There Is No Line: IF WE WANT IMMIGRANTS TO FOLLOW THE LAW, WE NEED BETTER LAWS.

• Author: Taylor, James Stacey

I BECAME A United States citizen on Friday, September 29, 2017.

If I wanted to put a romantic gloss on my story, I could note how I arrived 22 years earlier via a one-way ticket to Detroit on a student visa with just a small bag of clothes, some philosophy books, and $97 in cash. Or how I lived on $10 a week after the rent and bills were paid. How--in the tradition of all good immigrants!--I buckled down and worked hard and graduated with a Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University in three years. How I beat the odds and secured a tenure-track job my first time on the market and then met the woman who was to become my wife on the first day of faculty orientation.

To make my immigration tale even more compelling, I could throw in some of the challenges that I faced. Like how I ditched my useless, high-priced corporate immigration attorney for a man (an immigrant himself!) who shared an office with a taco stand. The new guy charged me a discount price of $80 after I showed I could identify the Dominican Republic on a map, and then he provided me with perfect visa-renewal paperwork within hours. I could recount the harrowing experience of having my work visa granted literally 15 minutes before teaching my first class at The College of New Jersey.

Like so many others', my story could be held up as an advertisement for the American immigration system. While it may have taken me a long time to become a U.S. citizen, I didn't have to wait much to enter the country legally--that initial student visa took just a couple of months. I worked hard, adhered to the law, and was naturalized only after dutifully waiting in line. Shouldn't everyone have to do this? Isn't it unfair to people like me when others jump the line and enter illegally?

No. Because there is no line.

THERE IS AN implication in the line metaphor that the current immigration system operates as it did at the time of Ellis Island: People get off the boat (or the plane or the bus), register with the immigration authorities, and then, after waiting their turn, get approved to live and work in the United States. There are more people coming in now than there were in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so the line's longer, but the principle is assumed to be the same.

It is not.

There are vanishingly few paths to being legally able to live and work here. The two main roads to legal immigration are the family-based visa program and the employment-based visa program. The family-based visa program is only freely available to the parents, spouses, or unmarried under-21 children of a U.S. permanent resident or citizen. (Those two classes of people are grouped together under the legal term "U.S. persons.") There are more-limited slots...