Opinion: Blurring the line between legal and illegal immigration
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You know how border hawks try to emphasize that they’re only at war with illegal immigrants, not the legal ones? Wonder how they react to this AP story:
A new poll shows that more than half of new California immigrants who have green cards at some point lived in the state illegally. ...They found 52 percent of new green card holders in California had lived in the country illegally before. When they looked at the country as a whole, researchers found a smaller but still significant percentage of permanent residents—42 percent—have lived in the country illegally.
The article notes that the Public Policy Institute of California study contradicts ‘the conventional notion that most legal immigrants wait in their home country for their permanent residency papers.’ Keep in mind, though, many of those offenders are simply what the study terms ‘visa abusers’ — those who come in with valid documentation but end up overstaying.
And no, for all you Minutemen out there, they’re not just from Mexico. The PPIC study points out:
Mexico is by no means the only country with a high percentage of 2003 [legal permanent residents] with prior illegal entries or stays. We estimate that more than one-third of those from Canada and 30 percent of those from Europe/Central Asia had prior illegal entries or stays.
Hard to blame them, given how rife with red tape the naturalization process has become.
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