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Whenever I see discussions or pages that talk about illegal immigration I often see the accompanying phrase, "I'm all for legal immigration, but totally against illegals" or something to that effect. Having a perspective from both sides of the spectrum I urge people to actually find out what legal immigration actually takes. I can almost guarantee that the people who fling this phase about, although possibly well meaning, don't actually know what legal immigration is. Don't worry though, in this page I am going to share that information with you.

Legal immigration is a term used for a process that is, in theory, supposed to allow eligible people to immigrate to the United States, in a socially safe, documented, orderly fashion. It is also supposed to protect the American citizen from the, supposed, freeloader on the tax dollar, and ensure that criminals who aren't here legally, do not end up filling our jails. In actuality, legal immigration is such a long, complicated, haphazard, and costly process that it is not feasible for most people who actually are entitled, for one reason or another, to legally immigrate.

Lets postulate for a moment, some of the things we hope a legal immigrant represents and then lets match that up with the legal immigration process. We hope that a legal immigrant speaks fluent english. This, in my opinion isn't too much to expect. I don't think we should necessarily require it in all cases, but as a norm it can validly be an expectation. The immigration process and the documents required are most often only in english. But is that really enough?

There are several basic conditions under which a person can legally immigrate to the United States. The major ones are employment sponsor, immediate relatives or family preference, marriage, investment, and lottery. Investment means that the person is filthy rich, donating or building a company in value between 500,000 and a million dollars with at least 10 employees, so we aren't even going to discuss this because we all know the United States is suddenly best friends with anyone rich. The lottery is another that we will throw out for the purposes of this article because it only works from people from "exotic" places from which we have few immigrants. For employment sponsor, the immigrant can be brought to the US on a visa, or can possibly and out of status immigrant or illegal entry immigrant could be legally immigrated by finding an employment sponsor. The requirement for having this being a likely option is the be extremely qualified for a career and being able to network from outside of the United States, if you aren't already in the US with a company that has a deficit of people to fill your position of expertise. Is this likely? No, although it has its practicalities. Most people who want to or need to immigrate to the United States are poor, impoverished even. They may come from backgrounds where extremely skilled professional training is a distant dream. Most legal immigrants, likely, do not immigrate through employment sponsors. On a practical note, we as Americans wouldn't want to fill our country with poor, uneducated people would we? Or might we delight at the opportunity to enrich lives and enable this distant dream to become a possibility for more people, through immigration reform?

Within the category of immediate relatives or preferred family, only a spouse, child, or parent of a US citizen count as proper relatives to enable legal immigration. The child must be under the age of 21 and unmarried for the parents of US citizens to petition for them or at least 21 to petition for their own parent. Now its a little confusing to sort through those relationship qualifications but when you do I'd like to ask the question of when these types of arrangements would actually take place. When would a person become a legal citizen or legal resident but have a child and a spouse that is not? The only likely scenario I can think of is the rich, probably white, vacationer who has a love affair with a girl he met on some remote island. She becomes pregnant and has the child there, but finally convinces him to petition for her and the child, which shouldn't be a problem considering the person petitioning is likely well off, remember they were on an exotic island vacation long enough to impregnate and establish on going contact with one of the locals. What about the other way, 21 year or older "child" petitioning for their foreign parents. This only makes sense if Angelina Jolie adopted the child and then wanted to immigrate their biological parents when they turned 21, or if a person who was, maybe 18, got married to an American and legally immigrated, then petitioned for their parents when they turned 21, assuming their immigration process was finished by that time. What about the legal spouse who petitions for their foreign partner? It only makes sense in situations where the couple has been separated for an extensive amount of time, i.e. long enough for the foreign spouse to legally immigrate and petition for their husband or wife, or long enough for a US citizen who married a foreigner while aboard to return to the US and petition for them. These are just not extremely likely scenarios.

The last two situations above overlap with the by marriage category. To legally immigrate by marriage the ideal situation is that the foreign spouse or even fiance remains in their own country until they get a green card or their visa. That could mean a lengthy separation and with the divorce rate as high as it is, I am not so sure how healthy that can be for any marriage. Oh and don't forget these conditions; If the marriage is less than two years old when the foreign-born spouse becomes a permanent resident, the green card will expire after a two-year period. Both spouses must submit a joint petition to remove the two-year condition within the 90-day period immediately preceding the end of the two year period. If the marriage has terminated by reason of divorce, death of the citizen spouse or spousal abuse, the foreign-born spouse may apply for a waiver of the joint petition requirement.

These are just the basics, now imagine all of the wrenches and technicalities that come into play if say you have cases of overstayed visas, meaning the person came in legally maybe got married to a citizen but the visa expired before they could petition though marriage. Or if the person came in illegally all together. Each case is very unique even within the general categories and that is why there are hundreds of different documents that could be necessary for each individual case. This is where the money part comes in.

It is possible to legally immigrate without lawyer in theory, but I've never heard of anyone doing it. Like I said the specific documents you need is a rather iffy subject to deduce even for extremely educated Americans to decide, let alone a person with english as a second language. So to our expectation of a legal immigrant to speak english, it really doesn't make that much of a difference, sorting through all the documents yourself and for your specific case is next to alien, no pun intended. Take a look at the flurry of documents yourself. Each document has its own filing fee. Some of them are free of charge, but those are likely the ones you don't need, or that you will need in conjunction to several of the more expensive ones. The prices can range from 0$ all the way up to 1,500$. Interestingly enough one of the documents that cost 1000$ is called a Request for Premium Processing Service, so basically if you shell over an extra grand they will make the process faster and promise not to botch it, this particular document is also eligible for electronic filing, ooh, fancy, right? To me this kinda of amounts to socioeconomic discrimination which really shouldn't occur in a minatory government procedure, but thats a topic I'm not rested enough to tackle right now.

Remember I said that filing by yourself is not really done, most people get immigration lawyers or buy kits that were put together either by immigration lawyers or the department of homeland security, themselves (a little hands off residual passive income for them, I guess). The cost of an immigration lawyer can vary depending on what state our are in. Legal fees can range from $3,000-$10,000. Its silly to think that people who are going through major life adjustments such as a marriage, relocation, etc are able all of a sudden cough up thousands of dollars as well. Most Americans aren't able to comfortably do that, why would we expect immigrants to? Thus, in all actuality legal immigration means holding the immigrant to higher standards than those of US citizens, perhaps in order to increase illegal immigration.

Contrary to what most people might believe about illegal immigrants not paying taxes and being leaches on government aid systems, many illegal immigrants either have a fake or stolen social security number, and some undocumented immigrant who entered the US legally have their own valid social security numbers. Therefore they are being taxed. What's more is that those who have invalid or stolen social security numbers are unable to file their taxes for returns, and thus those funds remain in the possession of the United States government. Should we use it, it would be considered profit. On a side note, if we wanted to talk tax leaching I would focus on the war on "terror" and aid that we've lost "building" and "aiding" any oil rich nation we could get our hands on--perhaps we should "aid" those countries sourcing the most illegal immigrants and they might find life there more desirable. Back on topic, illegal immigration "boosts" the economy, although for reasons that are not all together positive. It more resembles a mutually beneficial parasitic relationship in which the common, illegal immigrant is escaping from low levels of poverty to an American level of poverty which is a vast improvement to many of them--in turn Americans get cheaper labor, higher profits for big business, and possible lower prices for the consumer if the business owner decides to pass on some of their profit to the consumer. The only group that is really disadvantaged by any type of immigration is unskilled Americans--And I say this is proper motivation for the raising of American Standards. With the help of need based aid there is little holding back many of the unskilled from becoming skilled.

The United States government, as of recent time, doesn't really seem to have a quality assurance mechanism in place. Rather is seems that cutting corners is the best way to go about things as most choices that could have been made in our best interest as citizens is discarded as an option if it immediately looks too costly. Remember this is a place were cable upgrades surpass recycling or vehicle upgrades in a country were place like NY are considering dumping their waste in 3rd world countries & even in the back yards of other states, NC being one of them! & where we are fighting to keep food on the table and the utilities on in light of high gas prices. Lets not even start on the, now, evident global warming. Others complain about the crimes that have committed by illegal immigrants, but have failed to realize that it takes money to keep criminals in jail, so sentences turn out lax (this applies to many American criminals as well). Deportation is also costly & ineffective when the deportee can simply re-inter in a number of the holes in our "border security". The bottom line is it takes money to stop illegal immigration, it would also take a sacrifice in profits & a reform of the legal immigration system, to stop it. To many in power its just not worth it to take it as far as necessary, to solve the problems.

We would need a systems that actually reduces the ability for illegal immigrants to enter the country. A system that would allow eligible immigrants to go through the process efficiently and at a non-inflated cost (it shouldn't cost much more than filing for your passport). A system that finds illegals in the justice system and deports offenders starting with those who commit the worst offenses with no legal ties to the country. It would take a work place reform, a removal of the same mentality that allows child labor to take place abroad. People want everything, cheap and right now, without building the proper infrastructure to yield that level of quality or caring where and how the finished product came about.

So next time you get upset about illegal immigration, and wonder why don't they just apply for whatever, why the government doesn't just deport them all, etc, you'll know the answer.