The Politics of Immigration (2nd Edition). David Wilson
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maximum; in fiscal year 2013 it was 430,907, and this was normal. Less than half the people who get permanent status are entering the United States from outside; the majority are already living here. The result is that the number of slots open for people coming from abroad is about 250,000 each year for everyone except refugees, asylees, and members of U.S. citizens’ immediate families.
Within this number there are still more limits. For example, no country gets more than 7 percent of the immigrant visas available in a given year. In 2012, there were 1,316,118 Mexicans on waiting lists for the visas, while the highest number of Mexicans that could be accepted under the 7 percent rule was 47,250.22
Can’t immigrants bring their extended families here?
If you’re a U.S. citizen, you can generally apply to bring your “immediate relatives”—spouses, parents or unmarried children under twenty-one—here as permanent residents, although there are plenty of hoops to jump through, and it’s not always quick or easy. For other types of “family preferences,” an even more complex set of rules lays out “priority” categories and annual caps based on the family relationship and country of origin. Waiting times of ten to twenty years are not uncommon. In February 2015 the government was still processing family visa applications from as far back as August 1991. While they wait, applicants are disqualified from visiting the United States because they have shown “immigrant intent” by applying for immigrant visas.23
Some conservatives now object to the “family preference” system, but it was actually introduced into the 1965 Immigration Act as a concession to conservative politicians who wanted to keep Asians and Africans out of the United States. Family preferences would mean “there will not be, comparatively, many Asians or Africans entering the country,” Representative Emmanuel Celler, a liberal New York Democrat who cosponsored the 1965 law, said in Congress during the final debate on the bill, “Since the people of Africa and Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could immigrate from those countries because they have no family ties to the U.S.”24
What about the work visa and the “visa lottery”?
The government can also issue up to 140,000 immigrant visas a year for five categories of workers, and each of these has its own numerical limitations. The categories include professionals, people with special skills, and cultural or sports figures. There are openings for religious workers, former U.S. government employees, and investors, but only 5,000 visas can be issued to unskilled workers.25
In 1986, Congress created a temporary category of “diversity” visas to bolster immigration from Europe, which had slowed thanks to a growing European economy.26 The Immigration Act of 1990 made the program permanent starting in 1995. The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, often called the “visa lottery,” allocates 50,000 immigrant visas to different parts of the world under a formula favoring regions that have sent relatively few immigrants in the previous five years. Natives of countries that have sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States during the past five years are disqualified from participating in the lottery.27
“YACHT PEOPLE”
The Immigration Reform Act, signed by President George H. W. Bush on November 29, 1990, created a new category of visa for millionaire investors. Up to 10,000 immigrant visas a year were made available under the EB-5 category to anyone investing $1 million into a U.S. business and creating at least ten jobs for U.S. citizens. The investment can be smaller—$500,000—if made in rural or “high unemployment areas.”28
“We’ve done a great job on boat people,” Harold Ezell, former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) western regional commissioner, said in 1991. “I see no problem with a few yacht people.” After leaving his INS post in 1989, Ezell began marketing investor visas to wealthy foreigners.29 Ezell was one of a number of government officials who pushed for the investor visa program, then left for the private sector to reap profits from it, as revealed in a February 2000 Baltimore Sun exposé.30
Those profits were boosted when INS deputy general counsel Paul Virtue issued legal opinions in 1993 and 1995 loosening the rules for the investor visas. The controversial rules were reversed in late 1997, and the scandal led the U.S. Justice Department’s inspector general to launch an investigation in 1998 into the “appearance of impropriety” in the behavior of high-level government employees. The investigation concluded that Virtue had arranged special access to key agency officials for a private company, American Immigration Services (AIS). The Inspector General’s office closed the case without taking further action in October 1999, and its report was kept secret.31
The program started off slowly but grew each year, from 179 visas issued in 2005 to over 3,000 in 2012. In 2014 the number of visas issued reached the 10,000 maximum for the first time, with 9,128 of them going to Chinese nationals. One favorite “high unemployment area” has been Manhattan’s West Side, where some 1,200 Chinese millionaires have invested in the $20 billion Hudson Yards project. The Atlantic noted in 2015 that the project actually “is on the edge of one of the richest neighborhoods in the country.”32
Is it easy for people to come here as tourists?
As of December 2015, citizens of thirty-eight countries were eligible for the Visa Waiver Program (VWP), meaning they didn’t need to apply for a visa to visit the United States for ninety days or less. This waiver covers most of Europe, New Zealand, Australia, and several of the wealthier Asian nations: Brunei, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Chile, added to the list in 2014, is the only Western Hemisphere country that qualifies. Citizens of Bermuda and Canada can visit without visas through a separate program.33
In the rest of the world, the average citizen has a difficult time qualifying for a U.S. visitor visa (B visa). To apply, you may have to wait in long lines, pay hefty application fees, and travel to another city for an in-person visa interview. To get a visa, you must convince a consular officer that you don’t plan to stay in the United States, generally by demonstrating that you have a stable job or a profitable business, close family ties in your country, several thousand dollars in the bank, and a home or other property. Many people who would like to visit don’t bother applying, since they expect to be rejected.34
Consular officers have “sole authority to approve or deny” visa applications; there is no appeal process for those who are denied.35 In the early 1990s, the U.S. consulate in São Paulo, Brazil, routinely denied visas to applicants who “looked poor”—which generally meant they had darker skin—regardless of other criteria. Officers would mark applications with abbreviations such as “LP” (looks poor), “TP” (talks poor), or “LR” (looks rough), according to a lawsuit brought by a fired consular officer who objected to the discrimination. In January 1998, a U.S. federal judge ruled that the screening policies used at the consulate in São Paulo from 1992 to 1994 were “clearly illegal.”36
For those whose applications are approved, “a visa does not guarantee entry into the United States,” as the U.S. State Department website warned in 2015. The final decision on whether to let someone into the country is in fact made by a U.S. immigration officer at the port of entry. You can have a valid visa in hand and still be turned away at the airport and put on the next flight home, with no explanation, because of an arbitrary decision by an immigration officer.37
Aren’t there lots of other ways to come here with visas?
There is a whole alphabet soup of temporary visa categories, each with its own set of confusing and restrictive rules. Most of the people who have been displaced by economic and political crises around the world don’t fit any of these categories.
To get a student visa, you have to show you have strong ties in your home country and enough money to support yourself and pay your full-time tuition without working outside school. A massive database known as SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System), mandated under the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), links school records