According to Manley, one of his clients, a Mexican-born U.S. citizen who petitioned for his two brothers to be granted legal residency, waited more than 15 years and ultimately buried them rather than congratulating them.
They are making every effort. “They’re lined up,” he said. However, having faith in a system that was fundamentally created to fail from the start is challenging.
Although there hasn’t been a significant overhaul of immigration laws in almost 40 years, politicians are seeing an opening as the Trump administration pushes down on undocumented immigrants. Without another relief valve, people across a broad spectrum of the economy will suffer, according to economists, immigration lawyers, and academics.
Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California, is scheduled to submit legislation on Monday that would give 11 million immigrants who have been in the country for at least seven years a route to citizenship. Padilla said he decided to reintroduce the bill because he sensed a change in the mood in Congress and throughout the nation, even though it is unlikely to pass with a Republican-led House and Senate.
There are more besides him. Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) and Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) introduced the Dignity Act earlier this month in the House, which would award up to seven years of legal status with work permits to qualifying undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country before 2021.
According to David Bier, a researcher at the Cato Institute, Republicans and Democrats have attempted and failed for decades to modernize what is generally considered to be an antiquated system that only approved 3% of the 34.7 million pending green card applications in the most recent fiscal year.
“I think now’s the time,” Padilla remarked, referring to the Trump administration’s severe overreach. You discuss farmworkers and other agricultural workers with coworkers on both sides of the divide. Although there hasn’t been political will for many years, they claim that farmworkers deserve better.
However, images of Trump’s enforcement efforts against law-abiding citizens, such as recordings of women crying as they are taken from their children and the arrests of employees and sellers outside Home Depot stores, have permeated the public awareness and prompted outrage from people of all political persuasions.
This month, a Gallup poll revealed unprecedented levels of support for immigration. Seventy-nine percent of American adults said that immigration is typically a good thing for the country. Furthermore, a record-low 17% thought it was a bad thing.
A year prior, Americans who were worried about their personal finances were growing more and more alarmed by the influx of immigrants at the southern border. As a result, they voted for President Donald Trump last November, whose strict immigration policies were a key component of his campaign.
According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2024, 32% thought it was a negative thing and 64% thought it was a good thing.
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt responded to a question last month regarding the Dignity Act by saying that although the president has not reviewed the legislation, he has made it clear that he will not in any way support amnesty for illegal aliens.
While immigrants have filled positions picking in the fields, cooking and cleaning in the rear of restaurants, caring for children, and building homes, the United States has turned a blind eye under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
However, a report from the conservative American Enterprise Institute suggests that due to the Trump administration’s increased enforcement, net migration is likely to become negative in 2025, and that monthly job growth and GDP may decline by the end of this year.
According to economist Tara Watson of the Brookings Institution, one of the paper’s authors, this decline in migration hasn’t occurred since tracking started in 1960. About 1.2 million people enter the country each year, 600,000 of whom enter lawfully on foreign green cards and the remaining individuals who enter illegally or who come in search of asylum or another status.
According to the report, the United States may lose up to 525,000 citizens, which would result in a 0.3–0.4% decline in GDP.
A negative migration prediction was deemed startling by Watson.
“All of our labor force growth is due to immigration,” she remarked. In fact, the number of Americans in our employment is currently declining.
The United States may become less attractive to scholars, scientists, tech workers, and Ph.D. students if this trend persists, she warned.
According to her, we have developed an entire infrastructure around global talent. Losing that might have a seriously negative impact on our economy in the long run. I believe it will slow our progress in the near future.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform’s Ira Melhman and other hard-line immigration enforcement advocates argue that an economy based on the cheap labor of immigrants worsens working conditions for American workers.
If you provide low pay and unfavorable working conditions and Americans don’t apply for those jobs, you can make it a self-fulfilling prophecy by saying, “Well, you see, only immigrants will take them,” he added.
His organization supports merit-based migration and believes that family-based or chain migration should be stopped, with the exception of close family members.
The United States prioritized admitting immigrants with family members under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The system, which favored European immigration, superseded national-origins quotas with a racist undertone that had existed since the 1920s.
Approximately one million people receive a green card each year, which is a prerequisite for citizenship, through one of four main channels: employment, family ties, a lottery, or as a refugee or asylum seeker. Family ties are the most popular route, and many of those who are accepted already reside in the United States.
The number of green cards granted to family members other than immediate relatives is limited by the current system to 226,000 annually. Additionally, although there are few exceptions, it sets an annual cap of 140,000 for employment-based green cards.
Family ties, such as the one Manley’s customers were utilizing, are lifelong and may take decades to develop. Your case would just be coming up if you had applied for a Mexican sibling twenty-four years ago. However, because of the increased docket, such wait times are now lengthier. India is currently approving cases that are 19 years old, whereas almost every other country has been requiring roughly 17 years.
The work force is unable to meet demand due to aging demographics and dropping birthrates. According to Bier, the United States has the third-lowest rate of immigration per capita among developed nations.
As a result, workers are drawn to enter illegally because to the pent-up demand.
According to Hiroshi Motomura, co-director of UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, there is a misalignment between the legal system and the economic that has led to a system where workers are invited but no legal status is provided for many years. What follows is that the workers’ lives become extremely unstable.
Immigration attorney Carl Shusterman, who has been in practice since the 1970s, claims to witness it daily both in his practice and close to his Westside home.
You can see that there is no way for these people to obtain legal status if you go to any restaurant and look at the people who are cooking the food, building the buildings in the upscale neighborhoods, mowing the lawns, or taking care of the children. You can also look at almost any industry.
