodian refugees—most of whom came to the United States as young children.80
In 1990, the U.S. government created Temporary Protected Status (TPS) as a reprieve from deportation for migrants whose homelands have suffered a severe environmental disaster, armed conflict, epidemic or other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions. TPS is not for refugees who flee these conditions, but rather for migrants who are already living in the United States when the traumatic event happens, to protect them from being sent back to a country in crisis. Anyone convicted of a felony or two misdemeanors is not eligible for TPS. As of July 2014, some 340,000 people were beneficiaries of TPS, more than 60 percent of them Salvadorans (212,000).
TPS temporarily protects beneficiaries from detention and deportation, and allows them to work legally here, but it doesn’t provide a path to lawful permanent residence or citizenship. The special status can be renewed—and has been, repeatedly, for nationals of several countries. But if the U.S. government doesn’t renew the status, its protections expire, and its beneficiaries can again be returned to their countries, no matter how long they have been in the United States. Even while the status remains available, those who qualify are required to re-register for it and renew their work authorization every year or so, a process that costs hundreds of dollars.81
CENTRAL AMERICANS: ASYLUM DENIED
From 1984 to 1990, while war raged in Central America, the United States granted asylum to 25 percent of the 48,000 applicants from Nicaragua, whose leftist government the U.S. administration violently opposed. Over the same period, only 2.6 percent of the 45,000 applicants from El Salvador and 1.8 percent of the 9,500 Guatemalan applicants won asylum—the rest were dismissed as “economic migrants.” At the time, both El Salvador and Guatemala had brutal right-wing governments closely allied with the United States and widely known to be responsible for serious human rights violations.82
U.S. religious and activist groups pressed the government to loosen its restrictions. More than 150 religious congregations openly defied immigration laws by offering sanctuary in places of worship for out-of-status refugees from Central America. The American Baptist Churches brought a class action suit against the U.S. government on behalf of the asylum seekers, which the government finally settled in 1991 by agreeing to reopen the cases of Salvadorans and Guatemalans who had applied for and been denied asylum in the 1980s.83
But by then the conflicts were ending. IIRIRA, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which Congress passed in 1996, allows the government to deny asylum by claiming that there has been “a fundamental change in circumstances” in the applicant’s country.84
A year later, in 1997, Congress passed the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act. Even as it addressed the disparate treatment of Central Americans, NACARA continued to privilege Nicaraguans, allowing those who had failed to win asylum to gain permanent legal residency, while granting some Guatemalans and Salvadorans a chance to seek “suspension of deportation” under pre-1996 terms. Under heavy pressure from the Haitian immigrant community, in 1998 Congress passed the Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act (HRIFA), allowing nearly 50,000 Haitians to finally seek permanent residence under a process similar to that extended to Nicaraguans under NACARA.85
4. Why Can’t They Just “Get Legal”?
SOME PEOPLE THINK WE’VE ALWAYS had two distinct types of immigrants in the United States: “legal” and “illegal.” The “legal” ones are people who “follow the rules” and “wait their turn in line,” whereas the “illegal” immigrants are seen as criminals who for some reason decided to “flout our laws” and “cut ahead in line.”
Such views suggest a sort of permanent caste system into which immigrants have always been sorted. In truth, immigrants have continued to come to the United States over the years in much the same ways they did in the past. What changed was not the immigrants but the laws. Illegality was constructed, imposed on people, and maintained through increasingly restrictive immigration laws.1 That means we can deconstruct it—and counteract its negative effects—by changing those laws.
What’s the difference between “legal” and “illegal”?
The distinction between “legal” and “illegal” isn’t as clear as many people imagine. Being without status is not a permanent condition. Immigrants who arrive legally may fall out of status. Some who were once undocumented have become U.S. citizens. Asylum seekers who are ordered deported can win their cases in the appeals courts and eventually gain permanent residency. And immigrants who have had permanent resident status for many years have been “de-legalized,” as the New York–based group Families for Freedom puts it, because of past criminal convictions, even minor ones.2 In short, the difference between an immigrant who is “legal” and one who is not is simply that one has been granted an opportunity to gain and keep legal status, and the other is being denied that opportunity.
News reports sometimes claim that “illegal” immigration is an affront to immigrants who do things the “right way.”3
But most authorized immigrants have family members and friends who are still trying to gain legal status, and they understand how difficult it is, so it’s not surprising that a majority feel sympathy for the undocumented. In a telephone survey of 800 authorized immigrants taken by Bendixen & Associates in early 2006 for New America Media, 68 percent supported granting out-of-status immigrants a temporary work permit and a way to gain legal residency.4
A November 2014 poll by the Latino Decisions firm showed 89 percent of Hispanic voters backing a plan by President Barack Obama for giving temporary legal status to as many as five million undocumented immigrants. The poll didn’t distinguish between native-born and naturalized voters, but after analyzing the poll, TalkingPointsMemo.com editor Josh Marshall concluded it was “pretty clear that legal immigrants do not feel victimized by leniency or legalization for undocumented immigrants.”5
How did immigration become “illegal”?
Immigration