Immigration reform wasn’t going to happen before the midterms anyway

But I never ignore an opportunity to blame things on the Tea Party

“Just tell her to hang tight,” I said. “Under the Senate Bill, she’d be an open and shut case.”

My friend Sara (not her real name) and I were talking about Sara’s once-nanny-now-occasional-babysitter, Lucy (also not her real name).

Lucy is not authorized to be in this country. In common parlance, Lucy is an “illegal alien” or “illegal immigrant.” I personally don’t use these phrases because these individuals are not committing criminal offenses. That’s not an “opinion” as much as it is a truth, but that’s not the point of this essay, so I will move along.

I want you to know about Lucy. And I want you to know how immigration reform matters for many human beings who weren’t lucky enough in the genetic lottery to be born American.

Lucy is what we in the immigration biz call an “overstay.” According to Sara, Lucy was originally admitted lawfully (I don’t know under what particular visa, and I don’t want to know), and she was supposed to leave quite some time ago, but she didn’t. Depending on what kind of visa she had when she was lawfully present (the converse of which is “unlawfully present”), she probably wasn’t supposed to be working then, either. Very few non-immigrant visa types allow for work authorization. Those visas are usually for high tech (H-1B) or temporary agricultural workers (H-2A), and I know she was neither of those.

She’s been a nanny and a babysitter, paid in cash.

I’ve met her several times. Lucy is a sweet, caring human being. She’s timely and dependable. She takes care of Sara’s son Charlie (not his real name) as if he were her own. Charlie loves her. He almost doesn’t care that his parents are leaving him for (dinner, movie, whatever) because he gets so excited that Lucy is coming to play with him. He’s known Lucy as long as he can remember.

Charlie is almost 7, and he has not had a full-time nanny since he was 2 ½. When Sara hired Lucy originally, she had a relatively lengthy resume. I would estimate she has been in the United States for at least 8 years if not longer.

In those 8 years, she has been paying taxes and social security, and having taxes and social security paid on her behalf (by Sara, anyway).

She’s been contributing to her local economy AND sending money to her family in her home country.

She has been taking public transportation to her jobs because she can’t get a driver’s license.

She has had to speak to her mother on the phone for that entire time, because she can’t leave the United States or she won’t get back in the country.

She has been an upstanding… non-citizen.

She lives in an apartment with her cousins whose immigration status is current and who can put their names on a lease.

I would guess that she lives fearfully—even if only mildly—every day.

Have I mentioned that she’s lovely, caring, timely, and dependable?

I know that to some people, it doesn’t matter who she is. It never will. She overstayed her visa. She should have left the United States. She is not lawfully present in our country. She shouldn’t be working. They think she’s taking a job from an American who is unemployed.

These people don’t understand why Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers don’t hunt her down and haul her off.

These are the same people who voted against Eric Cantor in the recent primary elections in Virginia.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a huge fan of Eric Cantor generally. (Entertainingly, I did shake his hand once. He was sitting behind me at a Coldplay concert. That’s not a joke.) But unlike the ideologues of the Tea Party who defeated him, Eric Cantor was at least willing to enter into the debate about immigration reform.

Comprehensive immigration reform (or CIR, as we call it in the biz), would allow lovely, caring, timely, dependable people like Lucy to identify themselves as present, file paperwork to demonstrate that they are not criminals, and to obtain a temporary worker status with an eventual pathway to citizenship.

It’s not full-on amnesty the way the Tea Partiers make it out to be.

And the way that the bill is written (trust me, I’ve read it), it would not be a setback in national security. Quite the opposite. It funds enforcement first. It sends its beneficiaries to the “back of the line” for citizenship quotas. But it fixes a lot of problems with our immigration system, and it allows people like Lucy to come “out of the shadows.”

And we aren’t talking about terrorists, here, people. We are talking about people just like Lucy. Under the proposed comprehensive immigration reform bill, anyone who is inadmissible for national security concerns… is INADMISSABLE.

Anyone with a felony…. INADMISSABLE.

Two weeks ago I rode my bike 128 miles from Monterey, CA, to San Francisco, CA. Yes, in one day. Early in the ride, just north of Monterey, we biked through strawberry fields. The fields went on and on and on. Forever, you might even say. And up and down those rows of strawberries were people, Hispanic in appearance, hunched over. Picking.

I didn’t let anyone see me cry.

I think of them every time I walk into a grocery store and see strawberries.

Today, I ushered people to their seats and handed out flags at my first ever naturalization ceremony, where a colleague of mine swore in 1,111 new citizens of the United States. They came from 104 different countries.

Everyone saw me cry.

People like Lucy and like those hard, hard working people picking strawberries shouldn’t have to live in fear and “sit tight” and wait another two? four? seven? years for our politicians to enter into the debate and fix our immigration system.