Another installment in the Immigration Primer series.
This time, I will cover a very little known provision in immigration law that could actually resolve current and even future illegal immigration without an amnesty. This provision is known as the Registry Date
Previous editions covered immigration in general, illegal immigration, employment-based immigration, becoming a citizen, family-based immigration, US territories and the Mariana Islands, and most recently my own immigration proposal.
Q: What is the registry date?
The registry date is a cutoff date far in the past, currently 1972. Anybody who can show they lived in the US since that time will be considered to be a Green Card holder.
It is not an amnesty, but rather essentially a statute of limitations.
One of the major differences to an amnesty is that it doesn't matter how you arrived. An amnesty is inherently unfair because people who have been legally in the USA are usually excluded from it.
Q: Why use the registry date?
The registry date is a provision we have had in our immigration law for decades. It would not require passing completely new immigration law, but rather just updating one date in a law that we have had for nearly a century.
Further, this update historically should have already happened a long time ago.
Q: Why do we have a registry date?
It is essentially a statute of limitation - just as we forgive many crimes after a long time has passed, we forgive people with a long time in the USA.
The registry was first created in 1923 to solve a very real problem: until 1906, immigrants to the USA were not given any reliable paperwork to prove their status. Basically, it was impossible to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants who came to the USA before 1906. Therefore, anybody who has been in the USA since 1906 was considered to be legal.
Ever since, the registry date has been updated to be about 15 to 20 years in the past. The last such update was in 1990. Historically, an update is long overdue - the current registry date really should be somewhere between 1990 and 1995.
Q: How could it solve illegal immigration?
To be clear, it will not prevent illegal immigration. However, updating the registry date would allow many of today's illegal immigrants to be treated as Green Card holders.
Q: What about those who came to the USA recently?
Those people would not benefit from the registry date update right away, but they would benefit from future registry date updates.
Some proposals suggest making future updates automatic ("rolling registry date"), which would make the registry date even more like its sibling, the statute of limitation.
Q: How likely is a registry date update going to become reality?
It has been proposed as a solution to illegal immigration fairly recently, last in 2000. Since no law needs to be fundamentally changed, I would actually give it a reasonable chance of success today.