some type of adult girl

afloweroutofstone:

That’s a loaded question- you assume legal immigration is necessarily an option. Political discussions tend to focus very heavily on undocumented immigration in America, and they do so at the expense of the actual underlying problem, which is our deeply broken system for legal immigration.

In order to, as the National Visa Center puts it in their report, “avoid the potential monopolization of virtually all the annual limitation by applicants from only a few countries,” the United States immigration system caps the available number of many of the family and employment-based visas that can offered to people in any given country out of the annual total at 7%. In other words, only 7% of these visas can be given to applicants from any given country every year, regardless of what percentage of applicants they constitute.

Applicants from Mexico make up 29.5% of all immigration applicants in 2016, and yet they can only receive a maximum of 7% of these visas. See the problem? To put that a different way, each country can receive a maximum of 25,620 visas for this year. There are 1,344,429 Mexicans on the waiting list right now. This means that at most only 1.9% of those trying to come here legally from Mexico will be able to do so this year. The cap for Mexicans is the same as the cap South Koreans, even though the wait list is 25 times longer for Mexicans. Same supply for all levels of demand. Even if you don’t think that the number of available visas should be expanded (I do), you have to recognize that a significant part of the way which we distribute the visas we do currently issue is completely arbitrary and makes very little sense.

You could, of course, wait 20 years or so and hope that the list eventually comes down to you, but if you’re looking to start a better life, you probably aren’t going to wait more than a quarter of your life for it. That long of a wait might sound like an exaggeration, right? Not really, no. 

According to this month’s visa bulletin, a Mexican citizen who wants to immigrate to the United States through an F4 family visa (having a sibling who is a citizen) right now would have had to applied before April 1st, 1997, almost 19 years ago. The only family-based visas of this type (there’s another type for certain relatives, called IR visas) with a wait less than a decade long are those for spouses and children under 21 (the same is true for the Philippines, America’s second largest applicant for legal immigration). Our employment-based visas are mostly open without any waiting period, but they’re pretty limited in availability in nations with lots of applicants thanks to the per-nation caps, and they’re mostly restricted to skilled workers anyway.

There are plenty of other problems with our legal immigration system, but suffice it to say, it’s very difficult to get here legally. So now you’re left with a much more obvious answer to why there are so many undocumented immigrants here: legal immigration is frequently not a serious option.