Immigration Reflections

  I am not an expert on immigration law by any means; my experience with U.S. immigration laws and policies comes from helping the people most affected by them over the years. I was a volunteer at an immigration law clinic in San Francisco for many years in the early 1990s, and have been a teacher of English as a Second Language since 1997. Consequently, I have had to pay more attention to U.S. immigration laws than people who don’t work with immigrants, and I have seen the effects of several significant changes to immigration laws up close.  Still, I am a layman writing for other laymen.  I’m writing because I’m frustrated with what passes for discussion of immigration laws in U.S. public discourse. Immigration law is complicated, so even sympathetic journalists tend to simplify it in ways that are misleading.  The misconceptions seeded by these oversimplifications pave the way for the deliberately vicious lies and distortions spread by politicians like Donald Trump.  Now that ICE is creating chaos in the streets of Minneapolis and other cities, the horrific abuses at immigration detention centers are coming to light, and immigration enforcement is being used to suppress the free speech and other Constitutional rights even of U.S. citizens, it is clear that the nation needs to rethink its immigration policies.  In order to do that productively, we need a clear understanding of what the immigration laws are now and how they got that way. Through this blog, I hope to contribute to that in a small way. The posts will include my opinions, based on my personal experience, but I will also do my research and attempt to share good resources that I find for those who want to learn more about a particular topic.  I’m going to start with a review of changes to the immigration laws since the late 20^th Century.