All posts by John Lee

John Lee is an administrator of the Open Borders website. Liberal immigration laws are a personal passion for him. See all blog posts by John.

How arbitrary red tape changed someone’s life

1 Comment

On Quora, someone has asked how getting a green card changed people’s lives. There is one response explaining how getting an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) changed his (or her) life:

This is more about how the EAD and AC-21 changed my life.

I moved to the US on an L1-B work visa to work for a major tech firm. I got lowballed on the pay and didn’t realize that till I got here. I couldn’t switch jobs on an L1-B because it is tied to the company you work for unlike an H1-B that can be transferred. The H1-B quotas were filling up within a few days of being open back then. The company filed for my GC in the EB-3 category for which the wait times were estimated at around 15 years (EB-3 NOT rest of world). The company was in constant threat of going out of business or getting bought out. Layoffs happened every few months. I decided to go back to school to get a Masters degree. After getting acceptance letters I learnt that I wasn’t eligible for a student visa because I had applied for the green card. To get a student visa I had to prove no intent to immigrate but I had proven the opposite by filing for the green card.

In July 2007, for some reason all the priority dates became current for a brief instant. This allowed me to get an EAD. With the EAD and using the AC-21 rule I switched jobs to a similar role at another company. For the new job I had been able to negotiate the type of work and the salary. I knew that I didn’t want to go to another company and remain in the EB-3  queue for 15 years. So I had waited till I had 5 years of work experience before switching jobs. The new company filed for my GC, this time in the EB-2 category. I got my GC 2 years later. Freedom.

I think the biggest advantage of the GC is the peace of mind it gives you. You can work in any role without having to worry about being forced to leave the country if things don’t work out.

The absurdity of immigration rules is something I keep pounding on because for most of us, the government is at worst an annoyance. It’s a pain to pay taxes, waste of time to go to the DMV, and torture to face a tax audit. But for most of us, we don’t live in mortal fear of government tearing apart our family, kicking us out of our home, or sacking us from our job because of a simple mistake. It’s only immigrants, and those who wish to immigrate, that put up with this.

Absurdity? Let me count the ways:

  1. L1B visas bring professional, skilled workers to the US, but force them to work for only one company
  2. To call converting this to an H1B “difficult” would be an understatement
  3. In any case, H1B quotas were literally filled within days of the government opening room to apply
  4. Applying for a green card meant a wait time of 15 years
  5. Converting the L1B to a student visa was impossible because applying for a green card makes you ineligible
  6. For reasons totally unknown (possibly a government mistake), this person was suddenly able to convert their L1B to an H1B, get a new job, and get a green card

The author speaks of the “peace of mind” having a green card gives you. My aunt has been a US citizen for going on 2 decades, and today she still speaks of the fear of having her green card taken away before she became a citizen. No citizen would let their government psychologically and emotionally scar them the way we let governments abuse immigrants.

Arbitrary government decisions literally make or break people’s lives, and to what end? How do any of the absurdities laid out above make life better for the typical US citizen? How are these benefits to citizens in any sense proportional to the harm they do to the thousands of people already in the US seeking to migrate legally, or to the millions more who would love to just get into the US?

Any large bureaucracy has collateral damage. I work for a large bank, I know this from experience. But if we held immigration regimes of the world to half the bar the US government holds its banks to (and the US is not known for its strict financial regulatory regime), we would find that few, if any, immigrant bureaucracies pass. As a banker, I would be ashamed to show the above process to a regulator and tell them that is how my company treats our customers’ loans or savings. Why should immigration bureaucrats and legislators get a free pass for playing Kafkaeseque games with people’s jobs and families?

The government form depicted at the top of this post is a fictitious Czech form, created by Petr Novák and available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence.

US to foreigners: we’re a nation of immigrants! (If you’re a lottery winner, or Methuselah)

8 Comments

I recently stumbled across this interesting blog post by immigration lawyer Angelo Paparelli, where he talks about US visa refusals. The post is from 2009, responding to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s public statement that she was committed to streamlining the US visa process. Angelo mentions a staggering figure from the State Department’s fiscal year 2008 annual report:

In FY 2008, the State Department’s consular officers denied 1,481,471 nonimmigrant visa (NIV) applications under Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) § 214(b) (failure to establish entitlement to the requested NIV classification). While 19,837 (1.3%) of these refusals were overcome, almost 99% of the refusals prevented possibly deserving applicants from coming to the United States. [Note: These do not include the 64,516 refusals for specific grounds such as criminal conduct, public charge, material support of terrorism, etc.]

I checked the 2012 fiscal year figures and they are similar in every meaningful respect. To calculate the approval rate we need to bring in data on visas issued: with 8.9 million non-immigrant visas issued and 1.4 million non-immigrant visa applications rejected (virtually all because of 214(b)), we get an overall rejection rate of about 14%. I don’t know if that is too high or too low. But look at the data for yourself: these aren’t people with communicable diseases or criminal records. Over 1 million people have been refused student or visitor visas for the amorphous reason of “Failure to establish entitlement to nonimmigrant status.”

Presumably the intent is to deter fraud: there is a valid concern that non-immigrant visas can be used to get into the country and via overstaying, unlawfully “convert” the visa-holder to a de facto immigrant. But the main reason that is a problem is because the immigrant visa process itself deters bona fide immigrants! If you don’t believe this, one of Angelo’s colleagues recently crunched the numbers on current expected waits for some classes of lawful immigrants:

The wait for someone getting a visa today was as long as 24 years. The wait for someone starting today is much longer. An extreme example is Mexico F2B [Mexico-born “Unmarried Sons and Daughters (21 years of age or older) of Permanent Residents”].

The last time I took the difference between the cut-off date and the present date, then factored in the rate of “advance,” the anticipated delay for someone applying today under that category was 395 years. Mexico F-1 [Mexico-born “Unmarried Sons and Daughters of U.S. Citizens”] was “only” about 80-85 years.

In the US, gun rights activists love to say that if you make guns outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. By outlawing immigration, the US has ensured only outlaws will immigrate. Abortion rights activists love to warn that if abortions are banned, the only thing that will change is that more women will get hurt or die from unlicensed backdoor abortion providers: if immigration is banned, unsurprisingly millions will risk life and limb to immigrate.

If wait times longer than the human lifespan are not a de facto ban, I don’t know what is. You might as well tell someone he can own a gun when he lives to be as old as Methuselah (a man from the Old Testament who lived for over 8 centuries), or tell her she can have an abortion when she wins the Powerball (an American lottery). You may scoff. But that is exactly what the US government tells the person looking to join their family or earn a honest living. “Sure, we’re a nation of immigrants! If you’re a lottery-winning Methuselah, come on in.” And it is worse for those 1 million+ people denied the chance to visit or study in the US: because the US government has essentially outlawed immigrants, it has similarly had no choice but to do the same for visitors too. Through no fault of their own, millions of foreigners have been punished for the US government’s failure to fix its own laws.

Risking death to get into South Africa

11 Comments

The supposedly horrible socioeconomic consequences of South African apartheid’s abolition are sometimes used as a cautionary tale against open borders. But this story of Ethiopians and Somalians risking life and limb to get into South Africa serve as a potent example of how much people are willing to risk in search of a better life:

41 young Ethiopians suffocated to death inside an overcrowded van in Tanzania. With the aid of human traffickers, they had been hoping to start a new life in South Africa.

Some ended up paying with their lives, while those who survived will be deported back to their home country.

…Most refugees from Ethiopia and Somalia are economic refugees, says Getachew. But others flee also from war and political persecution. 32 year-old Mohad Abdul is among those who fled to South Africa because of violence in Somalia….Integration in South Africa was relatively easy for Abdul. He quickly obtained a residence and work permit. Today he is a businessman in Johannesburg and watches closely as more and more Somalis and Ethiopians flock into the country.

In no other country are there so many asylum applications. In 2011 alone, there were 100,000 applications. The authorities can scarcely keep up with processing them.

There is no accounting for such reckless risking of life without considering the place premium: the same person doing the same job in one country can earn dramatically more than he or she would in a different country. The Somalian fleeing lawlessness is almost certain to be more productive in any other society in the world, since that country will at least have a half-functioning legal system. It is not difficult to imagine that even countries in less anarchic states might not offer their citizens the institutions conducive to productivity and prosperity which do exist a country or two away.

The international wage discrimination created by closed borders is literally the worst that has ever been measured. That conclusion may sound shockingly strong, but when you consider that there are Indonesians who literally migrate to Australian jails (because to them it’s better to be in a jail in Australia than free in their homeland) or Afghans who risk being shot to death to get into Iran, what’s shocking is how blind we are to the suffering which closed borders create.

The image featured at the top of this post is of a mother with her child crawling under the South African fence bordering Zimbabwe, taken by Themba Hadebe for the Associated Press in 2010 and published in The Guardian.

Germany is thinking about abolishing visas

2 Comments

Open borders advocates may have some allies over in Germany. In January this year, Deutsche Welle published this story with the unassuming title German companies want fewer visa restrictions (emphasis added):

Visa applications take too long, representatives from German industry say. They argue that companies lose money when a foreign business partner cannot travel. And they have concrete proposals to reform the system.

A deal worth millions was almost closed at a German agricultural fair, but urgently needed visas could not be issued to the foreign business partner. The telephone number in the documents was wrong, so embassy officials couldn’t reach anyone.

This is not a unique case, according to Andreas Metz, a spokesman for the German business community’s Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations. He cannot understand why old rules are followed to the word.

“The visa system is actually a relic of the 19th century,” Metz told DW. “Today, there is a completely different method to ensure security, namely through a biometric passport and computerized information, which impede travel less significantly.” He hopes that visa requirements will be done away with eventually.

The discussion about unrestricted travel is also being discussed at the government level. German Economics Minister Philipp Rösler is pushing for more freedom. He recently called for Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich to give up his opposition to a more liberal issuing of visas.

The Interior Ministry’s main argument is security. The ministry is in favor of simplifying the visa application procedure, but it is against getting rid of visas. It has to ensure that aspects related to security and migration policy are preserved, the ministry said.

It seems difficult to believe that the German government is considering open borders via the abolition of visas. I’m not sure what exactly is being meant here by abolishing visas, since I can’t imagine the German government is eager to invite the entire world to live in its borders. (The article goes on to cite concerns about Turks and Russians unlawfully settling in Germany if visas are abolished.) Probably what’s being envisioned is that visitors would not require visas, so anyone can enter — but settling would still require a residency permit.

(By the way, talking of political externalities — Philipp Rösler is an immigrant from Vietnam who was adopted by a German family, so one can argue he has something of a vested interest in loosening border controls.)

This isn’t true open borders, but it’s one way to start down the road there. As the German lobbyist indicates, the modern visa system is only going to become even more out of place with the advancement of technology. I can still envision scenarios where a reasonable government would require visas: I can see the case for requiring visas from countries which are hotbeds for terrorism or organised crime. But modern technology makes the case for abolishing visas only more compelling.