VivirLatino

AP has a good piece today about how “legal” immigrants feel about the move towards legalizing thousands of undocumented workers. It’s a muddy area. The subjects interviewed in the article seem to sympathize with the plight of the undocumented workers, but fear that bureaucratic gridlock currently keeping them from legalizing their stays here in the U.S. will only worsen as the system absorbs all of these new cases:

Commuting to his home in suburban Bethesda, Md., Francisco Gonzalez passes scores of busy Latino construction workers, most likely illegal immigrants from his native Mexico. To the 36-year-old Latin American studies professor at John Hopkins University in Washington, those immigrants’ presence is at once a humanitarian crisis to solve and a real threat to his own ability to stay in the country.

“Our morals are on the side of the illegals. The paradox is that if they’re legalized, the line of 8 millions will become 20 millions, and the green card, they’re going to give it to me when I’m ready to retire,” Gonzalez said.

The system is to blame here. The need for mano de obra in “unskilled” jobs is great, but there is also need for immigrant workers in other areas, such as tech, teaching and nursing. All immigrants, documented or undocumented, are being failed by a system that makes it too expensive to legally immigrate for those who don’t have the means or the education, and nearly impossible for immigrant professionals to do so because of the low number of H-1B visas handed out per year — 65,000 for the entire country.

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