USA Green Card Immigration Blog

Dangerous path to legal status for some immigrants – CNN.com.

Aurora, Colorado (CNN) — Tania Nava has one piece of advice for anyone seeking to come out of the shadows and pursue a path to U.S. citizenship: don’t do it.

She says her decision to become a legal citizen is one of the reasons her husband was murdered.

“I should’ve stayed illegal this whole time,” the 21-year old widow said. “Jake would still be here.”

Jake Reyes-Neal, an American citizen, had traveled to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, last year to protect his wife as she waited for the long, complicated process to attain U.S. citizenship. Instead, Reyes-Neal — who had never been to Mexico and didn’t speak Spanish — became one of the thousands of homicide victims in Juarez as his family watched helplessly.

Nava and Reyes-Neal were high school sweethearts in Aurora, Colorado, and they got married at 18 after she gave birth to their son, Anthony. Nava decided that the next step to build her new life with her husband and child was to apply for U.S. citizenship.

Her parents had brought her to the United States illegally at the age of 7. Although Reyes-Neal was an American citizen, their marriage didn’t automatically give Nava legal status, so she still faced possible deportation.

Jake Reyes-Neal moved to Juarez, Mexico, with his son, Anthony, to protect his wife.

So the 18-year-old couple began navigating the intricate U.S. citizenship laws and regulations without the help of a costly lawyer. When Nava tried to apply for citizenship, she learned that federal law said she had to leave the United States and barred her from returning for up to 10 years because she had resided in the country illegally.

She could apply for a hardship waiver requesting that U.S. immigration officials not separate her from her husband and child, both American citizens. But she had to file that waiver in her birth country, and that meant packing up and moving to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

Every year, more than 100,000 people travel to the U.S. consulate in Juarez to attain legal status. The consulate was set up to handle the permanent immigration visas years ago before the city became so violent.

Immigration attorney Shawn Mead calls the policy a perfect catch-22.

“It’s an impossible situation: They have the option of staying here unlawfully, not being able to get their residence now or ever, or going and living in the city of Juarez, a place where people do get murdered all the time,” Mead said.

Nava left her husband and young son in Aurora and attempted to live in her native Mexico, where she felt like a foreigner. She lived with her grandmother in Juarez, where more than 3,000 people were murdered in 2010. Last year, that number fell to just below 2,000 — the first time the murder rate has dropped in four years.

“We were aware of everything,” Nava said of the dangers in Juarez. “I mean, where we lived was a really bad neighborhood. We would drive by, and there were a couple shootings, and they had the bodies right there and everything.”

Meanwhile, back in Aurora, the separation was proving even more difficult for Anthony, and it wasn’t long before Reyes-Neal packed up and moved to Juarez to keep his family together. In a letter to the consulate, Jake pleaded for a hardship waiver allowing his wife to live in the United States while awaiting permanent legal residency.

“I am living with my wife and son in perilous and very dangerous conditions in Juarez, Mexico. We live with fear of our lives on a daily basis,” he wrote. “As U.S Citizens, my son and I are facing extreme danger everyday we wake up in one of the most violent cities in the world.”

His plea went unanswered, and within six months, Reyes-Neal’s fear proved prophetic. He was shot more than 80 times outside the family’s home. Nava’s uncle was also killed in the attack. The motive was unclear, although the family suspects robbery.

“The last thing I heard was him saying, ‘I don’t speak Spanish,’ ‘No hablo español,’ and that’s it. And then I just heard the shots, and then I waited for a little bit because I was scared to go down there. I just went down there with Anthony and my grandma, and they were right there on the floor, on the ground,” Nava said.

Nava was covered in her husband’s blood before she realized she was still holding their 2-year-old son. That night still haunts her.

“It’s hard to sleep at night, because every time I think about them, the image pops in my head of them, they’re on the ground. And as much as I try to block it out of my head, I can’t,” she said, wiping away tears.

Today, Nava and her son live in Aurora, where she has a green card and is awaiting awaiting a path to permanent citizenship.

“The tragedy that this family has suffered is most unfortunate, most tragic,” said Alejandro Mayorkas, the director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.

“What we can do within the current laws is develop process improvements that mitigate the dangers and hopefully avoid tragedies to the best of our abilities.”

Immigration Services has recently proposed a rule change aimed at reducing the time U.S. citizens are separated from their spouses and children during the process of becoming legal immigrants.

The proposal would streamline the process of obtaining hardship waivers by allowing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to process certain waiver applications in the United States before an applicant departs for an immigrant visa interview with a U.S. consular officer abroad. In other words, it would reduce both the time the family spends apart and the time spent in harm’s way in places like Juarez.

Mayorkas says that as it stands, the immigration system punishes those who, like Nava, attempt to obey the law.

“I have been working in the immigration system now for almost two and a half years. As a federal prosecutor, I worked in enforcing immigration laws throughout the 1990s for approximately 12 years. Working in the system now, it is evident to me that the concern about a broken immigration system is indeed warranted and well grounded,” Mayorkas said.

The proposed rule change still has to go through several steps including a period of public comment before becoming official. But whenever it happens, it will be too late for families such as those of Jake Reyes-Neal.

Abraham H. Foxman: The Road Ahead for Immigration Reform.

There’s no doubt immigration will be one of the critical political and social issues of 2012. While substantial progress has been made on one significant concern — improving border security — overall the system remains broken. Whether America is successful in reforming it depends on the tone of the discussion in this country, guidance from the courts, and the prevailing political winds.

So far, when it comes to immigration and efforts by some states to impose a solution absent federal reform, we have seen a combination of initiatives — unevenly applied at best, constitutionally untenable at worst — and a national discussion that has wavered between constructive debate and hateful, ugly stereotypes.

In short, the immigration reform debate has engendered a mix of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Let’s start with The Good: Both former President George W. Bush and President Obama have supported proposals for comprehensive immigration reform. In a 2006 speech, President Bush stated that “an immigration reform bill needs to be comprehensive, because all of the elements of this problem must be addressed together — or none of them will be solved at all.” Five years later, in his May 2011 address in El Paso, Texas, President Obama echoed those remarks, asserting that “what we really need to do is keep up the fight to pass genuine, comprehensive reform.”

This past August, in the absence of a legislative progress toward immigration reform, President Obama on his own took some small positive steps, using his executive authority to ease some of the hardships the broken immigration system is causing, especially for youth and families. For example, the federal Department of Homeland Security now exercises prosecutorial discretion to target the agency’s enforcement resources on those who pose the greatest risk to the public. However, the administration’s actions do not obviate the need for comprehensive legislative reform.

There’s also good news in the broad public support for meaningful reform. Recent studies indicate significant public support for reforms including streamlining the process for employers to hire foreign-born workers to perform seasonal work.

In an October 2011 national poll conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, we found that a strong majority of Americans — 60 percent — were in favor of a six-year path to citizenship if the children had arrived here before they were 15 years old and had lived here at least five years. And 65 percent of Americans said that children of illegal immigrants who were born in the U.S. should be considered American citizens.

Sixty percent of those polled indicated they would oppose any change in the 14th Amendment that would remove automatic citizenship for anyone born in the U.S.

Now comes The Bad: Many states across the nation — including Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina — have moved to pass anti-immigrant laws that are on shaky ground constitutionally and of questionable efficacy. Some courts are already reacting to these anti-immigrant laws by striking down the most controversial of the provisions.

The Supreme Court this term will rule on the legality of Arizona’s SB 1070, the state law which seeks to push undocumented immigrants out by way of punitive measures. Passed in 2010, the Arizona law was the first in a wave of harsh state immigration laws that are having detrimental consequences on industry, citizens, and documented and undocumented immigrants alike.

In many of the states that have passed SB 1070 “copycat laws,” local police are authorized to check an individual’s immigration status during a traffic or any other lawful stop; during an investigation of petty offenses like open container laws, underage drinking, jay-walking, or smoking in an elevator; even during domestic violence incidents where often both the perpetrator and victim are initially arrested. For example, should an undocumented victim of domestic violence call 9-1-1 to report an incident in one of these states, that victim could be deported as a result of the police investigation.

And, of course, there’s The Ugly: The stereotypes, hateful rhetoric, and dehumanizing language about Hispanics, Latinos or immigrants we’ve seen surrounding the issue, especially during the past year, threaten to derail meaningful reform and taint the national discussion.

Regardless of how Americans feel about immigration, appeals to prejudice and bigotry simply have no place in a civil debate.

The climate of bias and hostility toward immigrants that pervades the immigration debate hurts our country and stands in the way of the kind of reform Americans desperately seek to the broken immigration system.

Our own experience in the Jewish community has taught us that when a society begins to distinguish a group as less deserving of rights, then discrimination, exploitation, and worse can follow. The current system fails more than just immigrants seeking opportunity and fair treatment. It fails all of us by refusing to embrace a future that welcomes diversity and equal access to the American dream.

The consequences of a venomous, anti-immigrant climate impact us all. In Alabama, home to one of the nation’s most restrictive immigration laws, headlines report that in the days after the law took effect, as many as 15 percent of Hispanic students were too afraid to attend school. In other states we hear stories about families broken apart, unpicked crops rotting on the vine, the embarrassing arrest of an international car company employee, and damage to tourism.

Without a doubt these stories highlight the imprudence of harsh state immigration laws. These provisions drive a wedge between law enforcement and immigrant communities. In particular, they deter Hispanics or Latinos — whether documented or undocumented — from reporting or serving as witnesses to criminal activities, including hate crimes.

The most severe impact falls upon Hispanics or Latinos who are undocumented or have undocumented family members, friends or co-workers. For such persons, these laws can create credible fear that any contact with law enforcement will result in arrest or deportation.

As we begin a new year, one that promises to bring key decisions from the courts, let us remember that there is a direct connection between the tenor of this political debate and the consequences to our communities. It is incumbent upon all of us to press for fair and workable federal immigration reform and to demand civil dialogue and respect in the process.

Obama: Immigration reform ‘cannot pass without Republican votes’ – The Oval: Tracking the Obama presidency.

President Obama today called for a “practical, common sense” immigration system that will help the U.S. economy and maintain America’s immigrant tradition — and he put the pressure on Republicans to get it through Congress.

“Reform that brings accountability to our immigration system cannot pass without Republican votes,” Obama said in his first major immigration speech as president . “That is the political and mathematical reality.”

Obama said his administration has already taken record-setting actions to strengthen the border, and he urged Congress to approve “a pathway to legal status” for the 11 million or so illegal immigrants who are already in the United States.

Immigration has become “a source of fresh contention” in recent days because of the new Arizona law that gives police greater authority to question people’s citizenship, Obama said. His administration is expected to file a lawsuit against Arizona, but the president did not discuss potential legal action.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the first step on the immigration issue should be “to secure the borders,” and that Obama’s pathway to citizenship amounts to “amnesty” for lawbreakers.

“The President can make progress on this issue, but it will take more than a speech,” the top Senate Republican said. “If he would take amnesty off the table and make a real commitment to border and interior security, he will find strong bipartisan support.”

Speaking to lawmakers, academics, and community leaders gathered at American University, Obama touted his plan by stressing the immeasurable contributions that immigrants have made to the United States, and the frequent discrimination they faced throughout history. “Immigrants have always helped to build and defend this country,” Obama said.

The chances for congressional passage don’t appear great. Like McConnell, congressional Republicans and some Democrats said the government should focus on better law enforcement better moving on to citizenship issues or guest worker programs. In the meantime, lawmakers who are already grappling with new Wall Street regulations and an energy bill must also deal with congressional elections only four months from tomorrow.

Obama said political posturing on an emotional issue has delayed congressional action in years and month past. “Into this breach,” he said, “states like Arizona have decided to take matters into their own hands.”

Arizona’s crackdown is understandable but “ill-conceived,” Obama said, arguing that an immigration system requires a national approach rather than a “patchwork” of state laws that puts too much of a burden on local law enforcement.

“These laws also have the potential of violating the rights of innocent American citizens and legal residents,” Obama said, “making them subject to possible stops or questioning because of what they look like or how they sound.”

McConnell, the Senate GOP leader, criticized Obama for his stand on the Arizona law, saying that “attacks on states filling the breach created by the failure of the federal government won’t secure the border, grow jobs or create solutions for what we all agree is a broken immigration system.”

At points in his speech, Obama criticized both sides of the immigration debate.

Some rights groups all but encourage illegal immigration, Obama said, though at least 11 million people are in fact breaking the law by not going through the citizenship process, and they should be held accountable.

As for critics of “amnesty,” Obama said it’s simply impossible to deport 11 million people. Doing so would disrupt communities and break up families, he added, as many undocumented immigrants have children who are U.S. citizens because they were born here.

The president said he has already taken major steps to better protect the border, proclaiming — twice — that “we have more boots on the ground near the southwest border than at any time in our history.”

As for his pathway to citizenship plan, Obama said it will help create “a younger workforce and a faster growing economy than many of our competitors,” Obama said. “And in an increasingly interconnected world, the diversity of our country is a powerful advantage in global competition.”