Right... I pretty much expected this. It's a predictable pattern -- immigrants (who have immigration lawyers, naturally) ask THEM what to do. The immigration lawyers, who generally give good advice on individual cases, also generally follow AILA's lead on national policy.
But AILA doesn't actually represent the interests of IMMIGRANTS, ya know. It represents the interests of their lawyers -- which ain't the same. Wouldn't you rather see a simpler system that delivered on its promises?
Show me an immigration lawyer who does. Show me where AILA has supported any reform that delivers faster green cards to immigrants, with less regulation, less legal work, and the clarity necessary to uphold your rights instead of diminishing 'em.
Moreover, even within AILA, you have a deep, latent split between the roughly one third of their membership which does mostly employment-based visas, with big corporate clients who provide the bulk of the immigration bar's revenue, and the other two-thirds, which are small practitioners who do family petitions, asylum claims and miscellaneous adjustments. There isn't much money in that kind of work, and the majority of folks who are AILA members who do this sorta thing have never made their #s tell.
And consider this, too: I played a small role in enacting the last increase in legal immigration, the FORTY PERCENT in annual green cards, the 1990 Act. Who are you talking to -- who are your friends talking to -- with a better record then that? I would stack my own record of advocacy and analysis against anybody's -- while since 1981, AILA's lobbying has managed to 1) delay the increases proposed by the Hesburgh Commission from 1982, until 1990; 2) failed to prevent employer sanctions (which they didn't want), and made the 1986 amnesty less generous (they wanted more); 3) nearly cost us the 1990 Act itself through lobbying so boneheaded their representative was expelled from the pre-conference negotiations; 4) responded to the welfare ban proposed in the 1994 Contract with America by attacking those who most successfully opposed it, like Barbara Jordan; 5) responded to the debate over comprehensive immigration reform in 1995-6 by derailing enormous increases in nuclear family immigration and the COMPLETE deregulation of employment-based immigration, leaving the Congress in a ferociously punitive mood; 6) tried to spin all this as a "victory", and promoted one of the architects of tis strategy, Stuart Anderson, to INS policy director under Bush, where 7) Finally, they managed to get a series of H-1B increases and other measures that led directly to the retrogression -- and, oh yeah, 9-11. (Search "Borderline Insanity" at the Washington Monthly website. For that matter, look for the "Bury the Ratchet" piece I did for ILW.com a couple years back. I forget if that was the piece in which I preduced taht the Bush administration would not actually propose an immigration plan -- when AILA was loudly applauding as if they already HAD. If you really want, I will send you a link to the report I did that predicted the retrogression, too -- are your friends telling you what a great job AILA did anticipating and preparing to fix it?)
So perhaps I can be forgiven if I am unimpressed with political amatuers who think AILA knows what the hell they're doing. If these guys were tax lobbyists held to bottom line accountability, they'd all be unemployed. Measured by the interests of the people they CLAIM to represent -- namely, people like you -- they are without a doubt the most counterproductive lobby in Washington. and as you see from the short list above, they have been that bad for a quarter century.
But measured by the interests of their real constituency -- not immigrants, but their LAWYERS -- they are superbly effective at screwing you, and charging you for the privilege.
I know how you can do better. Let me know if anybody is actually willing to talk about it, or if they're content to be duped AND fail like every other set of AILA's clients and "constituents" for the best couple of decades.
