A New Look at Immigration Policies That Make Families 'Collateral Damage'

For a generation, immigration has been a divisive “wedge issue” for American politicians.

In 1986, Republicans and Democrats once united to acknowledge that employers hired undocumented immigrants because they needed them. They went on to provide an amnesty for such workers and mandated new—yet tepid—penalties against hiring them. 

But since immigrant visas for crucial blue-collar jobs are virtually non-existent, U.S. employers have kept hiring undocumented workers. Those workers have settled down, and many have married U.S. citizens. Around 2000, however, U.S. citizens began discovering that what they assumed was a basic right—sponsoring spouses for legal residency green cards—was no longer a right in practice. 

Over the past two decades, these U.S. citizens have told journalist Susan Ferriss about foreign spouses exiled from the country for 10 years or more when they tried to obtain green cards. Families have been split apart, or forced to live in other countries to stay together. Back in 2007, a former CIA officer whose family was affected by these rules told Ferriss that a policy he considered misguided had turned Americans into “collateral damage.” 

The Biden administration has been listening to these Americans. The president recently announced a potential reform. Ardent immigration-restriction activists are objecting, but even some of them have admitted that the policy of separating spouses has done nothing to deter undocumented migration.