ILW.COM - immigration news: 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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