My Thoughts on US Immigration

But I'm Okay With Legal Immigration!

Imagine if you will that there is an exclusive nightclub in town which is heavily guarded and fortified by bouncers at the front door. You've heard all about this club, being that it has been featured in countless movies and television shows. Let's call it "The Land of the Free Home of the Brave" Club. You've heard that getting in to this exclusive venue will grant you access to perks and a better station in life. Even the old king was born there!

A love interest grants you an invitation as your sponsor. You both just need to make sure that your paperwork is in order.

As you approach the front you become very nervous. The bouncers at this front door, marked as "Family of US Citizens and Permanent Residents," don't seem to have much rhyme or reason to their decisions about who can enter. In some cases they check the paperwork, nod quickly and then move to the next person in line. In many cases they turn people away to get more documents. Sometimes they seem arbitrary and cruel about things.

"But my husband is in there!" A woman cries frantically as she is kicked from the front of the line with a dreaded pink slip, meaning that there is no coming back. All bouncers decisions are final based on a recent Supreme Court ruling.

"Better luck next life, slut!" they sneer cruelly. The woman calls her husband sobbing, trying to convince him to give up everything he has and come out of the club to join her. It's too much for him. She considers the backdoor entrance, but she's heard that there are a lot of criminals and human traffickers hanging out in those areas. If she does it that way, she'll forever be a criminal too.

If only she could find the "NGO Sponsor" line! They'd pay for her flight and all expenses! She's heard they're not even allowed to check paperwork there!

You look at some of the other lines at the front doors, all of which seem to move faster than the line you are in. The line entitled "Corporate Sponsor" seems to be a VIP area. The paperwork is shoved along quickly with few questions asked. On the rare occasion somebody is turned away from that line it is more businesslike and with little desperation. "I'll call my boss and see what he says." One man says curtly as he walks away with a yellow slip flagging him for needing more documents.

You finally pass to the front of the line and, after Herculean time and expense, you are let through into the exclusive "Land of the Free Home of the Brave" nightclub.

Once you are inside the club, however, you wonder what all of the fuss was about. The Land of the Free Home of the Brave has many nice things, but so does the place you came from. The food is not very good and many of the people inside look unhealthy and unhappy. Many areas seem unsafe and unclean. But hey, you can make a lot of money in this club relative to what you could where you came from.

You are happy to be there because you wanted to be with your loved ones. And home is where the heart is.

I’m all for that, by the way. Where’s that Epstein client list again?

Many moons ago, back during and after the process of making my first husband Oh a green card to come to America, I was a regular contributor on the VisaJourney forum for those seeking advice on the visa process for coming to the USA. I also advised many US citizens I knew in real life who were curious about the process. So you want to bring your family member legally to the United States? Poor you.

Let’s let Google be our guide:

What can disqualify you from immigration?

The general categories of inadmissibility include health, criminal activity, national security, public charge, lack of labor certification (if required), fraud and misrepresentation, prior removals, unlawful presence in the United States, and several miscellaneous categories.

Well that’s all clear as mud. The list sounds like they could kick you out for anything. Surely they have more sympathy and compassion than that for those on family based visas!

Er, not really.

I'm going to give a short list of some of the areas where people have encountered problems on immigrant visas that they have been unable to move forward from. First regarding the public charge, which means that the applicant can’t prove that they can support themselves or that their sponsor can do so:

1. First there is the income requirement for the sponsor, which needs to be 125% of poverty level in order to support the prospective immigrant. For some people this is not hard to clear while for others, especially those who have uneven income sources or who have been working overseas at a suppressed income level for a long time, it is more difficult. Family size also plays a role with every child under 18 adding to the income requirements.

   As an example I have known a few American men who inquired to me about bringing their Thai girlfriend/fiancee to the USA while they were working in Thailand as English teachers making between 30,000 baht to 40,000 baht per month. Although this is a respectable income level in the Land of Smiles, the $12K or so per year was only half of the 125% poverty income levels they would need to sponsor their lady, presuming there are no children in the mix at which point the level goes higher. So without the help of family in the USA as joint sponsors, the idea got left in the dust.

2. Domicile is another concept a few people got stuck on, which means that your primary home is in the USA or you intend for it to be in America in the very near future. I was flagged for this one in 2013 while trying to make my first husband Oh his immigrant visa: we were living in Thailand with our baby and I was working digitally through a US based company. So I needed to prove that relocation was imminent, which might include buying real estate in the USA, renting an apartment, enrolling children in school, investing money in America or something else. Even voting in US elections shows civic participation.

   Now Bob who works at XYZ Corp might be making plenty of money and with his big house in Ohio he has no difficulty proving either point one or two. But digital nomad Renee who has been backpacking through Europe might have a lot of difficulty here, especially as breaking an apartment lease might be expensive and there is no sure timeline for a visa for her husband Stephan or any guarantee of one ever.

3. I know of at least one prospective sponsor who dropped because he felt he owed too much in back taxes and did not think he would ever be able to reasonably pay them back to the IRS. So his wife and kids were never coming to the USA, not even to visit his family.

4. Now we get to criminal records. I’m not sure what the requirements are for the sponsor, but for the visa applicants they are rather strict. While it is funny to go through their insane checklist of weird things that would disquality the prospective immigrant such as recruiting child soldiers during a time of war or practicing surgery without a license, a lot of surprisingly mundane things are on there. The US government takes drug offenses very seriously, for instance, which includes marijuana. A single criminal charge of possession (not dealing) over the age of 18 is a permanent disqualifier (one possession charge A: at under 18 B: more than 5 years old and C: In which all time has been served, is allowed). Now there’s a waiver that can be used, but it takes on average three years to process that alone. Drunk driving charges also might require seperate processes and may spill over into the medical field as the applicant may be dubbed a danger to public health and/or labelled with an alcohol use disorder.

5. Now health records come into play. The applicant needs to be healthy (and taking medicine for any medical conditions), free of “Communicable disease” of which there are many on the list, and free from any drug or alcohol dependence issues. And of course, they need to be up to date with all CDC recommended vaccinations, which for my husband comprised 6 different injections (TDAP, MMR, hep B, varicella, flu and Covid-19).

   What I could see after awhile is that all of these requirements picked people off one by one. You might not worry about what happens to some potheads or junkies because you never got into the stuff, but perhaps the 40K in unpaid back taxes you owed seemed better to avoid. You and your prospective spouse might be clean as the Church missionary you are, but you’re poor and your family in the United States will not help you. You certainly never drove drunk, but that’s because you’ve spent the last decade trekking the world, don’t even have a driver’s license and have no place to call home in the USA.

So now you’ve been willing to jump through the hoops on all of that stuff. Both you and your loved one are good, clean people making plenty of enough money, or at least able to get family help to cover the difference. Somehow you’ve both managed to stay healthy despite getting every jab “recommended” by the CDC. That means that something is clearly wrong with your relationship and she’s just in it for the money.

6. Now attention may turn to the bonafides of your relationship. Are you two really together? Oddly I got flagged on this one too with my first husband Oh, despite USCIS assuring us early in the process that the most solid proof of a true intimate relationship was a baby together and that since we had that we should have no problems whatsoever with our I-130. Nah. They came back demanding records of mixed finances (joint bank accounts, joint leases/ownership agreements) and family pictures/proof of ceremonies together et cetera. This was very confusing at the time as I kept my US bank account seperated from his Thai bank account and rental house leases seemed to always get a better price if Oh negotiated them without me or my name on them. I pushed for a lot of family pictures though.

   I’ve heard some nightmare stories from Thailand on this front. The woman referenced in my hypothetical nightclub example was a story I heard on VisaJourney of a woman who was ejected from the final interview with a pink slip because she was supposedly already married! That sounds terrible, but as the story went it was not as terrible as the headline suggests: She had married a French man a few decades prior, who was long gone and hence was difficult for her to legally divorce. In the USA I know of two different women who ended up in similar situations, with a young marriage where the husband was long gone and hence was not easy to track down to legally divorce. In one case she also thought her old spouse had gone to another country, in that case Mexico. Her poor husband lamented that his Thai wife wasn’t even sure of the true legal name of her first husband.

   I’ve heard of cases where children are hidden as any child under the age of 18 is automatically assumed to immigrate and is added to the application, hence adding to income requirements and hassle especially with mixed families. One side is accused of marrying for money while the other side is heavily scrutinized for their potential to be leading the applicant into sex trafficking once they are in the USA. Government and organized crime already have a good handle on that stuff, meaning most of it happens through them.

Now of course you can make a short time visa to visit family in the USA, but that requires money too: the applicant is going alone and showing proof that he or she can pay all travel and related expenses during their trip to America. If the bouncers have any reason to suspect that the applicant may overstay their visa, the biggest reason being having an American spouse, they are often denied. From Thailand many times a long time spouse of a US citizen must prove that they are immigrating permanently to a country that they have never been to to be legally allowed to set foot into it.

The year is not 1874, folks. You don’t pack up all of your worldly goods, get on a boat for weeks, pray your children don’t die of typhus on the journey and then see the Statue of Liberty or whatever with no reasonable hope of ever seeing your parents or siblings in your home country again. In the modern world there’s airplanes that can make the journey in 15 hours even from the other side of the planet.

So yeah, sure. You’re all for legal immigration. What has been determined to be legal and not legal had nothing to do with you input whatsoever. Nobody lobbies for families. But the corporations and the BBB sure have lobbied for everything else in their financial interest.

So then you get insane situations like a few years ago when I was looking up wait times for my husband Ka’s marriage visa. I saw on the screen something about the two week (???!!) estimated wait time for an H1B visa. The good news for them is they can also add on their spouse and children easily in their visa application. Heaven forbid that they might be seperated from their family while they’re undercutting wages in those Silicon Valley jobs.

Of course they are beholden to their sponsor too, in a human trafficking of sorts. That is the same as it is with many student visas, where people will sign on the line of whatever BS research to keep their status. The Mark of the Beast system it is indeed.

In 2021 and 2022 I logged into the old VisaJourney website that I had spent so much time on years prior. I was looking for any information on waivers on the vaccine requirements to immigrate to the USA. To my dismay I realized that any relevant legal questions related to any vaccine requirements, including those for Covid-19, had clearly been suppressed. There was simply no information that any immigrant anywhere had any opposition whatsoever to taking this or all of the other countless jabs for immigration. A few times I saw a thread pop onto the screen which seemed related, but once it veered off course too much it was disappeared.

Safe and effective safe and effective safe and effective.

I wondered about legal liability of course, such as in the hypothetical situation where my husband was injured or even killed by vaccines given to him during the panel physician check. There was no information that I could find, not even anecdotes of the type of “My wife had to take all of these jabs and she was so sick yesterday” type that had at one time been acceptable on the forum. I was truly and despairingly on my own out there.

So you’re all for legal immigration? Who is determining what is “legal”? Both sides need a lot of fixing…

It’s food for thought…

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