November 2009 / vol. 6 issue 3
| Maybe the U.S. should issue toll tags. Illustration by lewis chang |
Close Encounters
Debate about illegal aliens overshadows real immigration reform
November 4, 2008, was declared a historic turn in American politics and government as Barack Hussein Obama rode his campaign promise of “change we can believe in” into the White House. Obama’s platform was essentially based on reversing eight years of Bush Administration policy and leading America in a new direction.
In some ways, he has succeeded greatly in his first nine months in office — he was recognized as this year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate for creating “a new climate in international politics.” The Nobel committee also recognized his ability to give “people hope for a better future.” However, to us soon-to-be Americans, Obama is echoing the same tired, destructive policies we have had to live with for years — and I think it’s time for some change on that front.
For starters, remember that border fence that the Bush administration proposed, the butt of late-night talk show jokes? If you thought that such dishearteningly unreasonable political plots were behind us, think again. A recent Washington Post article called Obama out on this issue, stating that he has “embraced several Bush administration initiatives”, including continuing the construction of the $8 billion virtual border fence (cameras) along parts of the U.S.-Mexico border.
It’s politically flashy, headline grabbing schemes like this that keep Americans from focusing on the real issue: comprehensive legal reform for all immigrants. Politicians keep telling us horror stories about indefinite numbers of illegal immigrants hiding among us, but there are more than 10 million legal immigrants in the United States right now, living in the shadows of this controversy, just looking for help to get through the process to rightful citizenship.
Those legal immigrants have to fight through a process that is unfair and unjust. For instance, two years ago, the U.S. government voted to double mandatory fees on all immigration paperwork. Thus, immigrants’ welcoming gift into these United States includes a grand old heaping of taxation without representation — oh, the irony.
In case you’re curious, the price tag on naturalized U.S. citizenship now reads $675. A substantial, but worthy, amount, you might say — until you factor in the fact that many immigrants arrive as families. They have already had to pay for a long journey to the border, and most of them are only at the beginning of that American dream.
Furthermore, the system is so backed up that physical forms can expire before one’s application is reached, forcing immigrants to redo their applications and be put back at the bottom of the stack. The wait to get a green card can drag on so long that immigrants have to fly back to their home countries for new visas — in some cases multiple times.
Is this what the greatest superpower on Earth aspires to? A system that suppresses the hopes of millions of legal immigrants trying to walk the right path but crushed under financial burden and voiceless to change the bureaucracy? In the meantime, the American government is too busy manipulating its citizenry with horror stories about the supposed millions of illegal immigrants that waltz across the border every day, turning the people’s minds away from the real issue.
It was originally encouraging when Obama announced his plans to make it a first year priority to introduce “comprehensive immigration legislation” — I found out that his plan would, according to The New York Times, “make legal status possible for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.” Wow. Way to slap 10 million people in the face, Mr. President. You would think that a president who lived abroad for much of his childhood and whose father was an immigrant would have a little more sensitivity towards immigrants of all origins.
However, under his new plan, the federal government would simply recognize that illegal immigrants violated the law, and then impose fines and other penalties to fit the offense — essentially the same immigration fees that legal immigrants paid willingly.
Can you imagine how that makes legal immigrants feel? I’ll tell you that I certainly can, because I’m one of them — have been since I moved here from the Netherlands 10 years ago. Obama is just playing the big-daddy, faux Nobel high-road card: giving these lawbreakers a stern shake of the finger, asking for a few bribery dollars, and then handing them a green card. Suddenly, the political “issue” of millions of immigrants “hiding amongst us” disappears, because Obama has found a convenient bureaucratic way to dissolve the dilemma. Americans will turn back to their daily lives, satisfied with that resolution to the “great immigration debate”, none the wiser that there are still millions of legal immigrants in the shadows watching powerlessly as others are simply handed the tickets into America that they have to earn.
So Mr. Obama, I am not convinced by your shallow message of “comprehensive immigration reform”. You simply perpetuate the same unjust, un-American policies with which legal immigrants have been struggling for years. Even worse, you mask the policy behind a “solution” to the immigration problem that screams bureaucratic wheeling and dealing and continues to narrow Americans’ political exposure to the need for real reform of the entire immigration system, for legals and illegals.
You claimed to bring “change we can believe in” — but right now, I don’t see any change, and I am fast losing my belief that it will ever come. 
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