Marrying an Alien: A Drama in 317 Acts

[pne]

Well, maybe not quite that many, but what this guy had to go through to have his Polish sweetheart join him legally in the US sounds like quite an Odyssey.

Comments

[jpallan.livejournal.com]

There's a large amount of resentment in various areas of the country regarding immigration. It's not really an issue here in the northeastern United States, but in the states that share a border with Mexico (Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California) and their surrounding states, there are a *huge* number of undocumented aliens from Latin America (for instance, much of El Salvador's population fled to the United States to flee los escuadrones de la muerte in the 1980s, many Mexicans now come for work). While for the most part, they live and let live -- they work for wages NO American citizen would accept (often as little as 10DM a day for 14-16 hours of work) in fields like agriculture, a number of them move into the cities, in neighborhoods where the vast majority of people speak only Spanish (it's 33% of Americans' first language and there's a sizable number of American citizens that never learned English at all in those border states), and avoid the immigration services as best as they can.

They work wherever undocumented people can work -- bars [where usually the owner skims a fair amount of the cash], taxi services, waitressing, etc. The real issue is that they need SOME level of state services *and* they reproduce. I doubt many people care about single men coming over the border for shit wages picking fruit off of Texas ranchers' trees -- it's the family fleeing Latin America that then in turn has children who go to school, family that needs medical care, etc.

[jpallan.livejournal.com]

(cont'd)

To respond to the problem, the states have said that any child, documented or no, can go to school. This is good because the children get a chance to learn English (commonly they then act as translators for their parents in official situations) but it's also hard on the schools, who are assimilating non-anglophone children from situations of incredible poverty and hardship, and who are having one hell of a time managing. Illegal aliens commonly need medical care, but in undocumented jobs, they can't get either health insurance from their employers *or* assistance from the state. Obviously, they cannot own property, etc.

The upshot of all this is that except for sales taxes, illegal aliens, through no real fault of their own, end up not paying any taxes, getting a chance to work better jobs (and therefore be less dependent on emergency room care, public schools, special education services) or being able to pay what bills they do accumulate. As a result, costs of healthcare and property taxes in some of the border states have soared. School quality plummeted as more and more children are taken into first grade -- the English speaking children are expected to know their alphabet, numbers to twenty, how to tie shoes, write their name, and such -- and to say the least, the kids who are coming in not even knowing the language are distracting the teachers who are then faced with the impossible job of teaching kids in two languages [experiments with bilingual education have failed miserably] and they're unable to refer their parents for services as they routinely do with poor American citizen parents [i.e. sending them to the state to apply for health coverage assistance, domestic violence services, etc].

It's a messy situation, and given how the U.S. economy is now, even some American citizens would take the jobs that in boom times, only non-citizens would be willing to take. This is not Helping with resentments, to say the least.

My area of the country has a number of refugees -- but the key thing here is refugees. Even the El Salvadoreans didn't get political refugee status from the INS, but the Bosnian population, along with the Sudanese and Somali populations here, and a generation ago, the Cambodians and Vietnamese, did, and consequently got health coverage for themselves and their kids, help finding apartments, and English lessons. That, and their lack of lingua franca in common, help assimilate them thoroughly. In states where the majority of people speak Spanish anyway, many illegals are never "forced" to learn the language to cope, and when they're working 14-18 hours a day, most of them never have time. I'm sure many of them intend to, but it's like how I intend to learn German at some point -- since I don't need German, it's easy to put off.

So while prejudice against immigration is not rare in the United States, it's really quite situational.

[sparkofcreation.livejournal.com]

1. Immigrants, even illegal immigrants, can and do pay taxes. In fact, having paid your taxes is one of the best ways to convince the US government that they should let you become legal.

2. The article had absolutely nothing to do with illegal immigration.

[jpallan.livejournal.com]

1. Illegal immigrants by definition cannot qualify for working papers and therefore must be employed under the table. Additionally, not having working papers means that you can't have a social security number, which effectively prevents you from being able to file income taxes on U.S. income. Similarly, the lack of legal income prevents you from qualifying for loans for property purchases, though I suppose it's possible that someone would be able to purchase property in the United States without any bank assistance, it does seem rather unlikely. Unless there's some kind of taxes I haven't thought of, the only tax I could see an illegal immigrant likely to pay is sales tax, which is, individually, a very small tax.

I'm not trying to say that they're deliberately freeloading or anything -- I'm pointing out that the avenues by which American citizens pay taxes (and in turn demand government services) are effectively closed to them, which makes them effectively non-taxpayers.

2. Right. I was explaining why the U.S. has so damn many problems with immigration at the moment anyway. :) There's lots of anti-immigrant sentiment, and as you can see from the tone of my earlier comment, I don't condone it, but I do understand how those sentiments have percolated in the U.S. Southwest. If there was less for INS to oversee and less bullshit (pardon my language) to deal with to get working papers in the first place, INS would be in turn that much more efficient and that much cheaper for taxpayers to maintain.

[sparkofcreation.livejournal.com]

You don't need a Social Security Number to pay taxes. Anyone who wants one can file for an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) and use it to pay taxes instead of the SSN. The IRS would rather have the money than spend its time keeping track of whose earnings are legal or not. Trust me. I work with immigrants, legal and illegal all the time, and illegal immigrants most certainly can and do use an ITIN to pay federal income taxes. Not all of them, certainly; as I said, those hoping to become legal often pay taxes because having been a law-abiding taxpayer (other than one's illegal status) is the best way to convince the government to not deport you when there's an amnesty granted.

[jpallan.livejournal.com]

Getting the amnesty, from the work I've done (admittedly sort of sideways -- I've worked with battered women seeking amnesty to stay in the U.S. while fleeing their citizen husband, so I've not faced the issues head on) can be a pain in the neck, and I know the people I've spoken to in that situation didn't want to do things to "attract attention". (How getting a taxpayer number is significantly different from sending your kids to the local public school is a good question, though.)

There's also the fact of getting W-2s and 1099s from employers who hired you under the table, documenting earnings from someplace sketchy enough to pay you without certifying your INS status, etc. . . . the entire thing swirls into a maelstrom of paper that can confuse college-educated U.S. professionals, let alone someone for whom English is not a first language and is uncertain on the jargon.

I sympathize deeply with the illegals and I want the barriers to be torn down for them -- but I also have heard many times *how* the resentment built up among Californians and Texans and New Mexico and Arizona residents, and that needs to be addressed too.

Of course, my Libertarian dream of "green cards for everyone who asks" is unlikely to happen anytime soon. :(