CBA Record May-June 2025

Chicago Bar Foundation Report

The Legal Community’s Role in Making Sense of Our Immigration System By Bob Glaves

I f asked to design the most byzantine, counterproductive, and dysfunctional immigration system possible, you would be hard pressed to come up with something that could rival our current reality. We are a nation of laws and a nation of immi grants, yet we have a broken system that serves neither well. Current problems have been decades in the making and have real consequences for the people caught up in the system, for our economy, and for public trust in our government and legal system. With the new Administration carrying out an enforce ment crackdown without addressing fundamental systemic flaws, these challenges will only grow. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are real, balanced, and long-term solutions that hold true to America’s core values and have broad support across the political spectrum. Our legal com munity can play a critical leadership role in helping us get there. Underlying Causes of the Broken Immigration System Two fundamental problems with our current immigration system have brought on the dysfunction we see today: 1. First, the current laws that dictate how many people can legally immigrate here are arbitrarily set and bear little or no relation to the realities of our economy or what is happen ing in the world. For decades now, the system has lacked sufficient legal channels to meet our country’s needs. 2. Second, even though it is widely understood that the system has long been broken, the penalties for violations of these flawed immigration laws essentially are all-or-nothing: either deportation or remaining in legal limbo. Some can get a temporary legal status with limited rights, but most do not have any realistic option to obtain legal status under current law. Because this fundamentally flawed system has been in place for decades, more than 12 million people are estimated to be

in the country without legal status today, including hundreds of thousands here in Illinois. Most have been here for many years now, playing by the rules and becoming an integral part of the workforce and their communities. Only a very small percentage have committed serious crimes or have otherwise been ordered removed by an immigration court. Problems with a Mass Deportation Approach The great majority of the unauthorized immigrants now living in legal limbo fall into one of the categories below, and make the all-or-nothing aspect of our enforcement system such a huge problem: l Young people who were brought here as children and have known no other home than the U.S., many of whom have been temporarily protected in recent years through the DACA program (https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/ consideration-deferred-action-childhood-arrivals-daca); l People who have lived here for decades, worked hard, stayed out of trouble, and started families that include children who are citizens; l Children and adults who came here to be with their families after finding they had no realistic legal options to do so; and l Many others who came here on a temporary visa, who received temporary protection due to natural disasters or other crises, or simply came in search of a better life, and pose no threat to anyone. The new Administration has issued executive orders that broaden enforcement priorities to include anyone who is here without legal authorization, regardless of whether they pose a danger. This approach has many problems, starting with the fact that mass deportation is logistically impossible given the number of people involved. However, the indiscriminate enforcement threat already is causing fear and distrust among immigrants and

26 May/June 2025