We the People, Our Principles, and Our Immigration Law

I used to think our immigration law was bad mostly for economic reasons, that society would have more things if we'd loosen the immigration restrictions. But I recently began working with immigrants as an attorney, and I have realized that our immigration laws' effects on people are more . . . personal. The immigration code's flaws affect society's view of immigrants, immigrants' view of themselves, and immigrants' ability to participate fully in society.

My goal with this article is that you'll contact your representatives and encourage them to promote a simpler and less harsh immigration system. There are links to help you do that at the bottom; let's see if I succeed!

The Constitution begins with "We the People," in much larger font than the rest of the document. We revere those words because we think it is important that we are responsible for making our own laws. There are currently some major contradictions between our immigration law and some principles and statements that many of us acknowledge as true and important. I think we should be welcoming to immigrants from a variety of backgrounds, and I think you'll be surprised at how unwelcoming our law is. My intention with this post is to bring to light some of the contradictions between our law and basic good principles like equality, economic freedom, and treating others as we would be treated. I believe that "we the people" can move towards having laws that better reflect our values.

Equality

The poem by Emma Lazarus, which has been at the base of the Statue of Liberty for 120 years, says:

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

However, we the people say you should be less likely to get to be here if you are too young, too old, or too medically needy, and we ask that you or a sponsor in our country have far more money than the average family in the country you come from. (See 22 CFR § 40.41 - Public charge.)

The Declaration of Independence says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

But We the People say that if you are an unmarried 30-year-old Canadian with a permanent resident parent, wait about eight years to get a visa; if you are an unmarried 30-year-old Mexican with a permanent resident parent, wait 22 years. See The Department of State's Visa Bulletin for Feb. 2023.

Jesus "denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female." See The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. 

We give high priority to "extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics which has been demonstrated by sustained national or international acclaim and whose achievements have been recognized in the field through extensive documentation." We also give priority to "outstanding professors and researchers," "certain multinational executives and managers," and "members of the professions holding advanced degrees or aliens of exceptional ability." We give no path to citizenship or permanent residence to a "typical" single mother from a poor country who may want to join her son who is living undocumented in the United States so that he can send her enough money to get by. Even if boosting our easily measurable economy was all that mattered, which of course it is not, we do not take account of the fact that a parent who does not fit our ideal employment categories may raise children here who do.

Several parts of The Declaration of Independence make clear that the revolutionists were not making up new rights they thought they should start to have, but that they largely wanted the rights that people in England enjoyed, such as Trial by Jury. Have we slipped back into only caring about our own rights and economic well-being, and ignoring the well-being of the more than ten million undocumented residents? Perhaps the colonists could have moved back to England to more fully enjoy liberty, but that would needlessly inhibit the spread of political and economic freedom.

Economic Freedom

Many in the Republican party, which is the larger culprit in stopping immigration liberalization, claim to support a free market. Becoming free from England's restrictive economic policies was part of what inspired the revolution and founding of our country. Adam Smith is known as the father of modern economics, with his most-cited idea being that of the "invisible hand." He explained in The Wealth of Nations that a person working  as he thinks best (not as the government thinks best) is "directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." Milton Friedman, a famous economist and advisor to Ronald Reagan, argued that "[u]nderlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."

The immigration code has hundreds or thousands of provisions trying to manipulate and guess about economic situations, giving restrictions and special spots for certain kinds of workers, and it seems nonsense to me to think that the incomprehensible mess has some helpful economic purpose, and many decades after most of the immigration act was passed, perhaps all of us would agree the immigration code is not economically smart. Of course, it creates jobs for immigration lawyers and others who are needed to apply the law, but that is not good economics. Little to no credit is given in the code to the idea that when an immigrant seeks his own best interest, or that of his family, he is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention" and is the best for society. I will give just one example from the code that defies free-market economic principles. For certain immigrants to work here, there must be a certification that "the employment of the alien in such labor or services will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of workers in the United States similarly employed." Unless the immigrant is truly an alien from another planet whose skills do not compete with or substitute for the skills of employees already in the United States, an immigrant's labor will ALWAYS, at least in some way or for some period of time, adversely affect the wages or working conditions of workers in the United States. That is simply how markets work: offering labor or other goods will lower the price (wages in the labor market) of what is already in the market, but the benefit of lowered prices to consumers and market as a whole is greater than the harm to the labor and product-sellers that were previously enjoying higher prices/wages. Given the nonsensical standard of not being allowed to have any adverse effect on wages, the line between those who can and cannot come to work must be arbitrary. I think there is "a lack of belief in freedom," specifically, a lack of belief that current workers here can adapt and learn new skills to adjust to a change that may occur if we have a free market that allows immigrants. If more people are given freedom to immigrate to the United States, individuals will adapt and innovation and efficiencies will occur.  This will eventually result in lower prices and more products. For example, some immigrants may be able and willing to make food at a lower cost, and may fuse cooking ideas from their country with ours.

The Golden Rule: Loving Others as Ourselves

Jesus said to "love thy neighbor as thyself." Matthew 22:39. The basic rule of our immigration system is to allow immigrants only through a route intended to benefit a close family member already here or an employer. This means that somebody already lawfully here must petition for somebody to come, and that is just the beginning of the restrictions on admission. A common bar to admission comes from being here without documents authorizing an immigrant's presence here. If an immigrant comes here and stays for more than a year, then even if the immigrant marries a U.S. citizen the immigrant must, unless he or she gets a special waiver, leave the country for 10 years before becoming a lawful permanent resident. Getting a waiver requires showing that there would be extreme hardship to somebody who is a "qualifying relative," which would be a lawful permanent resident spouse or parent. So when a lawful citizen petitions for her husband to become a resident and he has been here unlawfully for over a year, they must show that denying residence to the husband would create extreme hardship to the citizen wife in order to avoid the husband needing to wait outside the U.S. for 10 years prior to obtaining residence, and hardship to anybody else is not considered. To make this clear, a line from the policy manual of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services says to "consider an applicant who is married to a U.S. citizen with whom she has a 5-year-old child with a disability. Unless the relevant waiver allows for her child to serve as a qualifying relative, the USCIS officer may not consider the hardship to the child if the applicant is denied admission." Related hardship to a "qualifying relative" can be considered, but wouldn't we want hardship to ourselves and our child considered if we were in the immigrant's shoes or citizen child's shoes? If by some means we ended up in a country without documents and without the right to vote, either because our parents took us there or because we chose to come long ago to achieve a better life, wouldn't we want the neighbors around us, voters, laws, and government officials to consider our plight?

 

Jesus set an example of praying with loving words like "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." He taught that ". . . of you it is required to forgive all men." The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints defines forgiveness between mortals like this: "As people forgive each other, they treat one another with Christlike love and have no bad feelings toward those who have offended them."

We say that if you came without documents and lived peacefully here for decades, you must leave our country for ten years before gaining status, with exceptions only for those with citizen or lawful permanent resident spouses or parents (as mentioned above, hardship to a citizen child receives no consideration) who would face extreme hardship if you were deported. If you did more than come once, like say you went back to your home country to visit a dying parent and then came back, then you are permanently barred from obtaining legal status here. It does not matter that you have children who were born here, you must choose between 1) uprooting them to go to a country where they have never been and may not be welcome, 2) abandoning them, or 3) continuing to live here undocumented.

All of the immigration laws that I have referenced in this post involve no criminal convictions whatsoever. This means that there has been no showing of mens rea (evil/bad intent or knowledge) and no jury of one's peers to make factual determinations. So, similar to how sometimes I "forgive" my wife to overcome my own negative feelings, and in hindsight I realize she did nothing wrong at all, it may not be accurate to say we should "forgive" immigrants when wrongdoing has not been well-proven. But even if you think something wrong was done, does that make a 10-year family separation or uprooting the right answer? 

Cruel and unusual punishment could surely deter certain actions, but that doesn't make it right. 

If you think some penalty should be paid for an illegal entry decades ago, perhaps it could be financial. Or perhaps we just forgive it altogether. Do I think that it is wrong to punish crime? No. But like I said, the immigration penalties I have mentioned do not involve proving any crime. And while this may not be very scientific, use the "straight-face" test regarding the definition of forgiveness I mentioned earlier. I could say with a straight face to somebody who crashed into my car while under the influence, "I forgive you and do not have bad feelings towards you, but I do think a jail or probation penalty should be served." I do not think we could say with a straight face, "I do not have any bad feelings towards you, but I think that because you came here without documents 20 years ago you should leave your five U.S. citizen children here for ten years and then you can try to come back." I especially could not say that to a friend, or to the parents of my kids' friends. You might think, "well, that makes it sound more personal than it really is, government officials are the ones who enforce the law." But We the People make the law and are responsible for it. It is personal. These laws affect real people. These people live with anxiety about their status, they are often viewed differently and are less included socially, they can't vote or serve on juries, progressing careers is difficult, and in some states they do not have driver's licenses.

Perhaps you think that more legal routes should exist, but in the meantime laws are laws and must be followed. Instead of punishing somebody for violating an unjust law, why not change the law to make it more just? If a child rashly demands that her sibling comply with their assigned role in a game of pretend or get smacked, do we tell the child "you better follow through with what you threatened" or ask the child to apologize for making the threat? (Or would it be okay to pretend I don't hear . . . ?) Our bad immigration laws did not come from above, but from We the People, and we have the responsibility to change them. If "ye have no king; [then] if these people commit sins and iniquities they shall be answered upon their own heads." Mosiah 29:30.

All this said, I know it's not my role to try to guilt people into doing what I think is best; I'm just trying to give a new viewpoint by emphasizing the power of "We the People." Reasonable people may disagree, and if you find this more divisive than helpful, please comment and share your views! If you agree with me on any of these points, just spend 5 minutes writing your U.S. representative or one of your two U.S. senators (or 10 minutes to send to all three!). It could be as simple as "I think the immigration system should be simpler, less harsh, and less restrictive." Some conservative representatives may want the system to be simpler, but are afraid of lowering restrictions, and maybe some letters from constituents will help. I have had a few occasions where it is clear that at least somebody in the office had actually read my letter. If you feel extra passionate, doing a paper copy and cc'ing the legislative assistant over immigration will help your viewpoint get to the relevant people.

Here are some links that might help you (and just Google search if the links don't work😁):

U.S. Congressman Simpson, for Idaho's 2nd District (Mini-Cassia, Twin Falls, eastern Idaho, and some of Treasure Valley): https://simpson.house.gov/contact/

U.S. Senator Crapo for Idaho: https://www.crapo.senate.gov/contact/email-me

U.S. Senator Risch for Idaho: https://www.risch.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/contact?p=Email

Find your representatives in the Idaho legislature (for issues like the recent Republican proposal to give a driver's license to anybody who passes the driving test or amendments to propose amendments to the U.S. Constitution): https://legislature.idaho.gov/legislators/whosmylegislator/

Not in Idaho?

Find U.S. representative: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

Find U.S. senator: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

If you do reach out to a representative, please comment on this blog or on my Facebook post so that I can tell if posts like this do any good! : )

Mid-life Identity Crisis

First, my wife says I'm not mid-life yet, so we'll say I'm talking about the middle 40 years of my life. 

When I was younger, like high school and undergrad years, I viewed myself very differently than now. I thought I was extra smart, hardworking, healthy (even athletic, though too busy or disinterested to act on my innate talent), kind, social, and active in church. Extra is intended to modify all of those adjectives. By extra, I mean really great in my own eyes, and better than most I knew. 

I assumed those exceptional attributes would lead to being rich and publicly powerful. I may be exaggerating to make my point, but only slightly. I spoke openly about my expectations of getting rich. At least some members of my family commented they thought I'd be the richest, as an orthodontist or with another high-paying career. 

Now I'll break down how each of those identities have . . . broken down. 

Rich

I recall talking with my wife around the time we married about some of our concerns for the future. We knew so many good people with such fancy, big things. Big, nice houses in particular. We worried that, someday, we'd fall into that trap. I worried that, as my income flew wildly out of control, I wouldn't be able to help our expenses from keeping pace. That name-brand cheese and fashionable suits would be too easy and attractive to pass up. Before we knew it, we'd be in a fancy, big house like all the other rich people. How could we discipline ourselves enough to set aside most of our income to save for future missions or other generosity? Our lives would be fraught with the moral dilemmas of people aspiring to be humble but awash with too much wealth.

Now a few years later . . . you could double my salary, and I assure you I could find ways to spend all of it on just my family with no moral qualms whatsoever. I simply don't see anything frivolous about replacing our section of carpet that smells like urine (and surrounding carpet to match), adding a second bathroom, letting a child or two have lessons of some kind, buying a futon, making progress on books my wife and I want to publish, recieving some counseling or therapy, flying to see some friends and family, going to Harry Potter/Disney World for the first time while visiting Orlando family . . . okay wow this is easy, maybe I should be talking about tripling my salary. 

We just recently bought a home. We looked at a lot of options. Not a single option was eliminated because it was too fancy or big. They were eliminated because they were too expensive or too dingy. That's right, too dingy. We discovered that we're uncomfortable without a certain niceness. 

She excitedly builds her fancy house as he accepts he can't afford such a house

The difference between my younger financial expectations and current reality, while it feels stark sometimes, came about gradually. As I was considering law school, I was warned by many people that I wouldn't make much money, and I was advised that an MBA would be better. I believed them, but decided I still wanted to be a lawyer. Some of this change came from meeting my wife. Although most Americans descend from great-depression era scrimpers, she talks about and carries on that legacy more than anyone I know. I'm yet to find a spec of being materialistic or wanting to seem rich in her. So anyway, I started law school with slightly dampened visions of getting rich. Then at some point I recognized that I didn't fit the mold of an attorney set up for "big law" that would pay better than other attorney jobs. One honest and good-humored professor said about being on law journal that it looks good to law firms because it shows you're willing to do a lot of work for little compensation. I missed the deadline for getting on law journal, but that was a relief and felt meant-to-be for my baby daughter and overwhelmed wife. Later, I took advantage of a school-paid-for trip to LA to interview with a big firm. I thought that the interviewer, through her curriculum vitae and appearance, possibly spoke an Asian language, so I took a shot at saying a line in the language I thought she might have spoken. She didn't understand. I think I felt my chances at a job like that were low enough that I'd rather have the chance to get some language-learning in than slightly increase my chances at getting the job. 

After being a judicial law clerk (slightly boring sometimes) and then public defender (never boring and often stressful), I realized that both of those jobs easily met the threshold for excitement and fun, and I should probably seek the most boring job possible while making enough to get by. In summary, I have realized I am very unlikely to accomplish or even seek being as rich as I used to anticipate.

Healthy

I distinctly remember a few times my sister who is a runner (she has run 100 miles in less than 30 hours, enough said) saying that I could be such a good runner if I cared enough. And at the beginning of my relationship with my wife, I remember my wife commenting on how infrequently I got sick. Even though I didn't care enough about these things to try to become a super athlete, it made me feel like a super person, perhaps thinking I'd live extra long or simply could do anything I set my mind to. A few years later . . . I have had celiac disease for several years, so my body doesn't absorb nutrients like most bodies, I can't eat what I used to think of as the ultimate healthy (whole wheat spaghetti with whole wheat toast), I have frequent digestive problems, I feel like my kids and I are sick with bugs about half the time, and I get body aches when I am not gentle with my body. So I don't have the lack of physical pain and the physical confidence that I had when I was younger.

Smart

I think I have viewed smartness as the ultimate prover of coolness. Maybe somebody chooses a less lucrative career, but if you went to Harvard then you're still forever cool. This was probably my earliest crushed identity, starting with the ACT, a standardized college acceptance test that I took during high school. Nothing like one big number to reflect exactly how many students you're dumber than.

Hardworking

This identity lasted longer than my smart identity. I figured, I may not be smart, but I work hard to get good grades and be awesome. Then my law school grades were not as great as undergrad's, and I have seen that doing a stellar, perfectly thorough job on certain work projects requires more time away from my family than I want to spend. And I simply run out of steam before I can use hard work to make our house as clean as I'd like.

Good-looking

Just kidding, I've never thought I was super good-looking. Though once my sister was looking at the newspaper section about people leaving on religious missions and said something like "who is that good-looking guy? Oh my goodness, it's Rees!" She didn't do it on purpose. Happiest day of my life up to that point (though clearly the picture didn't look much like me).

Active in church

I went many years (perhaps my entire adult life before children?) never missing church on Sundays. Then with COVID and my family's subsequent regular illnesses it feels like we are home half the time. I sometimes find myself missing the days when I knew everybody in the ward and never missed anything.

Kind

Yup, I've discovered I'm unkind. Okay so perhaps easy-to-get-along-with would be a better way to describe that identity; I still haven't given up on kindness. I used to enjoy wowing my close friends and family with how I could get along with even people with difficult characters. The break-down of this identity started with feeling thoroughly disliked by some of my mission companions. Turns out that saying nice things about somebody is easier than making decisions with somebody and being with the person 24/7. This further broke down when I began practicing law, with some opposing attorneys or parties finding what I think is ethical and necessary zealous representation to be excessive and disagreeable.

Social

I used to be a social butterfly, who struggled a little to have really close friends but had lots of friendships. Now I have reverted to a caterpillar, though fortunately I snatched a wife-caterpillar and wrapped her and our kiddos into a group-cocoon. Sickness and other busyness has simply made hanging out and visiting with others difficult.

Takeaway: Consistently Doing Small Things to Show My Love for Jesus is More Important Than My Short-term Feelings and Identities

So what is my takeaway from all of this? Some identities don't last forever, but I have thought more about my most important eternal identity, as a child of God and follower of Jesus Christ. A few weeks ago, my daughter woke up with a fever. We had just gotten over another sickness a few days earlier, and we were excited about my daughter getting to sing a song she loves, called Thankful, with the primary children during our congregation's Sacrament meeting. I was very frustrated and downright grumpy with . . . life? And with my wife. As I was in the shower I was trying to remember some key to being better. I was trying to remember some trick that I had thought of relating to how I should respond when something hard is happening. I couldn't remember the trick. So I thought, "okay, what is even more basic?" In my religion, the most basic principle we are taught is faith in Jesus Christ. While not remembering this exact quote, I remembered the gist of this concept taught by President Nelson: "[A]ct in faith. What would you do if you had more faith? Think about it. Write about it. Then receive more faith by doing something that requires more faith." I thought "what would I do because I believe in Jesus Christ?" with the implication that I would not do it if I did not believe in Him. For some reason, that inspired me to think "I should say something nice to my wife." That started to change my thoughts, and then I said something nice to her, and it helped. I think I had begun to tie my identity less to someone who gets through a sickness and quickly returns to health, or someone whose daughter gets to sing the fun things that she and her parents look forward to, and even less to someone who feels perfectly good-natured about happy expectations being dashed because of his innate kindness and optimism. Instead, I was tying my identity to being a follower of Jesus Christ, one who tries to follow Him in whatever circumstances/feelings/state I might find myself in.

As a more general point, I have learned that a lot of the identities that I, at some point, have created for myself are not really important to what matters most to me. I want to be a loving follower of Jesus Christ. And I can show that to myself and God by small and simple choices. I do not need to worry, at least not in every moment, about my overall life experience and how I feel about it and how awesome or horrible my repeated successes or failures are. I can just choose to follow Jesus in this moment. I recently read a good article from 1977 about "what makes a person loving." It talks about several actions that a loving person does. None of the actions require having certain feelings at all times. Rather, regular efforts to show affection, accept others, and give of oneself are the focus. This is much more inspiring to me than thinking that I need to feel and look like who I used to think I was, but simply am not. The journey can still be hard though, so it is wonderful to remember that Jesus knows how I feel. Because He chose to take upon Himself my sins and afflictions, and conquer them, He knows what it feels like to have money hopes dashed, suffer from celiac disease, have mediocre intelligence, run out of steam, struggle to get to church, feel accused of being heartless, and not get to be with friends or family as much as one would like. He helps us in our feelings, and guides us to keep growing closer to Him. Knowing Him is the ultimate purpose in life.