Immigration Purgatory

Imagine: Your time is up, and a lifetime of good deeds is about to pay off with an eternity in communion with the Creator. You arrive to the Pearly Gates eager to enjoy the bounty of Paradise. There’s just one thing – you need to fill out the paperwork.

Don’t worry – it’s just the procedure. If you’ve lived a good life, then you’ll probably get in.

First you have to file a D-156 to declare your intentions to enter the Great Beyond. The form itself is pretty straightforward, assuming that you know your family’s entire history. But you also have to include some addendums proving that you have lived a good life – proof that you helped old folks cross the street, participated in the church potlucks, served at soup kitchens, and anything else you may have done to merit entrance into the Realm of Perfection. Hopefully you kept track of all of that, because you can’t file the D-156 without it. Once you submit this form, you’re almost started!

Now you just have to settle in to your comfortable seat in the DMV waiting room that is Purgatory. Over 150,000 people die each day, so don’t expect your paperwork to be a priority. You can ask other folks in line with you how long they’ve been waiting, but you’ll find that no one has a consistent answer – Wait, did that person who filed their papers way after you just advance to the next step before you? How did that happen? Don’t expect an answer.

Finally, after what seems like an eternity of waiting, you get a notification from the Council of Angels – your interview has been scheduled. An interview?! Haven’t they been watching you your whole life? Doesn’t matter. The rules are the rules. You’re ushered into a large room with towering gray walls and mean-looking angels with really sharp tridents guarding the door.

You have no reason to be afraid – after all, you filed your D-156 correctly with what you believe ought to be enough proof of a good life – but something about the judgmental way that one angel guard is looking at you is just downright unsettling. Your name is called, and after a few nerve-wracking minutes with a surprisingly curt Admissions Angel, your file is stamped.
 

Congratulations! Your file is officially going to be processed.

You just have a few more steps. From here, it shouldn’t take more than a year. Or maybe it will.

Now you have to go to the Angel Magistrate to have them declare you dead. I mean, it’s obvious that you’re dead or you wouldn’t be here. But every other angel followed the rules to get in, so why should you be any different? (It’s true, when most of those other angels entered Heaven, the rules were much easier to follow, but you’ve got to keep up with the times. Heaven can’t just open the Gates.)

Fortunately, you have a nice Angel Judge who confirms that you are most definitely dead. Now you just have to take his signed approval and file it with a J-293 – the Adjustment of Status. The J-293 must be filed in conjunction with the F-142, which proves that you will be able to support yourself in Heaven, and the I-43, which requires you to confirm that you were never an agent of Satan. You already had to prove this on the D-156 to get your initial interview with the Admissions Angel, but everything must be filed in triplicate.

 After a few months more of waiting, you receive the news – your case has been approved. You will be allowed into Heaven! But the Angels who approve the cases aren’t the same ones who issue your ID badge to actually get into the Clouded Kingdom, so get comfy in Limbo, because it’ll probably be another few months of waiting – assuming there weren’t any clerical errors, in which case you can add a few more months to that.
Finally, after the most stressful year of your post-life, you pass through the Gates and begin your new eternal life with the Almighty. Looking back, everything went pretty smoothly; but, boy-oh-boy, was that an arduous and unnecessary process. You can only imagine how unbearable it would have been if you had a more difficult case!

As you might have guessed, the point of that rambling hypothetical is to draw into sharp criticism how truly unGodly the immigration process is. Believe me – I’ve done it. And although I changed the names of the forms in my Heavenly metaphor, that is the exact process I followed in order to bring my fiancé to the United States. We are both college-educated and had the support of our families throughout the whole process, which cost us thousands of dollars in filing fees, document printing, interviews, and countless other items. It was one of the most difficult times of our lives as we played the game of Bureaucracy. Now that she is officially a U.S. resident, we count our blessings that the case wasn’t more complicated.

Here’s the punch-line: The immigrants in the news lately aren’t the ones with college degrees and middle class families supporting them so they can get married and live a comfortable life in the Pittsburgh suburbs. They are largely the ones running from governments that care more about lining their pockets than they do about curbing the rampant gang violence and crushing poverty that exist in their countries; they are trying to get to a place in the world where they won’t have to wonder which tattoos their kids will pledge loyalty to when they turn 14; they are trying to find a place in the world where they will have the most fundamental of our human rights – the inalienable right to life.

Most of the immigrants showing up at our southern borders – even those not specifically seeking asylum – are reluctant to leave their cultures, language, and family behind to try to forge a humble life here in hotel service or landscaping or restaurants. But they know that immigration might be their only hope. The legal immigration process, as I have found, is convoluted, costly, confusing, and borderline criminal.

Laws are the skeleton of a civil society, but the immigration laws that are currently on the books in our country are broken bones that must be casted and mended. We as Catholics don’t believe that God would build bureaucratic walls for us to scale, so it is imperative that we – as American Catholics – don’t support policies that keep our brothers and sisters from pursuing their human rights to life.
 

This is not a political issue.

It is a human issue, and our suffering brothers and sisters are depending on us to practice our civic obligation to go to the polls and vote for their humanity, to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and be the outspoken advocates of the downtrodden.

Remember the words of Jesus from Matthew 25:40 – “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”