This trend highlights the utter and profound failure of Congress to craft meaningful comprehensive reform policy, the inadequacy of a grossly underfunded bureaucracy formerly-known-as the INS to provide services efficiently and transparently, and the arbitrary and capricious application of existing law that limps along while judicial review is being unapologetically dismantled. By definition, when aliens are selected, almost at random, for deportation (10-20 million persons in this country are deportable under present law) there can be no fairness. When such aliens often include minor children who are U.S. citizens, or teen aged /young adult children who were brought to the U.S. by their parents illegally in infancy, the extreme cruelty of our present system is almost to painful to contemplate. Under attack are the hands that built America. Our gratitude to those tax payers, those back-breaking laborers, those seeds of growth in our entrepreneurial economy? Zilch. Instead, we are beset by paralysis. Political football, a game played for decades to a tie score, is never "called" on account of human lives destroyed. Who among us would wait 20 years for legislators to devise a winning policy that allows employers to sponsor the men and women who have been working thanklessly in the shadows? If U.S. citizens were told upon graduation from high school that in a few decades legislators would figure out how to get them eligibility for a driver's license or social security number, we would be storming the Capitol. Yet all around us such an unimaginable indentured servitude, caused as much by the failure of policy as by bureaucratic ineptness, is impacting cities, towns and rural communities. Invariably, U.S. citizens who have the bad luck to fall in love with foreign nationals are shocked when they learn that it will take years and thousands of dollars to bring their foreign spouse to the United States, and after that, to obtain a final, unconditional "green card". This atrocity fades quickly to a mere inconvenience when compared to the plight of tens of thousands of binational gay and lesbian couples who for all time immemorial have lived with the cold, hard fact that the law forcibly separates them, by relegating Americans to the status of utter legal strangers to their same-sex life partners, and causes incalculable hardship to extended families including young children, elderly parents, adult siblings and nieces and nephews of those gay and lesbian U.S. citizens caught in the vice grip of discrimination so profound, it deserves to be called persecutory.
See: "States Step Into Void on Immigration Law," Philadelphia Daily News/AP