Walking the Line

EditorialWalking the Line
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Published: May 7, 2006
There is one figure in the polarizing immigration debate that people respect and treat with deference no matter what side they are on. It‘s the line. It‘s the mostly invisible, somewhat metaphorical procession of immigrants trying to enter the United States under established rules. It also refers to the orderliness that lawmakers are trying to impose upon the illegal population already here.
Like a sweating manager in a movie theater facing a restless crowd of ticket holders outside and a throng of others who have sneaked into the lobby, this country is struggling to control an unruly situation. The obvious answer is to fix the line. Any serious effort at immigration reform demands it.
An estimated three million people are waiting patiently for visas outside this country. The backlog goes back decades in some cases. The 11 million to 12 million who broke the law to get here have thus given themselves a significant leg up, and while their campaign for a path to legal status is just, granting them a privileged place in line is not.
The Senate‘s immigration bill — the only rational proposal that stands any chance of passage in Congress — offers illegal immigrants a route to legality, but one that will take many years. During that time, the country would adjust its formulas for immigrant visas to eliminate the backlogs. By the time the line-jumpers get their chance to become legal, the people who were legitimately ahead of them will have been taken care of.
It‘s important to remember that the visa backlog is not administrative but structural: the problem is not bureaucratic inefficiency but an overwhelming gap between demand and supply. The Senate bill would increase the limit on the number of employment-based visas issued each year to 450,000, from 140,000, through 2016. After that, the cap would shrink to 290,000. To further ease the backlog pressure, spouses and children would no longer be counted against the employment-based visa cap. The limits on visas for family members of immigrants would remain at 480,000, but a large group — spouses and children — would no longer count against that cap.
Family reunification would be worth pursuing even without the current crisis. Some people in the Philippines, to cite the extreme example, are in their second decade of waiting to be reunited with loved ones in the United States.
The proper goal of immigration reform is to be humane and practical without insulting people‘s innate sense of fairness. And if such reform removes the perverse incentives that make it more rational to enter the United States through the Sonoran Desert than through a line at a consular office, so much the better.
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