Reform of the immigration system is long overdue, but a polarized Congress has not been up to the challenge, Steven Yale-Loehr told the audience at the latest Cazenovia Forum lecture. Speaking to about 100 people in the Catherine Cummings Theatre on Friday, June 3, Yale-Loehr called for “the 3 E’s”: expanded visas, earned legalization and enforcement.
A professor of immigration law at Cornell Law School and one of the nation’s preeminent authorities on U.S. immigration and asylum law, Yale-Loehr said all three changes were essential if reform of the system is to be effective.
“Just legalization won’t work because then people will say we’re not enforcing our borders,” he said. “Enforcing our borders by itself won’t do enough because we’ve got 11 million people undocumented in the United States. We have to figure out some way to deal with them. And expanded visas is important because we have to have a good working immigration system so we don’t have people coming here illegally to work.”
Yale-Loehr began his talk by detailing just how broken the current system is. One million people legally emigrate to the United States each year. Three-quarters of them are sponsored by family members who are already U.S. citizens, but their wait can take decades because Congress hasn’t increased quotas in a quarter-century. “If you have a brother or sister in the Philippines,” he said, “you can only bring them here if you started the process in 1992, 24 years ago.”
The U.S. only grants 65,000 H-1B visas for foreign workers in specialty occupations, but Yale-Loehr said last April so many employers — 233,000 — filed petitions seeking to sponsor such workers that the immigration agency had to hold a lottery to determine which companies could hire. “It’s really crazy,” he said. “They have to pay all these fees and they don’t even know if they’re going to be accepted.”
Yale-Loehr also addressed an issue that hits home in Central New York. More than half of all farm workers in the United States, including on New York dairy farms, are undocumented, he said. “Farmers desperately need workers. We don’t have enough U.S. workers, Americans, who want to do those jobs, but we don’t have a visa category that allows them to come in to work legally,” he said. The result is workers coming in illegally, being hired illegally and then playing a cat and mouse game with immigration authorities to avoid deportation.
Even the immigration court system is broken, Yale-Loehr said, with a lack of judges causing a two-year backlog in deportation hearings.
Congress knows the system doesn’t work well, he added. Every year for the last 20 years various forms of comprehensive immigration reform have been introduced, but none have been enacted so far, partly because immigration is so contentious. “People like individual immigrants but they worry that immigration with a capital ‘I’ is somehow bad for the economy, or that people are taking away jobs from U.S. workers. So it’s very hard to get an immigration bill through Congress,” he said.
In this election year, with talk of wall-building and mass deportation, the odds of passing a reform bill are approaching zero, Yale-Loehr said, and he cautioned against listening to the ‘siren songs’ of restrictionism and isolationism. “I think on the whole immigration is good for America. Macroeconomic studies have shown it benefits the economy of America.”
Yale-Loehr did not dwell on the security implications of immigration policy, but was asked about it in a question and answer session following the talk. He told the audience that among the one million legal immigrants that come to the U.S. each year, about 85,000 are classified as refugees. They go through a two-year screening process before they can enter the country. “If I were a terrorist,” he said, “there are a lot easier, a lot faster ways of getting into the United States that applying to be a refugee.” He also drew a distinction with Europe, which has been rocked by recent home-grown terror attacks in Paris and Brussels, saying the U.S. does a much better job assimilating immigrants and refugees with the rest of society.
After the talk, Yale-Loehr joined members of the audience for a reception at the Linklaen House.
The Cazenovia Forum series will resume in the fall with talks by psychology professor Carrie Keating, convicted former political operative Allen Raymond and pollster John Zogby.
All Forum lectures are free and open to the public.
