Monday, January 28, 2013

Immigration Reform

The news says that immigration is the next big issue on the President's agenda. I expected it sooner--like three years ago--so I wrote a series on the issue. The thing that strikes me about it is that everyone has an opinion on it, but almost nobody knows anything about it. If you click here you can find my simple explanations about how the law works now. Here are the individual articles in my Immigration 101 series:

Introduction
Immigrant Petitions
Getting a Green Card
Refugee/Asylee Status and Diversity Visas
Nonimmigrant Visas
Citizenship by Birth and Naturalization

6 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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    1. It's bad form to plug without making any attempt to engage with the subject matter where you're plugging.

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  2. This is going to make me sound like an ass, so please don't take it personally since it's not really directed at you.

    After living most of my life in the southwest, only to later move to Ohio and see the common perceptions here (where very few people have any direct experience with any form of immigration, legal or otherwise), I've reached a basic conclusion. People who have never lived in any border state are often eager to get up on their soapboxes, but they almost never have any clue what they're talking about, and given their personal removal from the subject I kind of feel like they're barely entitled to an opinion on the matter at all. You don't ask a vegetarian where the best place is to buy steak, and you don't ask somebody from a town with no immigrants how to deal with immigration.

    Obviously that's 100% personal opinion and has nothing to do with the current legal structure of the matter, but there's my 2 cents.

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    1. Sounds like common sense to me.

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    2. Given my job, I don't think I want to make any opinionated comments in a public forum. My right to do so is protected by the First Amendment, but still. I will say this. Person A knows the law but doesn't have any real life experience with something. Person B has real life experience, but doesn't know the law. Neither one of them is able to fix it by themselves, and there's almost nobody who has both kinds of knowledge.

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