Think Immigration: I Wish People Understood How Immigration Status Isn’t “Fixed”

We asked the members of the 2023-24 AILA Media Advocacy Committee to share the one thing they wished people understood about immigration. We present their insights in this blog post series.

When people say that an immigration status needs to be “fixed,” they usually mean that someone is out of status (often known as “undocumented”) and that somehow their situation needs to be resolved. 

But when I tell people that an immigration status isn’t fixed, I mean something different. I mean that immigration status isn’t static. It can change dramatically; it isn’t as though someone’s status is immutable or set in stone.  

I was once undocumented. I am now, decades later, an immigration attorney who works for a civil rights organization.

Here is my story: 

At the age of three, I arrived in the United States with my mother and two older siblings, to join my father, who had left Taiwan three years earlier to pursue a better life for us. My father had learned English in China and initially performed manual jobs in the Chicago suburbs. After learning about an exam for translators at an international organization in New York City, he took and passed the exam. My father then applied for visas for employees of international organizations and their family members, which allowed us to reunite with him. At 61, my father was forced to retire. I was in high school at the time, and my family and I all fell out of status.

Eventually, my father found another employer to sponsor him for an immigrant visa, involving a test of the U.S. labor market, and he and my mother were granted permanent resident (“green card”) status several years later. By the time they received their green cards, however, I had “aged out” and couldn’t be granted the same status.  My mother then needed to file a petition to sponsor me as the adult unmarried daughter of a green card holder. Ten years later and during my first year of law school, I was granted an immigrant visa by a U.S. consular post overseas and was no longer undocumented. 

My hope is that we as human beings can see each other, hear each other, read about each other, and recognize that we are more than the sum of our parts; we are the sum total of our individual experiences. All of us continue to change over the course of our lives, and immigration status is part of that. 

We hope you enjoyed this post on Think Immigration! We’re always looking for fresh perspectives and voices to join our community of contributors. If you’re an AILA member passionate about immigration and have insights, stories, or expertise to share, we invite you to write for us. Visit our FAQs to learn more about how you can contribute to the conversation and make sure you bookmark our Think Immigration page so you don’t miss any blog posts.