I came to the country illegally with my mother, as she fled the effects of the Nicaraguan civil war (Iran/Contra related), when I was 3 years old.
We jumped back and forth between Texas and Mexico 3 times. I like to say I'm 4 times illegal (Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, USA) and then kept doing it afterward.
In the early 2000's we were granted amnesty as part of a larger Nicaraguan-focused program. We'd been here for ~20 years. No way to proceed other than living in the shadows.
Anything to help people better themselves, I'm all for it!
That chart isn't really that insane. There are many ways to legally immigrate, and it just lumped most of them all together. Refugee status is missing. This is just a Top Level Design Doc. Most people are gonna answer the first question or two and then zoom in.
The process itself is tedious and can cost, but I think it is worth it. I went through it helping my wife get her green card a few years ago.
I know many people who just didn't want to deal with the process and hired a lawyer to do it for them.
I became a resident by following one of the simpler paths on this chart. Coming to the country on vacation with my American wife, deciding to stay and filing the I-485 (plus about $2000 in fees) and waiting for green card.
The whole process took about 5 months and included a visit to an office where they take your fingerprints and ID, a separate visit to a designated doctors to have a full medical and then a trip to a large city for an interview with the immigration officer.
For the interview my wife any I were the only ones in the waiting room without a lawyer or large binder full of supporting documents to prove our marriage. We just had a 5 minute chat with the officer which went quite naturally and he approved us right there. 7 days later a green card arrived in the post.
I tell my story to give a real example of immigrating here. I'm from one of the US 'allies' countries, no bad history, good job etc. When I look back now it didn't seem so bad but at the time there was a lot of stress and expense and that's just for one of the 'easier' paths.
I don't find that insanely confusing at all. The flow chart asks simple questions like "Do you have a job opportunity?" and "Do you have a family member in the US?" Sure the process might take a long time but many of those steps can be navigated just by reading the questions and following the yes/no paths to the next question. It looks complicated because of the many boxes in succession but most of those boxes are just informational and could have been combined into one single box of information. I don't know if the creators of this flow chart had an agenda to make it look really complicated to push reform or what.
If only providing the answers to these questions was as simple as reading through the image and saying "yes" or "no". In actual fact, the process of satisfying them of the answer and getting them to record that properly and consistently for the next person is incredibly frustrating.
edit: I've been through it myself. "Insanely confusing" is spot-on accurate - the process of answering each question on this graph is confusing in and of itself.
My opinion is based on that flow chart. It looks like it might be a bit time consuming and contain difficult steps. but it does not look confusing. I am not confused. In my opinion, it is not confusing... certainly not "insanely confusing."
That chart is a serious oversimplification of the actual process. Even knowing which steps to take and which forms to fill out -- among many with similar, obtusely worded instructions -- takes much more effort than following a flow chart.
It's even more complicated because the feedback loop is vague and it _very_ slow. If you fill out a form wrong, or don't include the correct supplemental materials -- which, again, are described in a language which somewhat resembles, but really isn't, regular English -- then (1) you will be waiting weeks or months to find out, (2) a mistake could result in outright rejection, and (3) if you're not rejected, then any explanation of deficiency you may get will be, again, vague and bureaucratic.
My opinion is based on my own experience with the short paths on that chart: I married a non-American. I can only imagine what it's like for those on the other routes.
This chart is a huge oversimplification. The immigration process is complicated, confusing, and arbitrary.
I moved to the U.S. in the Fall of 2003 (nine and a half years ago!), to enroll as an undergraduate at Stanford University. I graduated in 2007, and have since worked as a software engineer at several high-profile tech companies. I was an instructor for a class at Stanford. I've spoken at many technical conferences and meetups. I've been asked to review technical books and have received inquiries from publishers about authoring technical books (but declined). I've created and contributed to many open source projects. I've never been convicted of a crime. I make a six figure salary. I pay my rent, my bills, and my taxes. Thankfully, I've been able to get student visas and work visas to allow me to do all this.
However, even after nine-and-a-half years of this, I am not a single day closer to having a permanent legal status in the U.S. than I was the day I arrived for college. In fact, if I applied for a green card today, I could get deported. and denied entry to the U.S. for the next ten years[1]. Why? Because my current visa status is a "non-immigrant visa", and showing "immigrant intent" (such as applying for a green card) would be a violation of my visa status.
I'm even in a long-term committed relationship with a U.S. citizen (4.5 years now), but disclosing this to an immigration official could also get me deported. Why? Because it's a same-sex relationship, which the federal government is forbidden from recognizing for immigration purposes by the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), so my partner cannot sponsor me for a green card. Yet the mere existence of such a long relationship could be construed by an immigration officer as "immigrant intent" and a violation of my visa status.
But I have a great, well-paying job with an employer that appreciates me and wishes for my continued stay in the country, surely I should be able to get an employer-sponsored green card? Well...
First, I would have to change my visa status, because my current visa status doesn't allow me to apply for a green card.
Second, the green card process is expensive. Tens of thousands of dollars in government fees and lawyers' fees. I would gladly pay the money (it's worth it), but that would be illegal. My employer has to pay. They can't deduct it from my wages, that would be illegal. They can't pay me a lower salary than my fair market salary, that would be illegal.
Third, the green card process is complicated. My employer has to post a job opening and advertise it widely. (Like, in newspapers. Yes, newspapers.) They would have to interview candidates to fill this opening who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents. They would have to find that all these candidates are unsuitable for the job opening. They would have to thoroughly document this process.
Fourth, the green card process takes a long time. Even after all this, there's a lot more waiting. As a Mexican national, software engineer, with a bachelor's degree from Stanford, assuming everything I described above went swimmingly and I've managed not to get deported, it would probably take me another ten years of waiting before being granted that green card.
Oh, and in the mean time... I can't quit my job. If I do, I get to start all over again. (When was the last time you spent 10 years at a single employer?) Every time I cross the border I'm treated like cattle (if I'm lucky) or a terrorist (if I'm not). Every time I renew a visa I'm treated like I'm trying to defraud the U.S. government. Every time I renew a visa I have to deal with the worst bureaucratic nightmare you've ever imagined. You can be given an appointment at a consulate for a specific time (9:10am), and yet have to wait outside in line for hours. I've waited in 120F heat. I've waited in rain. You're not allowed to bring cellphones, car keys, or even wallets into the consulate. (But how do I get home? They don't care. How do I let someone know to pick me up? They don't care. How long will it take? They don't know, and they don't care.) Each individual immigration or consular officer has total discretion to deal with my case. If that individual is having a bad day and doesn't like the look of me, they can deny me a visa or entry into the U.S. and make it basically impossible for me to ever get a visa or be allowed entry in the future. If that happened, I would have no ability to appeal to the U.S. judicial system. (There are separate "immigration courts" set up under the executive branch, where due process is laughable.)
And yet I'm among the lucky ones. I've been privileged to study at great schools, work in great companies, in a growing field that is in high demand. Most people don't get it this easy.
[1] Denied entry under _any_ visa. I couldn't work in the U.S., I couldn't study in the U.S., I couldn't visit family in the U.S., I couldn't vacation in the U.S., I couldn't even wait in a U.S. airport for an hour before getting on a connecting flight.
If you're going the marriage route, it's not that bad. My wife and I did it without a lawyer despite every source out there telling you that you're crazy to do that (probably written by lawyers).
Don't get me wrong, the process is a horrible pain in the ass and needs vast reforms, but it's not much more painful than a complex tax return. If you go the lawyer route, I imagine it's pretty smooth sailing.
I think unrestricted travel on the planet should be a basic human right. There is something seriously wrong with someone telling another person he/she must not move from a certain place.
Travel and green card are different things. The issue is that welfare state is fundamentally incompatible with free immigration (you can't tax American rich enough to keep 7 billion people on American standards of living, and even if you could, it wouldn't work politically). So travel, beyond terrorism concerns and so on, is not much of a problem. My passport, for example, allows me to travel all Europe and most of the Americas without ever asking any visas. Immigration though is a different matter.
Working immigrants, documented or not, pay far more in taxes than they extract in benefits. They all live somewhere, so their landlords pay property tax from their rent. They all buy things in stores, so they pay sales tax. Those who have fake Social Security numbers pay payroll taxes, but like all of us under 45 will never see a dime in return.
I'm sure you can find some oddball exception like Obama's undocumented Auntie Z who lives high on the hog in some palatial public housing unit in Boston, but these indict stupid entitlement programs more than lax immigration.
I'm not claiming that limiting entitlements to immigrants is in any way unfair. If they don't like the deal they can move back home. I do object to this topic as a specious support for the "War on Immigration".
Working immigrants - yes. But if we allow free immigration with full access to welfare state benefits, it would create great incentive for people that can not or do not want to work to move into the US. Let's say you like to live in Elbonia, but you got sick and Elbonian healthcare sucks. So you move to America and sign up for health insurance (remember, we now prohibit insurance companies from charging high premiums an discriminating on the basis of existing conditions?) or get a free Medicare benefits. Or maybe, Elbonian government, being smart, even buys you a ticket - so you would not burden Elbonian welfare system but would burden American one. For how long such model would be sustainable for America?
>>>> but these indict stupid entitlement programs more than lax immigration.
That's my whole point - entitlement programs and free immigration can not coexist. We will have to choose one or the other. Most welfare states choose the former.
>>>> I do object to this topic as a specious support for the "War on Immigration".
There's no such thing. Thousands of people legally immigrate to US each year, and there's no serious politician that opposes immigration as such.
if we allow free immigration with full access to welfare state benefits
Why on Earth would we do that? Stupid entitlement programs coupled with expanded immigration might be problematic, but there is no moral principle that states we must have stupid entitlement programs. It's not as though we drop entitlements from airplanes; people have to sign up for them using real official documents. It wouldn't be difficult to say e.g. "no Section 8 housing for people on a work visa". If you don't like entitlements then free immigration would be a good argument to use in recruiting nativists to your side.
Immigration for a wide range of potential Americans we'd be wise to welcome is far more difficult now than it was fifteen years ago. That is why it's a "War on": the prison, LEO union, and armaments lobbyists only get paid when they make our authoritarian oppression more extreme than it already is. Cf. the Wars on Drugs, Terror, etc.
How could we not? If the immigrant becomes full citizen, he must have access to universal healthcare, social welfare, entitlement programs, etc. That's his right as a citizen.
As for entitlement programs being stupid - maybe you have in your pocket some other America, with different entitlement programs, that you could whip out and replace this one, but for me there's only one here, and it this America entitlement programs are what they are, and seeing the current political scene, are not going to substantially change, at least not for the better.
>>>> It wouldn't be difficult to say e.g. "no Section 8 housing for people on a work visa"
It would be. Section 8 is introduced because people feel that poor people that can not afford housing need to be helped. If you don't help poor people that can not afford housing, there's no point of having Section 8, so once these people are here, there always will be a push to provide them with the same benefits - for exactly the same reasons we provide other people with the same benefits. Poor people do not need shelter less because of visa status, and do not suffer less. If you do not want to tolerate such suffering in America - you would have to provide the benefits.
>>>> Immigration for a wide range of potential Americans we'd be wise to welcome is far more difficult now than it was fifteen years ago
Could you back it up with some data? As somebody who recently went though an immigration process and who have read a lot of immigration forums tracking what happens in the process, I got the impression the matters are actually improving lately (and they were not very good not because of some conspiracy but because of huge inefficient bureaucracy, which were made slightly more efficient in later years). In any case, I am seeing every day dozens of people who successfully immigrated in recent years. In what aspect it is "far more difficult now"?
At least in Germany, one of the considerations is that we provide a good amount of financial benefits.
So while people moving over here probably wouldn't be that big of a problem, extending those benefits to people that never paid in would.
On the other hand we also can't NOT pay them seeing as our constitutions first article is about the state protecting human dignity. This includes not living on the street or starving.
That being said, the EU introduced the free movement of labor, so it's going at least in the right direction :)
Yes, state organisation seems to be conflicting with the idea of free travel as a basic human right. The free movement of labour, too, is not quite there yet, either, but as you said, at least the direction seems ok.
The thing that surprised me when I recently renewed my password was reading some fine print that said you can't even legally leave the U.S without a passport. Like I'm a prisoner here unless I have that piece of paper. I can understand requiring a passport before getting on an international flight or something, just as a practical matter, but the legal speak there somehow rubs me wrong. Unless there's more fine print to amend that fine print.
I think the fine print is that short of a small list of exceptions US nationals are legally entitled to a passport. It's all symbolic anyway, given the broad economic dependence on the ability to anonymously cross US borders.
If you want to hop in a boat and motor away, no one will stop you. But if you leave this country, you probably want to go into another country (the world is about out of wilderness), and what are you going to do when you get there, without a passport?
But the fine print seems to say that they would stop you in principle, that is, if they knew about it and had enough resources to actually care. I'm not saying that they would...it's the principle itself that rubs me the wrong way.
As a practical matter, I actually prefer that they check my passport before an international flight, just as a last reminder. Certainly wouldn't want to fly all the way to Japan thinking that I had my passport, then, whoops!
Free movement across borders is fundamentally incompatible with the other civic guarantees like anonymity and social welfare insurance. It's like the CAP theorem for humanity.
I got a green card through the diversity visa program. The process itself really wasn't that complicated. Sure, a lot of forms to fill out and the overall process took about 1 year, but I never was at a point where simple internet research didn't answer my questions.
A combination of high demand + strong incentive to keep access at a strictly controlled low level = this.
I made it all the way to the green square at the bottom, following a long path along the left-hand edge. The process is a mind-boggling Rude Goldberg Machine governed by arcane and seemingly arbitrary rules riddled with exceptions. Having an excellent lawyer is both helpful (obviously) and depressing (in that it reveals just how many hidden controls are embedded within).
The worst part is the long wait time when you have absolutely no say in the outcome, basically at the mercy of a remote faceless bureaucracy that can decide your fate and enforce it.
>at the mercy of a remote faceless bureaucracy that can decide your fate and enforce it.
Welcome to the American-style of governance. Please see the DMV for your drivers license and then stop by the IRS to try your luck at the tax code. You will need documentation for everything. The appeals process exists, but is largely pro forma. If you comply successfully enough you might even get to join a homeowners association one day.
This diagram misses out a ton of other immigration routes, including the O1 visa (aliens of extraordinary ability, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_visa).
I like the charts but they doesn't seem to include the L-1 Visa path. Anyway it seems to me that this new reform rewards illegal immigration and doesn't do much to improve the chances of those applying for green cards through regular channels.
Also the travel restrictions for those with L-1 visas need to be reviewed, it doesn't makes sense that one you're approved with a L-1 visa in the US you need to go through another approval process in your home country if you want to travel outside the US.
They attempt to address the L-1A & B visa path on the right side where they ask "Working on H1, L1, etc".
Admittedly, the chart doesn't include the extra step of having to qualify for an L-1. At least for the L-1A, you'd need to have worked for a subsidiary for 1 year before being granted the visa.
The good news is that once you have the L1, then you can follow the EB1 or EB2 paths on the far left hand side.
In some states, there is no point to legal immigration any more :)
Illinois Governor Patrick Quinn just signed a law (with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel's backing) giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses and car insurance.
I like driving on roads when other drivers have car insurance. It lowers my rates, and in the event of an accident for which the other driver is liable I get money to fix my car.
Surely we can come up with a less brain-dead way of encouraging immigrants to participate in the legal process than intentionally making our own roads less safe? Perhaps by making that process simpler, with more tangible benefit for those taking part. The changes you cite are an example of that. This "War on Immigration" crap is motivated by armament and prison suppliers.
Three of the replies so far have assumed an anti-immigrant dog whistle was sounded. I'm not of the same opinion. If you can get to Chicago, as an illegal you basically have the same life as a legal, except you need to live cleaner than your average citizen so as not to get deported. Job, no problem, nobody cares if you're an illegal, employers actually like it. Car? Now no problem. Own land? Sure. Medical care? Not any worse than a citizen.
The insight is I'm quite certain I could not walk north into Canada and do the same.
Simply read what he wrote dispassionately without hearing imaginary dog whistles and its basically literally correct, there is little point in legal immigration for many people.
Now if that's good or bad, is where the psuedo-political sloganeering begins.
There are still some benefits that are open to legal residents but not undocumented immigrants. These include educational opportunities, many jobs (sure a cleaning service is happy to hire undocumented but a licensed daycare center, not so much), many entitlements (immigrants with fake Social Security numbers pay in but they'll never get anything out), etc.
There will always be illegal immigrants. Do you know what happens when you exclude a group of people from using the legal system? They create their own.
If illegal immigrants can't get car insurance, they drive without car insurance. If they can't go to the police without the risk of getting their family deported, accidents turn into hit and runs. And when people can't go to the police, they turn to less reputable people for protection.
My wife is an immigrant. Her path to citizenship took about 8 years and an extraordinary amount of time filling out paperwork, refilling it out, submitting it, waiting months at a time while "something" happened with it (of course with no way of status checking the progress of it). At the time, there was almost no "instruction manual" you could use. You simply went to www.ins.gov and started downloading PDF files and filling them out. You filled out anything that seemed even remotely relevant because you didn't want to show up missing something (more on that later).
Here's some of my recollection of it:
I remember spending many 5am mornings standing in a line outside the immigration office with my wife, only for the daily quota of people allowed in to max out and not be able to get in the building. More infuriating is that people who made it in the previous day were given paperwork to let them jump the line.
If you made it in, you simply stood in another line, so long that it wrapped around the lobby, and then up into the emergency exit stairs, then wrapped around the next floor then back into the stairs until you made it into the waiting area -- this was usually around noon.
If you left the line for any reason (since 5am!) for food, bathroom, anything, you lost your place.
Here you were met bruskly by a security guard who spoke rapid slang to all of the immigrants and she spot checked the paperwork. If anything seemed incorrect or they couldn't answer her questions (which even I had a hard time understanding) they were kicked out of line). A second desk of immigration officers then fielded complaints in the 20 or 30 languages of the people who were kicked out after waiting 7 hours but it mostly served as a place the officers could take a break and watch TV.
If you made it past that gauntlet you took a number and had to sit on the floor since the waiting area had at least 2 times as many people in it as it was designed to hold. Every 20 or 30 minutes a security guard would walk around and force people to stand up yelling "no sitting on the floor!". But after 7-8 hours of standing there weren't many people who followed that.
Most likely, after watching the call numbers for a few hours (and seeing only one or two windows actually providing service), they'd shut down for the day and you'd get a raincheck with a day to come back (where you could then jump the morning line and get directly into the waiting room).
After returning on your raincheck, and waiting a few hours more, you finally get up to a window, only to find out that either:
a) you brought the wrong, but incredibly similar, documentation (you filled out the relative sponsorship rather than the spousal or some such)
b) you brought the correct documentation, but they no longer accept that revision of the form. There is, in fact, an older version of the form that you didn't fill out because you figured the newer one would be more correct, but that's the only one they accept (and later when you return you find out that either they've reverted back to the new form, or you didn't fill out the addendum PDF you didn't know about that makes up for the gap in information that the new form was supposed to remedy
c) they simply don't like how you filled it out, you could return on another day, see a different immigration officer and have them accept the paperwork right off the bat
d) some of the required documents simply don't exist in the immigrants country of origin and they won't accept the equivalent (for example, my wife's native country doesn't use birth certificates)
d) you did everything well enough for the person working the window that day that they accept it. If you are lucky you are at the part of the process where you get a verification serial number of some sort that you are supposed to be able to use for them to look up your case for status checks etc.
Bear in mind that quite often the pile of papers you just gave the officer has the only existing copy of some of the legal documents, many of which are irreplaceable or extremely expensive and time consuming to replace. You are supposed to get these back at some point. In the meantime these documents are now unavailable for anything else that might require them. In our case this mean lost jobs and tens of thousands of dollars in lost wages.
The receiving officer unceremoniously dumps this precious cargo into a bin with a huge mishmash of other odds and ends. It could be a trash can or it could be the proper receiving bin, who knows? They assure you that by law processing this step must take n-days.
At n+180 days you start to panic. Calls to the number they gave you result in several hours of on hold time only to be told that they can't provide you with a status update.
At n+270 days they call you back because of a problem with your documentation. You go through the drill described above, usually taking one to two days of waiting in line to be told that
a) they can't find your file so you'll have to redo all of the documentation again (but those original one of a kind documents!). Don't worry, they assure you, they'll turn up.
b) they couldn't verify the address for her sister or some such nonsense, who of course has moved sometime in the previous 11 months, or god forbid a relative drop dead and you have to figure out how to get a death certificate into your file.
Either way, you'll have to spend yet another day or two standing in line.
Eventually...and this is back when they did work permits for green card applicants...you'll get a flimsy hand glued id card for whatever it was you were applying for. My wife had to go through the process 3 times on work permits, each time with the INS missing their legal response date by months, before finally getting called in for our green card interview.
Here, because up to this point you've received virtually no communication whatsoever from immigration, you do what everybody does, pile various artifacts from your life together, and memorize each other's toothbrush colors, where you then go and wait in line, only now with a box of stuff that'll have trouble making it through security, for a day or two. At the end you find you that it's not actually the interview day, this is the day they need you there to schedule the interview.
You return months later. In the meantime you get a letter that the medical checkup has expired since the process is taking so long, and your wife needs to go get another expensive checkup from one of two carefully selected doctors that the INS uses. This results in a multi-week position on a waiting list, only now you find out that your green card interview is happening before the doctor's appointment. In a blind panic you make dozens of phone calls trying to sort this out to no avail - but it doesn't matter anyhow, because what nobody tells you is that it doesn't matter, after the interview you can just submit the new checkup with an addendum form they won't tell you about. But you find this out much later.
There's no appeals process too which makes all this fun, so when immigration screws something up (they will) you have effectively no resort. You just hope they don't fuck anything up too badly.
Finally, after waiting in line for another few hours, you make the interview, where the officer looks at you and your wife says, "I believe you're married" (so you didn't have to bring anything at all anyways, you've just been lugging around 40 pounds of mementos for 4 days for no reason).
Now repeat the above nightmare for the citizenship application and you can see why it's so hard to legally immigrate.
Oh, and suppose my wife's friend wants to immigrate, but has no current job applying for her visa status and no relatives (she'll be the first generation ever in the U.S.). How does she get in? She doesn't! There simply is no path to immigration for this person. Sure she has a Ph.D. in Pharmacology or some such, but immigrating here and then looking for a job is simply not possible.
edit this was in 2001, I've heard the process has been improved greatly since then, our finally few visits for citizenship were smooth sailing in comparison to our early experiences
Wow. My experience getting a greencard two years ago was totally different. My wife's a citizen, so she sponsored me. We sent in the chunk of paperwork, two months later I got called in for fingerprinting, which involved waiting maybe 15 minutes after my appointment time. Then three months later we get called to the interview, again after a short wait time we talk to the CIS person for maybe 10 minutes, she looks at our financial info, a couple of wedding pictures, and we're done. 3 weeks later greencard shows up in the mail. No hassle about the type of documents Sweden provides (also no birth certificate), no snags albeit slow.
Just went to my sister-in-law's swearing-in ceremony - 3 years and 2 babies after getting married. What a great day! Senator Harkin was there with encouraging words; the judge was informal and encouraging, complimenting the crowd and the applicants on their enthusiasm and welcoming them all into Citizenship. Pictures, news cameras, speeches and songs.
This is in Iowa of course, in a town full of professionals and University faculty and staff. Maybe its different in a big city somewhere.
Yeah, the citizenship ceremony really was the only cool part of our experience. But it was really well done. Friendly, but with appropriate gravitas, they let us preening relatives get in the way a lot and take pictures that sort of thing.
It was a nice ceremony, not quite as big a deal I think as your sister-in-law's, but still very Norman Rockwell in a way.
As an aside, I think TN status is great if you can get it. The only real problem is that you lose it as soon as you step off of US soil and have to re-apply when you try to re-enter. This makes for increasingly stressful trips home to Canada (or Mexico) since the longer you are in the US, the less likely you'll be given a new one when you return. Granting the TN is totally arbitrary and depends on the mood of the border agent and the quality of your paperwork. Make absolutely sure your job title and description is identical to one of the TN-permitted ones. Lawyer-up if necessary. The cost of getting lawyer to prepare you is more than offset by the increased salary available in the US.
I've talked to people who've done it, but you can't leave the country when you start the process. It's better to use an H1/L1/etc. As a Canadian, I wouldn't really suggest US citizenship although.
Which isn't that bad. If your company is keen on having you stick around they can do the TN1->H1B->Greencard juggle in under a year. Otherwise, just sticking with your TN really isn't that different from being on a Greencard. Yes, you have to renew it yearly and the immigration folks can be surly about it, but you pay your $50 fee and you get another year. I did it for 10+ years without issues.
We jumped back and forth between Texas and Mexico 3 times. I like to say I'm 4 times illegal (Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, USA) and then kept doing it afterward.
In the early 2000's we were granted amnesty as part of a larger Nicaraguan-focused program. We'd been here for ~20 years. No way to proceed other than living in the shadows.
Anything to help people better themselves, I'm all for it!