A common belief circulated in public discussions about undocumented immigrants is that they could have come legally if they wanted to, or could “fix their status” if they were willing to follow the rules. This belief shows up everywhere: in political rhetoric, in media commentary, in everyday conversations, and makes it easy for others to assume that undocumented immigrants are troublemakers or out to cheat the system, and therefore bad in some moral way.

An important effect of this is that people who care deeply about fairness, lawfulness, and human dignity can find it easier to dismiss the harmful impacts of current immigration policies on people who are undocumented. This is doubly cruel because this belief is a fundamental misunderstanding of the current immigration system.

Before going further, one clarification about what kind of argument this is. Much public defense of undocumented immigrants rests on merit: they pay taxes, they do essential work, they have no criminal record. Those claims are true, and they matter for rebutting specific falsehoods. But an argument built on them fails for everyone it does not cover — people who cannot work, who are elderly or disabled or ill, who have an old conviction. That is not a small remainder, and their treatment should not turn on a different principle. So the case here is not that undocumented people have earned an exception. It is that the system offered most of them no lawful option in the first place, and not that what a person’s value depends on what they produce.

Contrary to rhetoric suggesting that undocumented immigrants could “get in line” or “fix their status” if they wanted to, no such general process exists for many. For millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States, there is no line to get in. There is no application to file. There is no realistic pathway to permanent legal status under current immigration law.

Understanding this reality is essential if we want an honest conversation about immigration. Without it, debates about enforcement, deportation, and “personal responsibility” rest on a mistaken picture of what the law actually allows, and the impact of these laws on our neighbors and friends.

A System with Severe Legal Limitations

The U.S. immigration system is often described as broken, but that language obscures the more troubling reality: it is an expensive system with severe legal limitations, especially for low-income and/or low-skilled workers.[1a] It is also incredibly complex and subject to rapid changes.[1b] Worse, it depersonalizes and mischaracterizes the people who bear the burden of its brokenness.

Many undocumented people have very little chance of legal immigration status under current U.S. law. The system is structured around narrow categories used to track and privilege highly skilled labor, advanced degrees, and exceptional ability. For people who work in agriculture, construction, caregiving, food service, and other essential sectors, the system offers almost no viable entry points. At the same time, these industries have high labor demand.

Employment-based green cards are a good example. While roughly 140,000 employment-based immigrant visas are made available each year across all categories, only about 10,000 are reserved nationwide for low-skilled workers.[2] These visas are subject to long backlogs, especially for applicants from high-demand countries such as Mexico.[3] In practice, many undocumented people have virtually no access to this path.

Temporary work visas are often presented as an alternative, but they are, by design, temporary. As such, they offer no help for people who are already here. Programs like H-2A and H-2B do not lead to permanent residency, require employer sponsorship, and generally must be applied for from outside the United States.[4] Undocumented people already living here cannot simply transition into them. Even when granted, these visas are short-term and restrictive, and they place enormous power in employers’ hands. Many of our essential sectors are dependent on low-wage labor from a population unable to gain legal status, which limits their ability to safely assert labor protections such as minimum wage without risking retaliation.  The immigration system, as it currently exists, systematically excludes many undocumented people from the possibility of long-term legal status.

When Legal Pathways Disappeared

This exclusion did not happen by accident. Historically, there were periods when U.S. immigration policy included programs specifically to bring in people for this kind of labor. One such example is the Bracero Program, a guest-worker program that operated from 1942 to 1964 and brought many Mexican laborers, many of them in Arizona, into the United States legally.[5] When the program ended, the demand for labor did not disappear. But most of the legal pathways did.

No Way to “Regularize” Status After the Fact

For people already living in the United States without legal status, the situation is even more restrictive. If someone entered the country without inspection, meaning they crossed the border at a non-authorized crossing rather than arriving on a visa, there is generally no viable way to apply for lawful permanent status from within the United States.

Leaving the country to apply from abroad often triggers automatic three- or ten-year bars on reentry, depending on how long a person has lived in the U.S. without documentation.[6] For people with families, jobs, deep community ties, and lives built here, this is obviously not a viable option. For most, legalization is functionally out of reach.

Some narrow exceptions exist. Victims of domestic violence under the Violence Against Women Act, survivors of serious crimes who assist law enforcement, and victims of trafficking may qualify for specific humanitarian visas. But only narrow and exceptional circumstances provide a pathway to legal status, and even these are very difficult to access by a population that is extremely vulnerable and marginalized.[7]

Marriage to a U.S. citizen is often assumed to be a solution, but it is not a guarantee.[8] For people who entered without inspection, marriage alone does not confer status. The process is lengthy, costly, and uncertain, and often requires difficult-to-obtain waivers.

Temporary programs such as DACA or Temporary Protected Status offer protection from deportation but do not lead to a green card or permanent status.

None of these options are solutions; they are stopgaps.

Asylum Is Not a General Safety Net

Another widespread misunderstanding is that people fleeing violence can simply apply for asylum. In reality, asylum eligibility is much more narrow than this common claim presupposes.

In the United States, a person is eligible for asylum if they are physically present in the U.S or at a port of entry and can demonstrate that they are unable or unwilling to return to their home country because of past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution. It applies only to people who fear persecution on specific grounds such as race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.[9] Things like generalized violence, gang violence, economic instability, and climate change are often not deemed sufficient under the current U.S. asylum law. To receive asylum, individuals must show past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution on specific grounds, and generally must apply within one year of arrival unless they qualify for limited exceptions. Many people who migrate under desperate conditions do not qualify, even when their fear is real and well-founded.

Life in Legal Limbo

The result of these constraints is a population of people who are effectively trapped. The overwhelming reality is that many undocumented people in the United States have no viable pathway to immigrate legally under current law. If someone immigrates in an undocumented way, the hope of gaining status is slim to nonexistent. And this was true before the current administration’s immigration and deportation campaign.

Millions of people have lived and worked in the United States without any opportunity to adjust their status, despite contributing to essential sectors of the economy, raising families, and paying taxes.[10] Most have no criminal record at all. Some crossed without inspection, a federal misdemeanor on a first offense; many others entered lawfully and fell out of status. Neither is a crime of ongoing commission.Yet they live with constant vulnerability to exploitation, to abuse, and to deportation.

None of this has gone unanswered. Undocumented people have organized for decades — through worker centers, legal defense networks, and the campaigns that forced DACA into existence — and they continue to, under conditions that make organizing dangerous.

The myth of “coming the right way” allows the public to accept harsh enforcement policies without confronting the structure of the system itself. It shifts responsibility onto individuals who were never given a meaningful legal option in the first place.

Any honest discussion about immigration reform, the current administration’s approach to immigration, and the unconscionable activities of immigrant enforcement agencies must face the reality that the narrative that many of us have been fed about our neighbors who are immigrants is misleading and harmfully inaccurate. Until we do, debates about immigration will continue to rest on fiction.

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[1a]”Low-skilled” and “unskilled” are terms of art in U.S. immigration law, not descriptions of the work. The relevant legal category is the EB-3 “Other Workers” subcategory, which the Department of Labor defines by training time as positions requiring less than 2 years of training or experience. That definition sweeps across agriculture, caregiving, food service, construction, and domestic work — occupations that demand real expertise, physical skill, and judgment, and that the economy cannot function without. I use these terms here because they are the technical vocabulary and the literature, not because I accept the framework behind them.

[1b] The current immigration system is rapidly changing. Under the current administration, the immigration system requirements are in flux, and this discussion is limited to the immigration situation prior to the November 2024 election. However, that is the situation on which most people’s beliefs about the immigration system are built; therefore, it is the relevant context for the narrative operating around the country right now about immigration.

[2] ‘travel.state.gov (U.S. Department of State- Bureau of Consular Affairs ). “Employment-Based Immigrant Visas.” Accessed May 21, 2025. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrate/employment-based-immigrant-visas.html.

[3] Ibid.

[4] ‘USCIS. “Cap Count for H-2B Nonimmigrants,” March 26, 2025. https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/h-2b-non-agricultural-workers/cap-count-for-h-2b-nonimmigrants.

Note: Temporary workers and trainees include workers in specialty occupations (H-1B visa), seasonal agricultural workers (H-2A), seasonal nonagricultural workers (H-2B), workers with extraordinary ability or achievements (O-1 and O-2), athletes and artists (P-1, P-2, and P-3), intracompany transferees (L-1), treaty traders and investors (E-1, E-2, and E-3), people working for employers in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and their immediate families (CW-1 and CW-2), representatives of foreign information media (I-1), workers in international cultural exchange programs (Q-1), workers in religious occupations (R-1), and TN visas reserved for Canadian and Mexican professionals, as well as their spouses and minor children.

Batalova, Jeanne. “Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States.” migrationpolicy.org, March 11, 2025. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states. 

[5] Library of Congress, “1942: Bracero Program,” A Latinx Resource Guide: Civil Rights Cases and Events in the United States – Research Guides at Library of Congress. (n.d.). https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/bracero-program

[6] USCIS. “Application for Provisional Unlawful Presence Waiver,” April 28, 2025. https://www.uscis.gov/i-601a. 

[7] USCIS. “Victims of Criminal Activity: U Nonimmigrant Status,” May 16, 2025. https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/victims-of-criminal-activity-u-nonimmigrant-status.

USCIS. “Victims of Human Trafficking: T Nonimmigrant Status,” May 16, 2025. https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/victims-of-human-trafficking-t-nonimmigrant-status.

USCIS. “Green Card for VAWA Self-Petitioner,” April 8, 2025. https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-eligibility/green-card-for-vawa-self-petitioner. 

[8] USCIS. “I Am Married to a U.S. Citizen,” November 18, 2020. https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship/learn-about-citizenship/citizenship-and-naturalization/i-am-married-to-a-us-citizen.

[9] USCIS. “Asylum,” January 24, 2025. https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/refugees

[10] Initiative, & Kallick, D. D. (2024, July 29). People who are undocumented: Occupations, taxes paid, and long-term economic benefits – immigration research initiative. Understanding economics, advancing policy, supporting action. https://immresearch.org/publications/people-who-are-undocumented-occupations-taxes-paid-and-long-term-economic-benefits/ ==