I’ve been away from dKos for the last several years; I was working for the State Department in Consular Affairs, mostly doing visa work. (I had to retire a couple of years ago.) Given the constant stream of sludge purporting to be Trump’s words of wisdom on how immigrants get into this country, I thought I would share a few facts on how it’s really done.
DIVERSITY VISAS:
Trump thinks countries use DVs to dump their undesirables on the US. NOPE. Can’t be done. Congress set up diversity visas (also known as the visa lottery) to bring in people from countries that haven’t sent us many immigrants — that’s why’s it’s called “diversity.” If you are a national from one of these countries (around 80, and it’s been stable for a while), you can apply in October of each year by going online and filling out an application; there will be around 15-20 million of you applying each year. In May of the following year, a computer in Kentucky randomly selects 125,000 of these applicants; if you are one of them, you’ll get an email saying so, meaning that sometime in the next fiscal year you MAY get called in for an interview.
But that’s a BIG maybe. We issue 50,000 DVs maximum each fiscal year; we select 125,000 so we have enough applicants to fill the slots. We start at number 1 (as assigned by that Kentucky computer) and keep going until we’ve issued those 50,000, or until midnight DC time on September 30th, or until we hit applicant 125,000 — but that never happens; we generally end up calling around 80,000 applicants each year,
So each month, a consulate will be given a list of 30-200 applicants whose numbers have come up, and we schedule them for interviews. Now they have to pay the interview fee, get a medical exam, provide police records, and also show that they graduated high school. (Every year some applicants try to fool us with a fake high school diploma. BAD MOVE; we ban them for life, and the local police usually arrest them for forgery and fraud.) We also make ABSOLUTELY sure that the applicant in front of us is the same person who filled out the original application. If at this point, if they’re clean, and can show us they can support themselves, or be supported, in the US while they get settled, they are in.
And their government can't do a thing to help them.
UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS:
This gets complicated, so I’m just going to touch on the basics. Three ways to get into or be in this country illegally:
(1) Sneak across the border. That means Mexico (or Canada, which is also a problem, but not a big one.) State has nothing to do with this; once you’re in the US, you deal with Homeland Security, not State. We only talk to people outside the US. Mostly these people are looking for temporary work (they come and go seasonally, and they have families back home they want to go back to), or they are refugees fleeing crime, gangs, and war.
Note: someone who requests asylum on or after arrival in the US has the LEGAL RIGHT to stay here, by law, by international law, and by treaty, until their cases are decided. A refugee, on the other hand, is someone applying for asylum from outside the US, and these cases take, on average, over 2 years to decide, with 9 separate agencies all having to agree, and the applicant cannot enter the US (on a refugee visa) until the case is done.
(2) Lie about the reason you’re coming to the US. These people got legal visas (or don’t need one) but then lie about the reason they’re coming. Customs and Border Protection does a pretty good job of spotting them at the border if we don’t catch them at the interview. We spend a lot of time weeding the bad faith ones out in the interview, and we’re pretty good at it. (I once caught a woman who had brought 5 children into the US and left them there and was now trying to do the same for her employee.) But it’s really hard to predict the future, and in any case we’re not allowed to. We also devote a lot of effort to looking for patterns, to validation studies, to keeping up on the latest rumors on how to scam the system. If Trump and the GOP really wanted to solve the illegal immigrant problem, they would give State and the other agencies more resources for this.
(3) Overstay your visa. This is the big one; people who get tourist visas, student visas, occasionally work visas, and enter legally but then decide, once they’re in, they want to stay. Maybe conditions changed at home; they met someone (but don’t want to marry them), they have it good here, all kinds of reasons. These are the hardest to spot because they applied for a visa and entered the country in good faith (which makes it different from #2). The way to solve this is better tracking of people who don’t leave when they're supposed to, but that calls for manpower (and has civil liberties issues).
MARRIAGE FRAUD:
This isn't exactly illegal immigration, since these people are applying to be immigrants, but it is against the law to marry a US citizen for the sole purpose of immigration. This one is really tricky, because the first step in a marriage visa is that the US citizen applies to USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services, a branch of DHS) with a petition to let his or her spouse immigrate. (Gay spouses can now also apply.) The problem is that USCIS makes its decision whether to approve the petition based almost entirely on the evidence presented by the petitioner, so when the applicant comes to us for an interview, he or she is assumed to be valid, and we have to come up with evidence that this is not so, evidence that USCIS can defend in court. I’ve had cases where I was sure the applicant was fraudulent, but I couldn’t prove it. (On the other hand, I once convinced USCIS to revoke a petition where the applicant had gotten his US wife pregnant, which is usually too solid evidence to overcome.) This is one area where many of us would like to see the laws tightened up (or USCIS to do a better job). It’s also an area I’ve never heard Trump even mention (though he got three wives this way). [Correction: 2 foreign wives]
I’ve skipped over a lot of the complexities and variations, but that is basically how it’s done.