Dawn McCarty writes regarding our broken immigration system,

“The immigration laws on the books are designed to fail. That is their purpose. Making it virtually impossible for most workers to be admitted legally, in the face of both a tremendous need for their labor in this country and the difficulty or impossibility of their getting a job in their own country, means that they are going to come here illegally. Bet on it. How could it be otherwise?

If the purpose of the system, from the point of view of those in power, is to maintain an underclass of workers that can be exploited [and hardly just immigrants], it is working very, very well. If it were not working for those with political power, they would change it. Would they not? The laws are so dysfunctional that if we ever seriously enforced them, whole industries would be ruined.

The fact is that the leaders of industry and agriculture need workers, they just don’t want to pay them. The current system of laws that make it impossible for most migrants to ever be legalized suits them just fine; the undocumented, who we all know are going to continue to come as long as they cannot survive in their own countries, can stay in the shadows here, working for peanuts. We can toss them away when they get sick or injured or old.

There is one area, though, in which the individual analysis (people should not break the law) and the structural (these laws are purposely designed to be broken) lead to the same conclusion: the undocumented who were brought here by their parents when they were infants or young children. They had no say in the matter. They broke no laws. But they are paying the price for our hypocrisy.

Last year I helped a bright young woman, Mari apply for college. She graduated at the top of her high school class and was easily accepted into an advanced program for students interested in the physical sciences. She wants desperately to become a doctor, and works harder than any student I have ever known. She did remarkably well in her freshman year and applied for a program that helps students get accepted into medical school. But the program requires proof of citizenship for the perfectly logical reason that acceptance into medical school requires legal documents, something that Mari does not have.

More than a decade ago, Mari’s father, at the time a young day laborer, was hit by a hit and run driver, abandoned, and left paralyzed. He could not lift a finger. He had intended to return to his home country when he had made enough money to feed his family, but now, instead of providing help to his family, he needed help from them. Mari and her mother moved here to care for him when Mari was just 9 years old. Those early years of helping to care for her father led to her interest in medicine. I have promised her that we will find a way for her to go to medical school, but sometimes I wake up terrified that I can’t keep that promise. After all, the laws currently in force require Marito be deported to her home country, a country she only vaguely remembers. She could, theoretically, apply for a visa after her deportation, but there is no visa category for which she is eligible. So, for the “crime” of being brought here by her parents, she is punished by losing her future and we are punished by losing a promising doctor.This is so patently cruel and counter-productive that a law called the Dream Act has been introduced into Congress designed to apply to a narrow class of situations such as Marifaces.

The thinking behind the Dream Act seems to be that broader immigration reforms are politically difficult right now, so let’s get something passed that almost everyone would agree with.

— Excerpt, New Mandate for Immigration Reform, Houston Catholic Worker, 2011