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Wife of former Marine to be deported to Mexico Friday, after 20 years in U.S. (2018)
(www.cbsnews.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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The system is unfortunate in that you can't apply for legal status while you're in the country illegally. Like you get married, you then have to leave the country and apply for a spouse visa from a consulate. Even if you leave, if you've been in the country out of status for over a year, you're barred from getting a visa for 10 years(even as a spouse or parent). She likely had no legal path to stay with her family. It's fucked.
Biden tried to do something about that and failed. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/08/g-s1-33370/judge-biden-program-immigrant-spouses-deportation
I get that though. If a country endorses that, you're inviting more people to break the law, get in the country, then apply for citizenship.
Also, what happened to green cards? A non-legal citizen marries a legal one, and eventually they get citizenship. Is that not a thing anymore?
You need an immigrant visa to start getting a green card. Technically a green card is a visa, really. It's a whole change of status thing that is quite Byzantine.
And in general, I do not see the punitive value of breaking up families. It's like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Because you're sending a message that it's ok to break the law as long as you eventually are in compliance with the law. This is a complicated situation, especially when you have a wife/husband and children involved. I won't pretend to have all the answers. Obviously no one is happy when a family of many years is separated, but this person knew what they were doing was wrong (from a legal perspective), and did it anyway. Just like breaking any other law, there are consequences for our actions.
In this case we're creating all the social ills and costs that broken families entails, being monsters, and punishing frankly a minority of those that lack status. All for a bad policy. I mean, you yourself thought there was a pathway when we started this conversation because obviously that's the most humane and sensible thing to do.