Anxiety Throwing a Loved One Into the Immigration Monster

- Or Why Left, Right nor the Apathetic Address Immigration Honestly

After 3 years and $10,000 I’m sending a man I love back to his home country to (hopefully) re-enter the USA legally. 3 weeks to go and counting.

He came here 12 years ago after being kidnapped by a cartel (narco). At gunpoint he fixed their radios. When finished he was told they had to kill him. When the gun misfired so he was beat to unconsciousness. When he regained consciousness no one was around so he escaped and tied himself to a train. He is my ranch foreman, his American epileptic wife (married 9 years) will travel with on the trip with him.

My man is a hard working, honest, reliable, trustworthy, self-starting and capable. He’s my ranch foreman. We found each other 7 years ago and have worked side by side in heat, freezing rain, mud and seen no shortage of injuries and scary moments. That’s ranching. We have built him his own home.

My man has never had so much as a speeding ticket. Homeland Security, US Department of State and country of origin police have spent months and unknown amounts of money to make sure that is accurate. All the papers are complete and in order and both nations (wink-wink) agree to process him through country and back home with legal papers. Sort of like a cold war exchange of prisoners across a bridge in the night. His first asylum request was disapproved (after at first having approval) because cartel gangs were withdrawn as death threat asylum basis — I have yet to understand the logic that can separate between a cartel and a terrorist group. We all have our whims. Approval has been granted because his epileptic American wife would need a lot more care by tax payer dollars if he was not around to be her caretaker.

After all the time and money I am judgmental of us, the American public as well as the political profiles we seem to force on our government elected officials. I would like to explain in detail, I hope someone reads the article and gives me feedback and criticism.

After close up experience in law offices, embassies, agencies such as Homeland Security and political campaigns I will attempt to simplify things to what I call the 3 legs to the stool of immigration.

1. The “Unilateral Leg”. These are the laws, attitudes, cultural values, border security, border enforcement, treatment and attitude toward immigrants (both those here already and ones attempting entry) chosen by the destination country. It is complicated and progress is not helped by emotion venting platitude chants like “build a wall” or “free babies from cages”. I’m ashamed as an American we separated small children from their mothers, I never thought I would see such a thing. I also believe there needs to be a secure and controlled movement along our borders — north, south and two oceans. Real solutions will be complex and require a lot of trade offs and compromises. It seems that perhaps a large percentage of Americans don’t want to hear non-slogan non-simplistic messaging.
2. The “bilateral” leg. The Central American country I am familiar with has many good people and much scenic beauty. Poverty, corruption and violence are pervasive and the United States has (over a period of many decades) on the whole contributed to the problem as much or more than helping stem it. Stabilizing the situation will will not be easy. Making simplistic threats and bombastic criticisms probably are not helpful. More likely what is required is tedious, consistent, specific and long term efforts across a lot of fronts in order to stabilize the flow of people truly desperate for asylum. It seems almost certain that there are people seeking entry to the United States by simply being among the crowd of truly threatened legitimate asylum seekers. Again, it seems this may be a difficult complicated multifaceted challenge that doesn’t fit simple boxes or platitudes.
3. The “process”. If anyone has some degree of agreement that points 1 and 2 above are complicated, multifaceted and challenging — this one takes the cake. For sake of fantasy let’s assume we as the USA became listening, compromising, rational, calm and cooperating grown ups. Designing and implementing the “how” would be horrendous. It would span border authorities, processes and tools backed by documentation and adequate resources to adjudicate in a timely way the agreed methods and procedures. The tentacles of address would be far reaching and pervasive into lots of adjacent related areas of law and society.

Whew. I feel better. I’ve heard often the “reason” has to come before the “what” or “how”. My deepest belief is admission of a problem comes first, and in this case my proposition would be this: America, our biggest problem is not our broken immigration process — it is our broken, emotional, polarized and simplistic attitude of unwillingness to be honest about the need for listening, compromise (no one gets everything they want) and finding common ground for ongoing pragmatic progress. And maybe that is not the root problem. Maybe the commitment, idealistic though it is, that our experiment depends on the goodwill and responsible duty as citizens putting country before personal opinion is our problem. Maybe we have lost that bigness.