I Married an Illegal Immigrant: A First-Hand Account of How Screwed Up This Country's Rules for Foreigners Are

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted March 30, 2009.

We were slightly concerned when we were asked to fill out entry cards before arriving back in port, and for good reason. A few weeks later, in an apparently aberrant act of efficiency, INS sent us a letter informing us that because we had left the country, our application (which they had not actually found yet) was rejected.

They invited us to appeal, which we tried to do. But we couldn't actually appeal, they told us, until the application had been found and transferred to Miami. In the meantime, my spouse's temporary work permit had been withdrawn.

I was then married to an illegal alien.

And let me state the obvious: that illegal alien had done nothing wrong, had no criminal record, had entered through an inspection point with a valid visa and had followed all the rules. The system, which opponents of reform claim is fine, had screwed us royally.

(And before anyone suggests that this experience was unusual, a study by the Public Policy Institute of California found that fewer than 40 percent of legal permanent residents had always had their paperwork in order; the rest had been "illegal" at an earlier point in time. In California, more than half of all legal permanent residents were "illegals" at one point in time.

Immigration restrictionists make a great effort to distinguish between lawful and unlawful immigrants -- they must, because unlike their counterparts in other wealthy countries, they have to deal with the fact that the U.S. is a "nation of immigrants" -- but the difference between legal and illegal is often a matter of simple chronology rather than a reflection of the character of the person in question.)

Again, these kinds of stories are ubiquitous among people who have tried to deal with the system, and at some point, we ended up swapping INS horror stories with another couple which, like us, consisted of a U.S. citizen and his foreign-born spouse. And they told us something that in hindsight seems incredibly obvious. They advised us that, based on their own experience, it's pretty much impossible to deal with immigration authorities without a good, well-connected attorney.

It just so happened that they had one to recommend. So, after about a year of trying to navigate the system on our own, we sat down with their guy -- a smarmy former INS official in a shiny suit. And we wrote him a retainer check for $2,000 (which I had to borrow from my father). And he said he'd see what he could do.

And ... presto! It was like magic. Our lawyer mentioned our case to the regional INS director over a game of golf one Saturday, the guy said he'd look into it, and suddenly ... the system functioned. They found our file. It appeared in the Miami office. We appealed the decision they'd made after the day cruise, and it was indeed overturned.

Suddenly, just like that, I was married to a legal permanent resident again, the kind of person Dobbs says he embraces with open arms. She was the same human being -- with the same productivity, the same attitude toward the rule of law and, yes, the same faults -- only she had valid papers, and we were two grand poorer.

Of course, not every immigrant working in the U.S. has two grand to spare for a shyster lawyer.

This story highlights the great irony of the immigration debate. With an average wait time of one to three years for status adjustment -- and some waiting for up to 20 years -- and with laws that make the it virtually imposible for the majority of lower-income, less-educated migrant workers to enter the country at all -- the reality is that those who want to reform the system so that it functions as it should are the true opponents of illegal immigration. And the politicians and pundits who oppose those reforms -- people who are content to keep those 11 million or so people living in the shadows of our society -- are the real "pro-illegals."

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Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.

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