Walking the Tight Rope: U.S. Immigration and the Challenges of Legality

• In Event: Criminal Justice Policy in a Comparative Context

Abstract

As questions about the undocumented persist, our nation stands at the fault lines of history where immigration and criminal law increasingly intersect with each other. This socio-legal intersection has led to the criminalization of the undocumented, a massive rise in deportation and a continued hardening of policy. Yet, despite this rise in punitive strategy, legal pathways are often restrictive, expensive and incredibly difficult for the documented and undocumented migrants who wish to pursue them. Keeping this in mind, this work uses data from the 1992-2016 Visa Bulletins compiled by the National Visa Center (NVC) and the U.S Department of State to illustrate that the enforcement-without-reform model has created a contradiction between immigration policy and economic demands. Findings illustrate that labor demands have not always been able to adjust to new admissions in periods of economic growth and recession. Further, legal immigrants who are in queues as family or employment based petitioners can expect wait-times spanning several years or decades for their applications to be processed by the U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services. As such, these complexities negate the cost of American migration as a good investment for prospective immigrants and reflects an inability to adjust visas to labor market needs.

Author

• Denise Obinna, Mount St. Mary's University