Legal Emigration and Illegal Immigration

When I was growing up, most citizens living under the socialist republic were not allowed to visit abroad, immigrate, or emigrate. The borders were shut tightly, holding everyone inside like a giant maximum-security prison controlled by the Communist Party and its dear leader.

The government had an anti-emigration policy, immigration was suppressed, and travel abroad was tightly controlled and only allowed to those who had a clean record, deemed so by the Communist Party who investigated a person’s lineage, political activity, land ownership, real estate, and private property. Emigration, the actual moving and settling permanently in another country was highly discouraged and so was immigration, the temporary movement of people from one country to another.

If the parents and grandparents were considered “objectionable” by the Communist Party, that person never saw any meaningful jobs, promotions, admission to college, free attendance, and other benefits only available to the lapdog apparatchiks.

If a person’s ancestors had fought the Communist Party, the Russian Bolsheviks, owned land, a home, were considered bourgeois and undesirable. Few people would want to associate with them or marry them lest they would be marked as well. Their dossiers were compromised for life.

To escape such a prison, one could try swimming across the Danube to Bulgaria, another communist country, or cross the border west into Yugoslavia. A few married foreigners to escape, many attempted defections while on temporary travel abroad, if they could escape their assigned handlers, or were successful in defecting in creative ways. Some were killed or imprisoned for life for such attempts at escaping across the highly militarized border. If they managed to escape, their families left behind were mistreated and even jailed.

An annual quota of 11,000 ethnic Germans and 1,000 Jews were allowed emigration to West Germany and to Israel in exchange for hard currency, German marks, or dollars, paid by West Germany and Israel to the Communist Party coffers.

Studying abroad during the socialist regime was only reserved for the children of the Communist Party members who were higher in the elite hierarchy. Learning English was discouraged as a foreign language, replaced by French and Russian. University students were told “to stay away from the small American Embassy library and to avoid and ignore exchange professors and students” and visitors from other countries.

Approximately 2,500-3,000 Romanians were allowed to emigrate to the U.S. annually in exchange for the most favored nation status (MFN) as part of the trade agreement of 1975. (Pinstripes and Reds, David Funderburk, 1987)

A certain percentage of more recent emigres to the U.S. were winners of an annual lottery. This type of visa is called the “diversity visa lottery” and requires a high school diploma and at least two years of work experience. This visa is also known as the green card visa and 55,000 people are chosen from those who apply. Time Is Running Out For Diversity Visa 2021 Applicants (immigrationdirect.com)

It is interesting to note that the more educated individuals have a harder time getting a visa, while the U.S. immigration policy encourages and allows the flotsam and jetsam of the third world to come to the U.S. illegally through the southern border in hopes that they will augment the Democrat voting rolls.

You could say that our immigration policy is racist in terms of the number of Caucasians allowed to emigrate and immigrate to the United States. “Between 2010 and 2020 about 97% of all refugees were non-white.” Around 10 percent of the immigrants allowed into the U.S. between 2010-2020 were white and Asian.

And there is also the fiancé visa, K-1, the visa made famous by the reality show, “90 Day Fiancé.” The prospective foreign fiancé has 90 days to come to the U.S. and get married to a U.S. citizen.

Finally, there are student and tourist visas. Students and tourists overstay their visas and, if they are lucky, they are never returned to their home country. Out of thousands of overstayers, only a few were deported back to their home countries.

The F-1 visa allows foreign nationals to stay after graduation, working for a company in the U.S. for a period of 12-36 months. An article in 2020 stated that some foreign students were actually “working” for fake companies. Thousands of foreign students in U.S. on student visas may have 'worked' for fake companies (nbcnews.com)

In addition to the F-1 visa, there is an M-1 visa for vocational training and a J-1 visa for an exchange visitor program. The longer-term options for such students are H1-B visas and LPR (lawful permanent residence) status. Foreign STEM Students in the United States (congress.gov)

According to the Congressional Service Report of November 1, 2019, “More than 1 million foreign students in the United States on student visas were enrolled in U.S. Of these, almost half (497,413) were studying STEM disciplines. The countries that dominated such STEM disciplines were China, India, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Iran, Nepal, Taiwan, Vietnam, Kuwait, and Canada.” Foreign STEM Students in the United States (congress.gov)

According to the Pew Research, during the Covid-19 pandemic the foreign student college enrollment in the 2020-2021 school year dropped by 15 percent, with less than a million foreign students enrolled online and at U.S. universities. Foreign student enrollment at U.S. universities fell 15% amid COVID-19 | Pew Research Center

The Atlantic authored an article in 2019 claiming that visa overstays are the immigration crisis, not the southern border illegal immigration. Since people on student visas are vetted, including medically, it is hardly credible that such foreign nationals would pose a larger threat than those flooding our southern border every day, unvaccinated and sick, carrying diseases that Americans are not prepared to pay for and deal with in public, in hospitals, and in school settings. The Real Immigration Crisis: People Overstaying Their Visas - The Atlantic

Experiencing a totalitarian regime where nobody is allowed outside the country’s borders is oppressive but we have to be careful and not go to the extreme, throwing the borders wide-open to a massive influx of unvetted and detrimental individuals who are going to put a severe strain on our society. It is a dangerous direction and it is no surprise that Governor Greg Abbott of Texas made good on his promise to bus illegal immigrants from Texas to Washington, D.C. The first bus arrived yesterday.

Maria and Our Immigration Problem

The short and stocky Salvadoran woman was very talkative in her unschooled English. She’s been in this country for twenty years. She had fled her native country for economic reasons; she paid a coyote $1,000 to bring her across the southern border with Mexico, her family’s savings.  She had promised to send money back every month and, once able to marry and have babies, she would wait patiently until she could claim legal residence and bring her extended family to the United States via chain migration.

She and Juan had four children and now, at the age of 40, her 18 year old daughter has given birth to an out of wedlock child who became an automatic U.S. citizen the moment he took his first breath, thanks to the anchor baby ruling twisted by liberal courts into a birthright citizenship under the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

She has kept her promise and some. She has brought to the United States her mom, dad, sisters, brothers, and cousins from her large extended family.  She has recently taken in a stranger, an eight-year little girl, who had been sent to the United States unaccompanied by her parents on the government’s promise that she would be allowed into the U.S., no questions asked.

Many such children were brought in the middle of the night and dispersed to centers around the country in communities willing to take them in and shelter them with our government’s money.  Maria was grateful to Obama for bringing in small and unaccompanied minors even though most were male, way past the age of adulthood, and sporting gang tattoos.

El Salvador, with approximately 6.34 million people, is the smallest and most densely populated nation in Central America. The Salvadoran economy produces about $4,000 worth of goods and services per capita. The official currency is the U.S. dollar which makes it quite convenient when the illegal Salvadorans in this country send home tax-free money to their relatives. It is a social security net that their government cannot possibly replace.

They had a home in El Salvador with glassless windows to allow some air circulation from the humid and overpowering heat. Tropical critters, including snakes, plagued them often. Depression and a sense of hopelessness surrounded her and suffocated any desire to try and make things better. Her mom had told her that she would do fine so long as she did not irritate the police and the gangs that roved in all neighborhoods asking for and seizing food, clothing, and whatever valuables a family may have had. Nobody dared to infuriate them or else they would wind up dead.  It never crossed mothers’ minds that it was up to them to change the culture of crime and fear by raising good sons who could oppose the criminal life that ruled them daily.

Having no education beyond eighth grade, Maria works hard for $18 an hour, cleaning a few homes of the wealthy, earning an untaxed living while her extended family takes advantage of the U.S. taxpayers’ generosity who provide them with welfare and Medicaid insurance. She is not the best cleaner, she added, but she tries, never admitting when she brakes things in some of the homes that hires her.

The work ethic in her country is vastly different than here and she does not understand the American obsession with work and the lack of the three-hour siesta. Perhaps that is what makes Spain the happiest country to live in, their extended siesta. Family and their needs are most important to her, not the needs of an employer who hired her.

She changed employers often – breaking their stuff while cleaning and using cleaning methods that were not up to par with our western standards. She did not quite understand the issue of germs and cross-contamination. She thought Americans to be obsessed with cleanliness and disinfectants. What could possibly be wrong using rags to clean commodes by hand and then use the same rags to clean countertops?

She explained that her countrymen are not so generous as the Americans are – they only give up their possessions and hard-earned money if MS-13 gangs and police come around demanding to be paid, confiscating their valuables. Whoever dares to say no, winds up dead.

The small country struggles with excessive poverty, inequality, and crime. Mostly agricultural, depending heavily on coffee production at one point (as much as 90%) and the indigo plant during the colonial period, El Salvador is now turning to other sectors (finance, industry) to improve its GDP.

The fact that Maria knows nothing about civics and government in our country, does not stop her from voting for the party that has given many immigrants like her welfare – the Democrat Party. There is an occasional Democrat Party drive in her Hispanic community to rally the vote and those who do not have transportation are offered rides. They are always coached how to vote and for which candidate, always Democrat.

She is just smart enough to know how to manage her family’s budget but not knowledgeable how the free market economy works in our country. Like all third world citizens who come to this country illegally with stars in their eyes, she thinks money grow on trees in the United States and there is an endless supply of it because it comes from the generous government. She does not see any connection between the funding source of government and the “rich” American taxpayers who fund it. By the rest of the world’s standards, any American with a job is filthy rich and should share their wealth with the world.

I asked her if it bothered her that she is voting for the Democrat politicians who want open borders and are bringing in the MS-13 gangs she escaped from El Salvador, turning this country into the unsafe country she left behind for the wellbeing and economic prosperity here. She raised her shoulders with a deer in the headlights look on her face and said nothing.

It would only take ten percent of the millions of the flotsam and jetsam of the world currently residing illegally in the U.S. to vote Socialist Democrat, fundamentally transforming this country into a ruling regime diametrically opposed to our U.S.  Constitution and Christian roots.