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Denise Gilman
I teach the Immigration Clinic, which is both a classroom experience for the students, as well as a practical experience.
We deal with a range of cases, individuals seeking asylum in this country, who are fleeing persecution in their home countries.
We handle matters of individuals who have lived for many, many years in the United States,
but who have not been able to achieve any regularized status here.
We handle cases, even of persons who were born abroad,
but who have claims to the United States citizenship through United States citizen parents,
and they may not even realize that when they come into contact initially with immigration authorities.
We also deal a lot with individuals who are detained by the immigration authorities.
Many of them, especially women, at a facility just 45 minutes from Austin, here in Taylor, Texas, the T. Don Hutto facility.
We help them try to achieve release from detention and also represent them sometimes in the merits of their cases.
These are all cases, for the most part, that are being heard by an immigration court in San Antonio, Texas,
and the students actually do the hearings before the immigration court, again, under the supervision of the faculty.
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Of course there’s a long history of migration in the United States.
Initially, in our country, there really were no immigration laws.
If you could arrive here, you had arrived and were an immigrant to this country.
Over time, some laws were put into place, but those were mostly laws of exclusion.
Prostitutes and drunkards, at various times in our history,
had been categories of people who would not be allowed to immigrate.
Now the case is that you have to, for the most part,
be a very close relative of somebody who already has permanent resident or citizenship status here,
or if you fit into the small group of people who can claim asylum, who are fleeing persecution.
Or you may come if you are a particular type of laborer, of worker,
who can immigrate through an employer seeking to have you come to the United States,
and then there is a small category of people who are allowed to come through what is called “The Lottery.”
Only a very few people have the ability to immigrate through work or through family,
and even then, the wait times are extremely long.
For the average case of an individual from Mexico,
who has even a United States citizen child living in the United States or a close family member, we’re talking 10 years,
because there are quotas on the number of migrants in each group who can come legally each year.
And for the larger countries like Mexico, there’s a huge backlog.
Many anti-immigrant advocates ask why people don’t just get back to the back of the line,
and why they don’t just immigrate through lawful means.
And what is very important to understand is that there are not any lawful avenues for many, many immigrants,
including those, for example, who have some family here.
This idea that people just come here to have anchor babies,
and then to get their own status in that way and just bring their entire family.
Well, in fact, even if you have a baby here who is a United States citizen,
that child cannot petition for their parents until they’re 21 years old.
So it’s not a very effective and quick way of immigrating, if that were the intention.
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People immigrate to the United States because they’re fleeing persecution in their home countries.
They are fearful for their lives and for their well-being.
Some people come as young immigrants, as children, and the decision there is really made by their parents.
People come for work. They come to make a life for themselves,
fleeing extreme poverty often and sometimes natural disaster.
And also many people come to the United States, seeking to reunite with family members.
In the world, the statistics say that only about 2 percent of our world’s population migrates.
Now, that’s not to say that the U.S. isn't a large receiving country,
and that there aren’t countries that are larger sending countries than others.
It’s not an equal distribution across the world.
But the point is that people don’t leave their home countries at the drop of a hat.
This is a very important decision that people make,
and it’s usually made only for very serious reasons and at great risk to the individuals involved.
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Corporations want migrants in this country. That is clear because they are a crucial source of labor,
and it seems that largely who’s advantaged are the corporations who can depend on the cheap labor,
who can keep their production costs low,
pass some of that along to the consumer, but also reap a lot of that in terms of profits.
Most corporations are in favor of a relatively liberal immigration policy for that reason.
They’re not the ones, interestingly, who are suggesting that immigration flows should be decreased.
Food, our clothing, might be more expensive if it weren’t for immigrant labor,
so long as the law is set up in a way that makes that labor very cheap, which is by making it unlawful.
And so you’re talking about a handful, at most, of employers
who are sanctioned or even brought up for possible sanctions in any particular year.
Meanwhile, for migrants, what it means is that they are not authorized to work.
They will still often find employers who will hire them.
But they are placed in an extreme situation of disadvantage,
in terms of advocating for their labor rights or even for a lawful wage,
because of their vulnerability as individuals who don’t have authorization to work and who could be deported.
There’s a very strong argument that if migrant workers were granted more rights
and more visibility and more protection in the workplace, it would really be to everybody’s benefit,
because wages would increase both for American workers and for migrant workers.
Might it mean some rise in the price of food? Perhaps.
And perhaps that’s the cost of making sure that American workers are protected.
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The walls around the world have been shown largely to be ineffective at the goals they claim they are set up to promote,
which is usually goals of impeding unlawful, irregular immigration and impeding terrorism, national security.
It’s not that they’re ineffective in the sense that they don’t have effects.
They have huge impacts on people, both people living in those areas where walls go up,
whose land may be forfeited to the government for construction of a wall,
who may be separated from the other half of their community, which ends up on the other side of the wall.
The walls also have huge impacts, particularly in the United States,
in shifting migration flows in a way that does not prevent irregular migration,
but instead forces migrants to go over increasingly difficult and dangerous pathways.
So, in the United States, for example, those segments of the wall that have been built up
have forced migrants to go through extremely difficult desert terrain to cross.
They’re not refusing to cross. They’re not declining in numbers,
at least not because of the border wall.
But they’re just going through more dangerous areas, and hundreds of migrants have died crossing.
The border wall is actually just small segments of wall, intermittent segments of wall,
so in addition to the fact that it has been and can be easily breached,
it really, by merit of its design could never serve its purpose.
The Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, who supervised much of the construction of the wall
acknowledged, in fact, that at most it would prevent migrants from crossing for a couple of minutes.
Probably the main kind of central reason the wall is ineffective
is that migration flows don’t have to do with walls and physical barriers.
They have to do with opportunities or lack of opportunities.
And so government numbers do actually show that irregular migration has decreased in the last two or three years,
some of which period predates the border wall,
and the government report suggests that it’s probably because of the economy.
We’ve spent already $2.6 billion just to construct these little segments of border wall.
Of course, that leads one to wonder whether our immigration policy is best served by putting up walls and deporting people,
or if it’s best served by thinking about the situations that people are facing in their home countries.
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