By Jodi Magallanes, Truth Staff
jmagallanes@etruth.com
"Don't people realize that they can't just become legal?" asked Goshen resident Erica Macías recently.
What is common knowledge from the Yucatan to El Paso has not yet diffused into the consciousness of all Americans: that the avenues for a low- or middle-income immigrant to come to the U.S. legally are mainly long shots.
* Only a fraction of the Mexicans who apply for visas to come to the U.S. are granted those visas each year. The U.S. State Department quotas for visits to family members vary between 23,000 and 65,000 per year total, for which hundreds of thousands of Mexicans alone apply. A Mexican visa applicant also faces a wait time of five to 15 years to be considered for a visa because of the backlog. Other countries are guaranteed a certain number of visas per year, but far fewer residents apply for them.
* Visas can be issued for foreigners who have master's degrees and/or skills in great need by American companies or institutions. This type of visa takes far less time to acquire than a family visa, the type that the majority of immigrants from Mexico apply for. But also with professional visas, more immigrants apply than the number of visas available and the process is not a piece of cake, said Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Cardinal Mahoney when he spoke during a forum on immigration at Notre Dame last year.
"We have to hire an immigration attorney just to get a priest here from another country," because the process and documentation requirements are so complicated, Mahoney said.
* Marriage to an American citizen
If the illegal resident has been here a year or less when he or she marries a resident, he or she must return to Mexico for 10 years in order to be granted legal residency, said immigration counselor María Sanchez Schirch of LaCasa in Goshen. If the resident has been here more than a year, he or she is required to appeal to a judge in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, who will decide if and how much to punish the undocumented spouse. Temporary exile and fines usually constitute the punishments.
* Amnesty
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill which granted temporary legal residency to illegal alien residents who could meet residency requirements and were not criminals. Almost 3 million undocumented residents applied for legal residency through this program, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
* U.S.-born children
Children born in the U.S. to parents who are illegal residents can petition for permanent residency for those parents once they reach the age of 21. The State Department is far behind in processing these applications, currently processing requests in this category that were made in 1992. And if the child who made the application marries or moves during the years of lag time, the parents' application is denied, according to Sanchez.
* Dream Act
The Dream Act is a proposal in Congress that would allow the children of illegal immigrants to attend post-secondary education, and access to state and federal funds for education as well as provide them with a path to legal citizenship.
* Hardship
Illegal immigrants detained by the Department of Homeland Security and threatened with deportation can file a cancellation of proceedings legal residency on the basis that their deportation will be hardship on their U.S.-born children. According to immigration lawyer Moises Hernandez, it is rare for these appeals to be granted.
* Sometimes the U.S. will grant temporary legal status to refugees from countries that have experienced large-scale natural disasters, such as hurricanes or earthquakes. Many Hondurans, Salvadoreñas and Nicaraguan immigrants to the U.S. currently enjoy this status.