The Gang of Eight in the U.S. Senate has advocated 10-year wait for a green card for most of those in the proposed amnesty followed by a three-year period before naturalization could begin.
How should we think about that?
My position is that any broad-brush amnesty is a bad idea because it would encourage more illegal immigration in the future. That certainly was the result of the IRCA legalization of the 1980s.
Similarly, the idea that millions of illegal aliens are to be given legal status and work permits before there is any real effort to enforce the law is equally unattractive.
But if we lose on those fundamental issues, my sense is that a really drawn-out period before green card status is a better idea than a quick march into full resident alien status. Why?
Because if the Congress does not create some kind of additional amnesty for those related to the beneficiaries of the basic amnesty, those in the pre-green card status would not be able to set in motion follow-on family migration until they got their green cards. So here would be a (presumably) multi-million population that would be present in the United States, but unable to cause the migration of their spouses and alien children (if any) because they would not be in a legal position to do so.
Delaying such chain migration — sure to bring still more poverty-level people into the United States — would be better than not delaying such migration, and the 10 years of non-migration would make a big difference. (If that sentence had too many negatives in it, it is simply typical of the terminology of the immigration business.)
But how about the three-year period before naturalization would begin, which would be different from the five years now demanded of new immigrants?
I am not terribly worried about that concept, for three reasons. First, if it is part of a package that includes 10 years of no family immigration for a large population, it is a tolerable bargain. Yes, the two fewer years of naturalization will bring part of the newly amnestied into citizenship more quickly, and citizens have far more opportunities to set in motion family migration than green card holders, but as a trade for 10 years of the population having absolutely no access to chain migration, that's a relatively good deal.
Second, most of the next round of amnesty beneficiaries probably will not opt for citizenship anyway; that is something we learned from our experience with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 legalization program, as outlined in a recent CIS Backgrounder.
Third, we need to keep the realities of the residence requirement for naturalization straight. What the senators are proposing is a 13-year restriction for those arriving illegally, as opposed to the five-year requirement for those arriving legally; that is an extra penalty period of eight years. That the requirement is for only three years of green card status for the illegals compared to five years of such status for the legal arrivals is nominally correct, but not very important.
Unfortunately, the Gang of Eight's proposal also suggests that a minority of the illegals, those eligible for the Delayed Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) amnesty, be allowed much quicker citizenship status.
The best approach, of course, is to delay any consideration of a broad-brush amnesty until enforcement and attrition substantially reduce the size of the illegal population along with the elimination of some of the family preferences and all of the diversity preferences and gets the annual flow of legal immigrants down to something like 700,000-800,000 a year. Once those basic steps have been taken, we could, probably some years hence, start talking about a legalization program for the remaining illegals.
That would be the best approach, to be sure, but do not count on Congress to do anything so sensible.