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4. Why Can’t They Just “Get Legal”?

SOME PEOPLE THINK WE’VE ALWAYS had two distinct types of immigrants in the United States: “legal” and “illegal.” The “legal” ones are people who “follow the rules” and “wait their turn in line,” whereas the “illegal” immigrants are seen as criminals who for some reason decided to “flout our laws” and “cut ahead in line.”

Such views suggest a sort of permanent caste system into which immigrants have always been sorted. In truth, immigrants have continued to come to the United States over the years in much the same ways they did in the past. What changed was not the immigrants but the laws. Illegality was constructed, imposed on people, and maintained through increasingly restrictive immigration laws.¹ That means we can deconstruct it—and counteract its negative effects—by changing those laws.

What’s the difference between “legal” and “illegal”?

The distinction between “legal” and “illegal” isn’t as clear as many people imagine. Being without status is not a permanent condition. Immigrants who arrive legally may fall out of status. Some who were once undocumented have become U.S. citizens. Asylum seekers who are ordered deported can win their cases in the appeals courts and eventually gain permanent residency. And immigrants who have had permanent resident status for many years have been “de-legalized,” as the New York–based group Families for Freedom puts it, because of past criminal convictions, even minor ones.² In short, the difference between an immigrant who is “legal” and one who is not is simply that one has been granted an opportunity to gain and keep legal status, and the other is being denied that opportunity.

News reports sometimes claim that “illegal” immigration is an affront to immigrants who do things the “right way.”³

But most authorized immigrants have family members and friends who are still trying to gain legal status, and they understand how difficult it is, so it’s not surprising that a majority feel sympathy for the undocumented. In a telephone survey of 800 authorized immigrants taken by Bendixen & Associates in early 2006 for New America Media, 68 percent supported granting out-of-status immigrants a temporary work permit and a way to gain legal residency.⁴

A November 2014 poll by the Latino Decisions firm showed 89 percent of Hispanic voters backing a plan by President Barack Obama for giving temporary legal status to as many as five million undocumented immigrants. The poll didn’t distinguish between native-born and naturalized voters, but after analyzing the poll, TalkingPointsMemo.com editor Josh Marshall concluded it was “pretty clear that legal immigrants do not feel victimized by leniency or legalization for undocumented immigrants.”⁵

How did immigration become “illegal”?

Immigration opponents regularly claim that their ancestors came here legally; they even buy T-shirts and bumper stickers saying that. In fact, their ancestors may well have arrived long before people coming from other countries needed legal permission to enter the United States.

Far from restricting immigration, the thirteen British colonies actively sought people to settle here as a way of providing cheap labor and displacing the Native American population. Many people came against their will—including more than 388,000 Africans who were brought here as slaves between the mid-seventeenth century and 1860.⁶ Most white colonists arrived voluntarily, but not all. Of the about 500,000 Europeans who had migrated to the colonies by 1775, some 55,000 were convicts deported from the British Isles and forced to work as indentured servants for periods of up to seven years. About 200,000 other whites also came as indentured servants; a small number of these were brought by force, according to historian Richard Hofstadter, and “a much larger portion came in response to deceit and misrepresentation” by recruiters.⁷

After the U.S. Congress banned the slave trade starting in 1808,⁸ the country continued to encourage voluntary immigration. Another sixty-seven years passed before the federal government finally enacted its first law regulating immigration—the Immigration Act of 1875, often referred to as the Page Act or the Asian Exclusion Act.⁹

This law limited immigration by male Chinese laborers and Chinese women. It was followed in 1882 by the Chinese Exclusion Act, and then by other openly racist laws aimed at keeping out most people from Eastern Asia. Europeans continued to be admitted with few restrictions until Congress passed laws in 1921 and 1924 establishing quota systems. The Immigration Act of 1924 limited total immigration to about 165,000 people a year. Africans and Asians were almost completely excluded, and the quotas for Southern and Eastern European countries were set in a way that virtually shut out people from those areas. The European quotas reflected widespread prejudice among citizens of Northern European ancestry against the Italians and Eastern European Jews who had started arriving in larger numbers in the 1880s.¹⁰

Has Mexican immigration always been “illegal”?

Although the 1924 law was an effort to end most immigration from Africa, Asia, and much of Europe, it didn’t set quotas for most people from the Western Hemisphere.¹¹ These immigrants only needed to meet a few requirements when applying for visas, such as paying fees and taxes, and demonstrating good health, the ability to read, and the absence of a criminal record. In practice, some of these requirements were used to block Mexican laborers seeking to enter the United States; those allowed in were forced to strip naked and submit to a humiliating “delousing” bath and medical inspection at the border. Europeans and first-class passengers on ships or trains were not subjected to this treatment.

After 1924, the U.S. government actually encouraged a certain level of migration from Latin America. But Mexicans were wanted only as temporary manual laborers. “A settled resident workforce would have encouraged both labor organization and more stable communities, and all that they imply—higher wages, education, political participation, growth of a middle class,” observes historian Mae Ngai. Restrictions introduced in 1924, including the creation of the Border Patrol and the expanded use of deportation, “ultimately served the interests of agribusiness by creating a vulnerable ‘alien’ workforce,” Ngai notes.¹²

With the 1924 laws came talk from politicians and the media about the need to expel the newly “illegal” immigrants.¹³ Deportations expanded, particularly of Mexicans, yet so did labor recruitment, for example through the 1942–64 “bracero” program.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act) set up new barriers for Latin American migrants. It removed the discriminatory quotas of the 1924 law, but it extended quotas to the Western Hemisphere for the first time, setting the limit at 120,000 a year.¹⁴

The 1965 law caused the number of unauthorized immigrants to swell further in the 1970s, and politicians and the media stepped up their scare-mongering about “illegal” immigrants “invading” and “swarming” over the southwestern border. “Illegality” quickly became the charge raised most often by people who opposed immigration. In the past immigration opponents openly expressed prejudices against the Chinese, for example, or Eastern European Jews. Civil rights gains in the 1960s made it less acceptable for public figures to voice prejudiced views, so the idea of illegality gave people holding such beliefs a cover. They could say they weren’t against immigrants (or against Mexicans), they were just against “illegals.”¹⁵

How “illegal” is immigration, anyway?

Law is not a neutral force. Throughout history, people at the top have made laws to uphold their power against threats from below. Even acts like robbery and murder, which seem to violate clear and strongly held social norms, have always been treated differently depending on who carries them out against whom and in what context.

Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it harmful. It was illegal for people to flee slavery, and to help others escape; it was illegal for black people to sit at the front of the bus. Yet those were acts of courage that made history and inspired millions.

Laws can change when enough pressure is exerted. What was illegal yesterday may be perfectly legal tomorrow, or vice versa.

In any case, lacking immigration status isn’t necessarily a crime even under our present laws. As of 2015, entering the United States without government permission (by “jumping the border,” for example) is a criminal offense—a minor misdemeanor, with a maximum sentence of six months. Living or working here without permission, regardless of how you entered, is just a civil infraction, not a crime. While some local officials try to claim such “unlawful presence” is like trespassing, it’s more comparable under the law to a ticket for jaywalking.¹⁶

Many out-of-status immigrants use false identification documents, usually in order to get legitimate jobs instead of working off the books. Federal law treats this as a crime, with a maximum sentence of five years.¹⁷ Working for a living doesn’t harm society, and most people consider it to be a good thing. But immigrants face more public condemnation, and harsher legal consequences, for using fake IDs to seek employment than U.S.-born teenagers do when they use fake IDs, for example, to buy alcohol. Immigration opponents charge that immigrants are committing a serious crime—identity theft—if they unknowingly use a real person’s Social Security number to get a job, but the Supreme Court ruled in May 2009 that this use of false documents doesn’t meet the legal definition for identity theft.¹⁸

Why don’t immigrants “follow the rules”?

It’s easy for U.S. citizens to go to most other countries. To enter Mexico as a tourist, for instance, you only need to show your passport, go through customs, and (if traveling beyond the border area) pay a small fee for a tourist card. Gaining permanent residency in Mexico takes more time and requires applicants to prove they can support themselves, but almost all U.S. citizens who apply to settle in Mexico are able to do so.¹⁹

Many people in the United States assume that undocumented immigrants could all have come here legally if they’d been willing to “stand in line.” But as the American Immigration Council (AIC) points out, “There is no line available for them, and the ‘regular channels’ do not include them.”²⁰ Otherwise why would so many risk their lives trudging across the desert for days without water, stuffed into sealed train cars or truck beds, stowed away in shipping containers, crawling through sewage tunnels, or floating on inner tubes across polluted rivers or shark-infested oceans?

About one million people manage to become “lawful permanent residents” in the United States each year. This is a large number, but nearly all of these people gain legal residence either because they have close relatives living here (66 percent), meet requirements for a special work visa (16 percent), win a “diversity visa” (5 percent), or qualify as refugees or asylees (12 percent).²¹

Immigration laws don’t limit the number of refugees, asylees, and members of U.S. citizens’ immediate families (spouses, parents, and minor unmarried children) who can get a green card, but there’s a limit of 675,000 a year on the total granted residency under all the other categories. Because of complicated rules, the annual number of new permanent residents never comes close to this maximum; in fiscal year 2013 it was 430,907, and this was normal. Less than half the people who get permanent status are entering the United States from outside; the majority are already living here. The result is that the number of slots open for people coming from abroad is about 250,000 each year for everyone except refugees, asylees, and members of U.S. citizens’ immediate families.

Within this number there are still more limits. For example, no country gets more than 7 percent of the immigrant visas available in a given year. In 2012, there were 1,316,118 Mexicans on waiting lists for the visas, while the highest number of Mexicans that could be accepted under the 7 percent rule was 47,250.²²

Can’t immigrants bring their extended families here?

If you’re a U.S. citizen, you can generally apply to bring your “immediate relatives”—spouses, parents or unmarried children under twenty-one—here as permanent residents, although there are plenty of hoops to jump through, and it’s not always quick or easy. For other types of “family preferences,” an even more complex set of rules lays out “priority” categories and annual caps based on the family relationship and country of origin. Waiting times of ten to twenty years are not uncommon. In February 2015 the government was still processing family visa applications from as far back as August 1991. While they wait, applicants are disqualified from visiting the United States because they have shown “immigrant intent” by applying for immigrant visas.²³

Some conservatives now object to the “family preference” system, but it was actually introduced into the 1965 Immigration Act as a concession to conservative politicians who wanted to keep Asians and Africans out of the United States. Family preferences would mean “there will not be, comparatively, many Asians or Africans entering the country,” Representative Emmanuel Celler, a liberal New York Democrat who cosponsored the 1965 law, said in Congress during the final debate on the bill, “Since the people of Africa and Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could immigrate from those countries because they have no family ties to the U.S.”²⁴

What about the work visa and the “visa lottery”?

The government can also issue up to 140,000 immigrant visas a year for five categories of workers, and each of these has its own numerical limitations. The categories include professionals, people with special skills, and cultural or sports figures. There are openings for religious workers, former U.S. government employees, and investors, but only 5,000 visas can be issued to unskilled workers.²⁵

In 1986, Congress created a temporary category of “diversity” visas to bolster immigration from Europe, which had slowed thanks to a growing European economy.²⁶ The Immigration Act of 1990 made the program permanent starting in 1995. The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, often called the “visa lottery,” allocates 50,000 immigrant visas to different parts of the world under a formula favoring regions that have sent relatively few immigrants in the previous five years. Natives of countries that have sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States during the past five years are disqualified from participating in the lottery.²⁷

“YACHT PEOPLE”

The Immigration Reform Act, signed by President George H. W. Bush on November 29, 1990, created a new category of visa for millionaire investors. Up to 10,000 immigrant visas a year were made available under the EB-5 category to anyone investing $1 million into a U.S. business and creating at least ten jobs for U.S. citizens. The investment can be smaller—$500,000—if made in rural or “high unemployment areas.”28

“We’ve done a great job on boat people,” Harold Ezell, former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) western regional commissioner, said in 1991. “I see no problem with a few yacht people.” After leaving his INS post in 1989, Ezell began marketing investor visas to wealthy foreigners.29 Ezell was one of a number of government officials who pushed for the investor visa program, then left for the private sector to reap profits from it, as revealed in a February 2000 Baltimore Sun exposé.30

Those profits were boosted when INS deputy general counsel Paul Virtue issued legal opinions in 1993 and 1995 loosening the rules for the investor visas. The controversial rules were reversed in late 1997, and the scandal led the U.S. Justice Department’s inspector general to launch an investigation in 1998 into the “appearance of impropriety” in the behavior of high-level government employees. The investigation concluded that Virtue had arranged special access to key agency officials for a private company, American Immigration Services (AIS). The Inspector General’s office closed the case without taking further action in October 1999, and its report was kept secret.31

The program started off slowly but grew each year, from 179 visas issued in 2005 to over 3,000 in 2012. In 2014 the number of visas issued reached the 10,000 maximum for the first time, with 9,128 of them going to Chinese nationals. One favorite “high unemployment area” has been Manhattan’s West Side, where some 1,200 Chinese millionaires have invested in the $20 billion Hudson Yards project. The Atlantic noted in 2015 that the project actually “is on the edge of one of the richest neighborhoods in the country.”32

Is it easy for people to come here as tourists?

As of December 2015, citizens of thirty-eight countries were eligible for the Visa Waiver Program (VWP), meaning they didn’t need to apply for a visa to visit the United States for ninety days or less. This waiver covers most of Europe, New Zealand, Australia, and several of the wealthier Asian nations: Brunei, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Chile, added to the list in 2014, is the only Western Hemisphere country that qualifies. Citizens of Bermuda and Canada can visit without visas through a separate program.³³

In the rest of the world, the average citizen has a difficult time qualifying for a U.S. visitor visa (B visa). To apply, you may have to wait in long lines, pay hefty application fees, and travel to another city for an in-person visa interview. To get a visa, you must convince a consular officer that you don’t plan to stay in the United States, generally by demonstrating that you have a stable job or a profitable business, close family ties in your country, several thousand dollars in the bank, and a home or other property. Many people who would like to visit don’t bother applying, since they expect to be rejected.³⁴

Consular officers have “sole authority to approve or deny” visa applications; there is no appeal process for those who are denied.³⁵ In the early 1990s, the U.S. consulate in São Paulo, Brazil, routinely denied visas to applicants who “looked poor”—which generally meant they had darker skin—regardless of other criteria. Officers would mark applications with abbreviations such as “LP” (looks poor), “TP” (talks poor), or “LR” (looks rough), according to a lawsuit brought by a fired consular officer who objected to the discrimination. In January 1998, a U.S. federal judge ruled that the screening policies used at the consulate in São Paulo from 1992 to 1994 were “clearly illegal.”³⁶

For those whose applications are approved, “a visa does not guarantee entry into the United States,” as the U.S. State Department website warned in 2015. The final decision on whether to let someone into the country is in fact made by a U.S. immigration officer at the port of entry. You can have a valid visa in hand and still be turned away at the airport and put on the next flight home, with no explanation, because of an arbitrary decision by an immigration officer.³⁷

Aren’t there lots of other ways to come here with visas?

There is a whole alphabet soup of temporary visa categories, each with its own set of confusing and restrictive rules. Most of the people who have been displaced by economic and political crises around the world don’t fit any of these categories.

To get a student visa, you have to show you have strong ties in your home country and enough money to support yourself and pay your full-time tuition without working outside school. A massive database known as SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System), mandated under the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), links school records with government records, so the immigration service automatically revokes the visas of students who drop out, flunk out, or stop taking a full course load.³⁸

There are also visa categories for exchange visitors, athletes, artists, entertainers, religious workers, “intracompany transferees,” and others.³⁹

Once immigrants have been here a while, can’t they “get legal”?

Millions of immigrants have lived in the United States for many years without status and are eager to gain legal permanent residency. According to a survey by Bendixen & Associates in October 2005, 98 percent of the undocumented would try to get legal status if it was available to them.⁴⁰ Those who have a valid option for legalizing their status generally pursue it, even though the process can be expensive and can take years. In 2013, a total of 530,802 people—including documented and undocumented immigrants—managed to adjust their status to permanent resident, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).⁴¹

But there are only a few ways to “get legal,” and most out-of-status immigrants don’t qualify. The process is difficult for people who entered the United States with visas (or under the visa waiver program) but stayed longer than allowed. It’s close to impossible for people who came here without permission—“entered without inspection” (EWI) in immigration law jargon.

Even marrying a U.S. citizen doesn’t usually help immigrants who entered without inspection. Instead of applying to adjust their status here, they must leave and apply for a visa from outside the United States. Once out of the country, they are trapped by the punitive provisions of Section 301 in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Under those provisions, anyone who has been “unlawfully present” in the United States for more than 180 days is deemed “inadmissible” and barred from returning for three years; anyone with more than twelve months of “unlawful presence” is barred for ten years. If you can prove that your absence will cause your U.S. citizen spouse to suffer “extreme hardship,” you can apply for a “provisional unlawful presence waiver” that may allow you to return to the United States sooner. Starting in 2013 people married to U.S. citizens could apply for this waiver while remaining in the United States.⁴²

Is it ever easy to get a green card?

If you entered the United States with a valid temporary visa but overstayed it, you might be able to get permanent residency through family ties or employer sponsorship. If you overstayed more than 180 days, you’d technically be subject to the three-year or ten-year bars, but if you’re married to a U.S. citizen you can generally avoid the bars by adjusting your status in the United States.⁴³

Still, getting a green card is rarely easy, even for immigrants who haven’t overstayed their temporary visas. Any encounter with the immigration bureaucracy is likely to be plagued with obstacles and frustrations.

Many people believe that getting a green card through marriage is just a matter of filling out a few forms and answering a few questions—as long as the relationship is legitimate. But the way the government looks at it, the burden is on you—the applicant—to prove your marriage isn’t fraudulent. You and your spouse are expected to get a joint checking account, pay taxes jointly, and have bills and leases in both your names, among other steps (even though not all married couples routinely do these things).⁴⁴ The whole process from marriage to green card generally takes at least ten months if you’re married to a U.S. citizen, but it can take longer. The process is much longer if the spouse sponsoring you is a permanent resident rather than a citizen.⁴⁵

Before July 1, 2013, there was no way for a U.S. citizen to sponsor a same-sex spouse. After the Supreme Court struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in June 2013, the administration of President Barack Obama changed its policy and instructed federal employees “to review immigration visa petitions filed on behalf of a same-sex spouse in the same manner as those filed on behalf of an opposite-sex spouse.”⁴⁶

Getting an employer to sponsor you for permanent residency is especially complicated, and can often take more than five years. Employers are frequently reluctant to go along with the tax and salary requirements involved and prefer not to admit they’ve been hiring out-of-status workers. Before your file even gets to the immigration agency, the Department of Labor must certify that your employer tried unsuccessfully to find U.S. citizens or permanent residents who could do your job.⁴⁷ Although discrimination on the basis of national origin is illegal in the United States, a 2014 study of approval rates for labor certification petitions found significant disparities based on the nationality of the prospective employee, even when other factors like skills and experience were the same.⁴⁸

What about the “anchor babies”?

Children born in the United States are U.S. citizens, even if their parents are out-of-status immigrants. Opponents of immigration like to call such children “anchor babies,” implying that immigrant parents use their U.S.-born children as a way to establish themselves here. In July 2010 Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) claimed on Fox News that unauthorized women come to the United States simply to “drop and leave” their babies.⁴⁹

Most citizen children of undocumented immigrants are actually born some time after their parents have settled in the United States, according to a study of babies born to immigrants from March 2009 to March 2010. Just 9 percent of the out-of-status parents had arrived in 2008 or later; most had been in the United States for a number of years when the babies were born—30 percent had arrived between 2004 and 2007, and 61 percent arrived before 2004. For its October 2006 survey, Bendixen & Associates asked undocumented immigrants to give their reasons for migrating to the United States. The respondents overwhelmingly cited work opportunities; having “anchor babies” didn’t even rate a mention.⁵⁰

In any case, having a U.S. citizen child doesn’t help undocumented immigrants gain legal status, or even protect them from deportation. U.S. citizens have to be at least twenty-one years old to sponsor their parents for legal residency. Each year, thousands of people who have U.S.-born children are deported, leaving families shattered. A 2012 study by the New York University School of Law’s Immigrant Rights Clinic found that 87 percent of New York City immigration cases involving parents of U.S. citizen children between 2005 and 2010 ended in deportation.⁵¹

Before 1996, out-of-status immigrants could sometimes win “suspension of deportation” by proving that they had lived in the United States for seven years and had good moral character, and that their removal would cause “extreme” hardship to themselves or to a family member with legal status. But IIRIRA, the 1996 immigration law, changed the rules. To be granted what is now called “cancellation of removal,” applicants must prove they have lived here for ten years with good moral character, and their deportation would cause “exceptional and extremely unusual” hardship to a U.S. citizen or permanent resident parent, spouse, or child. It’s very difficult to meet the hardship criteria: a child who is separated from a parent clearly suffers hardship, but the situation is not necessarily exceptional or extremely unusual. When such cancellation is granted, it usually goes to an immigrant parent who is the primary caregiver for a U.S. citizen child suffering from a severe, life-threatening medical condition.⁵²

The 1996 law also set a limit of 4,000 on the number of people who can be granted this particular type of cancellation in any given year—not counting permanent residents seeking to reverse deportation orders, who are counted separately and are not subject to the cap. Complicated rules designed to prevent judges from granting more than 4,000 cancellations in any given year have resulted in a backlog of decisions.⁵³

BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

Some countries base citizenship on family heritage, but the British colonies followed English common law in automatically making people citizens of the place where they were born. The newly formed United States continued to recognize birthright citizenship; the Supreme Court assumed it as the basis for an 1804 decision.

However, women didn’t have full citizenship until they won the right to vote in 1920, and many states originally denied voting rights to citizens without property. Slaves were denied citizenship altogether, and until 1870 only white immigrants were eligible to naturalize as citizens. The situation was more complicated for free native-born people of color: in most states they had limited citizenship, without the right to vote; at the time of the Civil War free men of African descent could vote in only six of the thirty-four existing states. Some Native Americans, but not all, were recognized as citizens in treaties with the federal government. In 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo mandated U.S. citizenship for all Mexicans living in the southwestern territories taken from Mexico in the Mexican-American War.54

With the 1857 Dred Scott decision the Supreme Court ruled that birthright citizenship only applied to white people. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, specifically redressed this injustice by restoring birthright citizenship without reference to race or ethnicity. The Supreme Court upheld the principle in 1898 in the case of the Chinese-American citizen Wong Kim Ark.55

Conservative legislators like Sen. Graham and former Arizona state senator Russell Pearce have proposed amending the Constitution or finding some way to circumvent the Fourteenth Amendment so that children born in the United States to out-of-status immigrants would not be U.S. citizens.56

Revoking birthright citizenship might leave many children born here stateless, since their parents’ countries may not automatically grant citizenship to children of their citizens.

This could violate international standards. The Dominican Republic’s government, for example, eliminated birthright citizenship in 2010, a move motivated by racial animosity toward Dominicans of Haitian descent. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) charged in December 2013 that this effort had created a “human rights problem,” and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) suggested that it had caused “grave violations of the right to nationality, to identity, and to equal protection without discrimination.”57

If we ended birthright citizenship, what status would the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants have? Would they also be undocumented? In that case, ending birthright citizenship would increase the number of undocumented people in the country; the undocumented population would be at least 44 percent larger by 2050, according to a projection by the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute project.58 In other words, revoking the country’s long tradition of granting citizenship to everyone born here would expand and make permanent an underclass of vulnerable, easily exploited people without full rights—very much like the U.S. South under Jim Crow laws or South Africa under apartheid.

Can’t immigrants apply to become U.S. citizens?

A total of 7,259,530 immigrants were naturalized as U.S. citizens from 2005 through 2014, an average of nearly three-quarters of a million each year.⁵⁹ But like most processes for immigrants, this one is far from simple. People who want citizenship must first become permanent residents, then wait five years before they can apply to be naturalized. (If you are married to a U.S. citizen, you can apply for citizenship three years after getting your green card; U.S. soldiers on active duty can take advantage of a more accelerated schedule.)

Some permanent residents hesitate to go through the naturalization process because it is expensive (at the end of 2016 the filing fee was $640) or too much of a bureaucratic hassle.⁶⁰ Others don’t apply because their home country doesn’t allow dual citizenship, and they may lose certain rights there by becoming U.S. citizens. Some permanent legal residents are barred from gaining citizenship because of prior criminal convictions.

For those who do seek citizenship, the process is not always straightforward. If your residency status was based on marriage to a U.S. citizen, immigration agents may raise questions about your marriage. If you travel outside the United States for more than a few months each year, your application can be denied (and the government may even try to take your green card away). Any past arrests will resurface through fingerprint record checks, and may get you deported.

Even if your record is clean, you may be confused with someone with a similar name and prior arrests. In one such case, a longtime permanent resident from Peru who had never received so much as a parking ticket was denied citizenship based on crimes committed by someone with the same first and last name and the same birth date, even though the person who committed the crimes was a foot taller, had a different middle name, and was a U.S.-born citizen with no reason to apply for naturalization. While such confusions would be easy to clear up quickly through fingerprint comparisons, immigration officials refused to fix the mistake and grant citizenship until they were sued in federal court.⁶¹

Citizenship applicants also face unexplained delays. California resident Mustafa Aziz, a military veteran who was only a year old when he and his family escaped war-torn Afghanistan and moved to the United States, applied for citizenship while on military duty in 2003. The government left Aziz waiting while it allegedly carried out a type of background check known as a “name check.” “Despite serving in the U.S. Air Force, I have been waiting for my citizenship for more than two years,” Aziz charged in August 2006. With the name check still dragging on and no end in sight, Aziz and nine others in similar situations sued the government with help from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California, the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); the goal was to get the immigration service to start following set deadlines on its name checks. In October 2006, two months after the suit was filed, the government announced it would finally grant citizenship to Aziz and six of the other plaintiffs.⁶²

The problems continued, however. In 2013, the ACLU of Southern California reported that a covert U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) program had since 2008 indefinitely delayed or rejected without cause the citizenship or residency applications of numerous Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian immigrants. Those affected received no explanations for why their applications were singled out for delay or denial.⁶³