Comment

Abolish Family Immigration?

With an estimated 10 million undocumented aliens living and working in the US, it is undisputed that our immigration laws are broken. Our current immigration laws unfortunately do not reflect the fact that most immigrants come to America to work. Any attempts to fix the current immigration system must address the reality that our country's immigration laws are mostly focused on family-based immigration. To align our current immigration laws with reality, family immigration numbers must be trimmed to make room for more employment-based immigration. Until our nation's immigration laws incorporate this reality, the number of undocumented will continue to grow and our immigration system will continue to be broken. It may be politically difficult to trim family quotas since waiting times are already very lengthy. It may be much easier politically to eliminate entire categories of family immigration rather than reduce quotas for those categories. Painful as this might be, we do not see any politically feasible way of legalizing the undocumented millions. Legalization would be not just a milestone in immigration law, it would be a major social, cultural, political event. To achieve legalization, creativity of the first magnitude will be required. The elimination of several categories of family immigration may be just the right creative solution to break the legalization logjam.

We welcome readers to share their opinion by writing to weeklyeditor@ilw.com.

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Letters

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Dear Editor:
As a recent (Jan. '03) retiree from legacy INS, I take exception to the statement that INS was held responsible for the issuance of visas to the 9/11 hijackers thus leading to the creation of DHS. The last time I checked, the State Department and their consular offices abroad issued the visas, while INS did the actual 'admitting' at a port of entry. And, "yes" INS did admit the hijackers based on the validity of their travel documents. Unfortunately, other government agencies that had some of the hijackers on a "watch" list, failed to pass that information on to INS. Had they done such, those individuals would have been turned around at the port of entry. The finger-pointing on the tragic events of 9/11 needs to stop now. What was lacking prior to that date was information sharing between the agencies charged with protecting this country. Sadly, the turf battles continue as the recommendations from the 9/11 commission are already being eroded by several agencies fearing they will lose their exclusivity over certain intelligence data. I may be naive, but it strikes me that battles are won by teamwork and, unless we get serious about terrorism, our lack of teamwork is going to cost us again and again.

(Mr.) Lynn M. Ligon
Dallas, TX

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Dear Editor:
In fact both DHS & al Qaeda are separate entities. We are mixing them both because US Immigrants/Citizens are involved. This is actually a security measure, not immigration. The country's insecurity & perspective on immigrant identity should be dealt separately without involving the USCIS. It is important to note that every Muslim (Islamist) is not a terrorist; but every terrorist is a fanatic muslim (islamist). Most terrorists are from Middle East/Gulf( Arabic and Muslim) countries besides involvement of some countries in Africa and South & Far East Asian countries. If DHS put all possible restrictions to prospective immigrants coming from these countries for security clearance, filter them out at the initial application stage itself, then the problems of immigration and proccessing delays will be minimized for other countries' prospective immigrants. For immigration, these probable terrorist countries should be separately dealt with to minimize hasseles for other peace loving countries.

Venkateshwar Yenumulapally