Over the summer I interned at a law firm that handing immigration law. The firm was pro-bono, so we did not see any of the business executives or highly educated immigrant’s visas. A considerable amount of our cases were with uneducated people who had been poor in their home country and are now poor in our country. Many times they were completely undocumented and had scheduled consultations to see if there was any provision in the law that could get them ‘papers.’
I am semi-fluent in Spanish so I spent a lot of time translating first-time client consultations. It was through this experience that I truly saw the way the bureaucracy we were discussing in class today affects immigrants coming from developing “southern” countries. There were many times we had clients who did not understand the concept of what a court was. We had clients who had thrown away the paperwork given to them by ICE officers with their trial date because they did not think they were that important. Many of them had come from poor rural areas of central or South America and had a level of inexperience with bureaucracy that I think as modern-day Americans we struggle to comprehend. There was even a consultation I translated for in which a client thought our office was the immigration court.
Even in Lenon’s utopia, there would need to be at least some sort of government bureaucracy to keep track of what was going on, and even that would be an impediment to migrants with extreme inexperience with bureaucracy. My summer experience gives credence to the idea that the “trillion-dollar bills” on the sidewalk can not just be picked up for free. The costs to not only get low educated migrants from the south through our bureaucracy and then integrate them to work within our domestic bureaucracy would be astronomical, regardless of whether the government or private citizens spearheaded the effort.