"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses"... now serving #12

Check out the visa bulletin on the Web site of the U.S. State Department, and you will see the problem immigrants face. The government offers 140,000 employment-based visas a year, with 5,000 set aside for unskilled workers, and most have been allotted years in advance. The State Department has a quaint term for the unavailability of visas — they are "oversubscribed." Two Mexicans received visas as unskilled laborers last year, according to the New York Times. And so it goes. Anti-immigrant forces tell the workers to step "to the back of the line." But if you are Mexican or Guatemalan or Colombian, the line for legal residency is not merely long; it is nonexistent. "There is no line to step to the back of," Marshall Fitz, an official with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said. "The biggest misconception is that the reason people come here illegally is because they would rather do that than do it legally. The vast majority does so because they have no legal channel to come here. That is the reality." (San Antonio Express-News)