“In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.”
Immigrants know this intrinsically. President Trump’s immigration policy is pulling the rug out from under people who are currently documented — Ohioans with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) — by cancelling their paperwork in hopes of being able to deport them. The Guardian came to Lima to report on the impact of Ohioans losing TPS.
Immigrants from Haiti such as Amos Mercelin, who is one of several thousand people from the devastated Caribbean country now living in the Lima area, have stepped in to fill the labor shortage.
“I worked first at a plastics factory, then I did 12-hour shifts at a Fedex [warehouse]. Now I work with a healthcare organization,” he says.
“It was hard, but I knew these were just first steps.” Many Haitians, he says, work at food production plants scattered around the area, where cold temperatures and harsh physical conditions are a part of the job.
But come August, when temporary protected status (TPS) for more than half a million Haitians is set to end following an announcement by the Department of Homeland Security on 20 February, that growth could be jeopardized. For Mercelin, thousands of other Haitians and the businesses that depend on them, that could be catastrophic.
We’re hearing a lot about what is wrong and broken about the immigration system — because every action the Trump administration takes makes it more broken. Upending the lives of people like Mercelin, who has survived more than most people will face in a lifetime. Sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into our communities to abduct our friends and relatives. Locking immigrants up in so-called “civil” detention, which is really a criminal jail, to try to get them to give up on their cases.
So what should we do instead? How about listening to the ideas of everyday U.S. Americans? They have a concept of how the “system” works, based on movies, myths about their ancestors, and assumptions about our overly-complex system. Instead of arguing that “things don’t work that way,” what if we listened to their ideas and Congress implemented them? Ohio Capital Journal reported on this very topic.
According to Celinda Lake, a pollster who has researched public opinion on immigration for decades, “People don’t think you can never become a citizen. They think that if you came over undocumented, there’s amnesty. If you work here 20 years and pay taxes, there’s amnesty, you can at least get a visa. They’re very, very supportive of anybody who works 20 years and pays taxes. They support that they should be able to become citizens. It’s 60-plus percent of the public that believes you should become a citizen under those circumstances. What’s more American than working for 20 years and paying taxes?”
Indeed. While the immigration system has never been fair, it used to be a little more flexible, immigration lawyer Heather Prendergast points out. But Congress and successive presidential administrations, including the Clinton administration, erected road blocks and landmines to make it nearly impossible for people to immigrate here or obtain legal status, including when their circumstances change.
Instead, the default decision is deportation. Immigration judges look at cases for reasons to deny them, not reasons to grant them. Immigrants have no right to counsel in immigration proceedings, while the government is represented in every case, every time. Also, unlike criminal processes, the civil immigration system offers only two options for outcomes and, in most cases, no way to consider mitigating circumstances — like the impact of deportation on one’s loved ones or community. Either your status is granted or you are deported, and deportation involves life-altering, and sometimes life-threatening consequences.
Writes Peter Markowitz in his visionary paper, “A New Paradigm for Humane and Effective Immigration Enforcement, “That binary choice makes the U.S. immigration system function like a medieval criminal justice system, where the only two choices were no penalty or the death penalty…. [I]mmigration judges must have available to them a set of scalable penalties that could be imposed in lieu of deportation when appropriate. Compliance with such penalties would then open up a pathway to permanent lawful status. Fines are one such scalable penalty and are used pervasively in other administrative contexts.”
Prendergast further explains that people who are not immigrants have more compassion about individuals they know who were born in other countries, than the stereotypical caricature on the nightly news. Tongue somewhat in cheek, she suggests creation of a “good guy visa.”
It’s worth consideration. Sometimes the best ideas are right there in front of us. This isn’t a new, negotiated “comprehensive immigration reform” package, where some people’s progress is traded for other people’s pain. It’s just boring bureaucracy. Making it work; making it make sense.
The truth is, people in the United States are far more reasonable than the law. Let’s give their ideas a listen.