What we owe our immigrants in Ohio

OBERLIN, Ohio — In his State of the Union address last month, President Trump continued his familiar attacks on immigrants, calling up images of “illegal alien invaders,” newly released from foreign prisons, now freely roaming through our towns and cities.

Hyperbole is par for the course for Trump.

And yet even among those who reject his bombast, many continue to question why many who wanted to emigrate didn’t “get in line” and come in the “right” way, “like our grandparents” did?

This question is inevitably followed by the same conclusion. If you break the law, you suffer the consequences: “illegal” immigrants must be removed. 

I might have more sympathy for these views if such a queue actually existed, a line one could join with the expectation that, at a reasonable future date, the immigrant would be welcomed into their new homeland.

And I think I would understand the demand that the law be strictly followed if most of us didn’t disregard it every day as we sped to work, or, more to the point, if the law treated every law-breaker with an equal measure of disapproval, an equal demand for accountability. 

Immigration law is hugely complicated.

Think of it as a Rubik’s cube — except the colors keep shifting and new layers of cubes are added on willy-nilly.

The end result is chaotic, dysfunctional, and almost impossible to solve.

One simple example can illustrate why our legal immigration system has become the greatest impediment to legal immigration and the greatest incentive to unauthorized entry. 

Numeric quotas, degrees of family relationship, and countries of origin make up some of the factors that determine when an applicant should have applied for an immigrant visa in order to be called in for a visa interview and, if all goes well, allowed to reunite with her American relatives.

The State Department publishes a Visa Bulletin each month indicating who is eligible for a visa interview that month.

To qualify for an immigration visa interview in March 2026, for example, the married Mexican daughter of a U.S. citizen must have submitted her immigrant visa paperwork before July 1, 2001.

No, that’s not a typo; yes, that’s a quarter-century ago.

That is not a line, that’s a slap in the face. And it is why so many immigrants are in this country without proper authorization.

Immigration laws are there to be followed, I have been informed countless times. Yet this administration regularly scorns these same laws.

In the last few days alone, one federal judge fumed that the the government is intentionally violating immigration law, a second determined that the IRS broke the law over 42,000 times by disclosing confidential information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Minnesota’s chief judge admitted that he was “not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt — again and again and again — to force the United States government to comply with court orders.”

But for many, being in the country without proper authorization, a civil misdemeanor not a criminal felony such as the 34 counts for which Trump was convicted, is a form of original sin, a crime without repair as long as the individual remains in this country.

My own grandparents came to the United States in the late 19th century, fleeing persecution in Russia.

They didn’t stand in line because there was no line.

And while they faced many challenges, not the least because they were Jewish, they were still able to flourish and contribute to their new country.

It is time we put aside the fiction that we bear no responsibility for an immigration system that is colossally broken or that we owe no thanks or debt of gratitude to the millions of undocumented immigrants who have put roofs over our heads, food on our plates, and, more often than not, brought joy to our hearts.

They, just like our grandparents, deserve a path to citizenship.

Steven Volk, Emeritus Professor History at Oberlin College, has worked as an advocate for immigrant rights for more than 20 years.