A human perspective on U.S. immigration policy
🏳️🌈 On this day in 1978, the rainbow Pride flag was flown for the first time. Gilbert Baker, its creator, was partially inspired by the Rolling Stones’ 1967 banger “She’s a Rainbow.”
Issue #105: 90-something problems and bad goals
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As of last Tuesday, thanks to an executive order signed by Joe Biden, undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens can get green cards. With a green card, they can live and work in the U.S. but not vote. It’s one step down from citizenship.
Some Republican congresspeople are painting this order with a broad brush, calling it “mass amnesty to illegal aliens.” On Medium, human rights journalist
characterizes it as simply “streamlin[ing] one bump in an already shady and expensive immigration process.” He lays out the basics:- Eligible spouses must have lived in the U.S. for at least a decade. (On average, most of them have lived here 23 years.)
- They can’t have a criminal history.
- These spouses could already get green cards — but due to a legal loophole, they ran the risk of being deported for a decade beforehand, so many of them didn’t even try.
For a human perspective on the executive order, I turned to
’s Medium story about his wife’s 30-year road to citizenship. She came to the U.S. from Peru as a child (her parents were on tourist visas). Before college, her visa was revoked and suddenly she was at the mercy of a confusing, changeable set of immigration policies that “treated her like a criminal on parole” even though she’d arrived legally as a kid. In one particularly dystopian scene, Andreu describes petitioning for her permanent residency and meeting with a bureaucrat who scolded him for holding his wife’s hand, looking for any sign their marriage was fake.The 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy saved her from deportation — but even that safety net almost vanished during the Trump years. Now that Andreu’s wife is a citizen, she wants to leave the U.S. This part surprised me, but also made sense:
It may seem counterintuitive to those observing from the outside. One might wonder why someone who’s been clawing and enduring for decades to become a citizen would now willingly move away? Could you really blame her? Why should she be loyal to a country that was never loyal to her?
From the archive: 90-something regrets
Back in 2018, minister Lydia Sohn interviewed her oldest congregants, people in their late 80s and 90s, about their biggest regrets (and joys). What they told her contradicts popular research around the “U-bend theory” of happiness, or the idea that you’re most content at the beginning and end of your life (and unhappiest in the stressy mid-life years).
When asked about the happiest moments of their lives, Sohn writes, “every single one of these 90-something-year-olds, all of whom are widowed, recalled a time when their spouses were still alive and their children were younger and living at home.”
“But weren’t those the most stressful times of your lives?” Sohn asked.
“Yes of course… But there was no doubt that those days were also the happiest.”
Lastly, on regret, this section has lived rent-free in my head for the last six years:
Their joys and regrets have nothing to do with their careers, but with their parents, children, spouses, and friends. Put simply, when I asked one person, “Do you wish you accomplished more?” He responded, “No, I wished I loved more.”
Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about goal-setting
If you ever set a goal and then wonder why you feel so lazy about actually getting it done, ask yourself: Was this something I actually wanted or something I only wanted to want (but don’t actually want)?
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