Immigration Attorney Highlights Legal Problems

PRISCILLA LABOVITZ: Yes, more than 12 years ago in many cases. Yes, and it's not as if you can just get in line. This is not a situation like a dry cleaner where you just get in the line and they serve the next one.

Compared to the numbers of people who wish to come to the United States, there are a very small number of positions available. And if you don't know anybody here, if you don't have a family member or an organization that wants you, either to employ you as a auto mechanic or as a software engineer, then there's no way you can get in that line.

RAY SUAREZ: Are there people who you've consulted with who, at the end of it, you just tell them, "I think you're going to have to go back home"?

PRISCILLA LABOVITZ: I've had to tell people that they either would have to go back home, or they can, if they stay, they take their chances of being apprehended and deported, or that they can play the numbers and perhaps not get picked up.

But on the other hand, they won't be able to work legally. They won't be able to get a Social Security number. They won't be able to leave the United States and go home and visit. Even if Mom dies or is dying, if you go, you don't get back in. With barriers to entry into the United States so high, anybody who gets here is less likely to leave.

PRISCILLA LABOVITZ: Well, a lot of cases stick in my mind after years because it's been a lot of years. I think some of the most difficult are the people who really don't have any link to permanent residents in the United States.

Currently, I have a client who is a young woman my own daughter's age, born in the Caribbean to parents from two different countries, kidnapped by her father, brought to the United States, raised here, father left. She's left with the father's common-law wife, is raised by her, and graduates from high school, a star in high school, a wonderful, talented young woman.

And she can't say in the United States. There's nobody to petition for her. She has no immediate relatives in the United States. She hasn't done anything wrong. The immigration service will even say it's a sympathetic case but that their hands are tied.

RAY SUAREZ: As you watch, as you listen to the debates on Capitol Hill about illegal immigration and how this country should respond, what do you think is missing, both in the content and in the tone? What are you waiting to hear that you haven't heard yet?

PRISCILLA LABOVITZ: Well, I would like to see people think about those who are trying to come into the United States as like their own grandparents.

I know my great-grandparents came to the United States. I have no idea whether they were legal when they came. I know they didn't speak English. I know they lived within their own little community.

And I'm very grateful that they did, because I know they did what immigrants now do, which is delay gratification, show a lot of initiative, a willingness to sacrifice, and a work ethic that some people think is endangered in the United States.

And I wish that people would look at these as real human beings or imagine them as real human beings as opposed to people of a certain appearance or different language who are "invading" our country, because nobody has invaded this country since immigrants from Europe came and conquered the Indians.

RAY SUAREZ: Priscilla Labovitz, thanks a lot.

PRISCILLA LABOVITZ: My pleasure.