Miguel Alejo Lopez looks over his documents while waiting inside the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez for an interview with an officer who will review his application for legal permanent residency. Critics of the immigration system say it's a legal quagmire that's too restrictive, but others say it's not restrictive enough.

james gregg / Arizona Daily Star

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If you haven't said it, you've probably heard it: "I understand people want to come here; I just want them to do it legally, like my great-grandfather did."

But they don't come through Ellis Island anymore.

Hector Arroyo Garcia of Phoenix has waited 11 years for a green card for his wife and nearly nine years for green cards for his daughters so they could come from Mexico.

The Silva-Felix family of Douglas could be forever separated from their oldest daughter in Mexico, in part because the family lacked the money to hire an attorney and the knowledge to handle their own green-card applications.

University of Arizona assistant professor Cecilia Rios-Aguilar and doctoral candidate Patricia Azuara — highly-educated, sought-after professionals who beat the odds to get visas — worry about their futures and dread their visits to U.S. consulates for renewals.

The reality, immigration and human-rights advocates say, is that the U.S. immigration system has become a legal quagmire.

The process is restrictive, cumbersome and unwelcoming, critics say. In their view, it forces families to be separated and pushes desperate people to cross illegally — many through Southern Arizona's desert.

"People imagine that there is this system to welcome people because we are this nation of immigrants and we welcome people and we are so good and organized and there are all these systems in place," says Patricia Mejia, a Tucson immigration attorney. "But there is no system. The immigration system has failed."

For many people, the failure is that the system is not strict enough. They see a bloated, overreaching network that lets families bring members over one by one and threatens to overwhelm the country. They believe the backlogs and high costs are evidence the system should be trimmed: Fewer people in line would mean cases getting cleared faster, they argue.

The idea that a restrictive system causes illegal immigration is backward — it's legal immigration that stimulates illegal entries, says Steve Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates reducing immigration.

If a restrictive system were the problem, he asks, "Why doesn't doubling the legal immigration numbers reduce illegal immigration?" His evidence: Since the United States put nearly 3 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship by granting amnesty in 1986, illegal immigration has increased nearly fivefold.

"You don't just wake up one morning and say, 'I want to go and I'm going to go,' " Camarota says. "It's a person in the United States who says, 'Look, I can get you a job at the warehouse when you come.' "

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received 7.7 million immigrant and non- immigrant applications in 2007, up from 6.3 million in 2006. The U.S. State Department, which runs all U.S. consulates and embassies around the world, received 8.5 million non-immigrant applications, up from 7.7 million in 2006.

The U.S. government puts about 1 million immigrants on the path to citizenship each year by issuing them green cards, which makes them legal permanent residents and gives them the right to work. It issues another 5.5 million non-immigrant, or temporary, visas that let people enter the country for tourism, school or business.

A rush to beat rising fees helped create a recent surge in applications and is keeping Citizenship and Immigration Services from reaching its goal of processing applications within six months.

The wait for a U.S. citizen in Arizona who wants a green card for a spouse, minor child or parent is more than seven months, a Citizenship and Immigration Services chart shows.

The wait for green cards for most people sponsored by employers or certain relatives — which are limited by yearly quotas — ranges from three to 22 years, the State Department's visa bulletin shows.

The wait times can be frustrating, but any immigration policy must have restrictions — or we would have open borders, says Daniel Tichenor, an associate professor of political science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of "Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America."

There are more categories than ever in which immigrants can qualify, but that doesn't mean it's a well-oiled system, he says. Current immigration law reflects a hodgepodge of competing national interests, he says, such as protecting national security versus honoring our roots as a nation of immigrants.

"Our policies have just become much more labyrinthine and specialized," Tichenor says. "It makes it very confusing for immigrant families. It makes it very confusing for small businesses, small employers, and as a result you often have to make sure you have an extremely good lawyer to help you in the process. It very much reminds me of the tax code in its complexity."

To get a sense of that complexity, consider the process for obtaining an H1B worker visa.

A company that wants to hire a foreign worker must complete a rigorous approval process from the Department of Labor. Then it submits an application to Citizenship and Immigration.

Even if the application is approved, a cap limits visas to 65,000 per year. In one way it's less than that because 6,800 are allotted to Chile and Singapore through free-trade agreements.

In another way it's more because 20,000 more are available for foreigners who earned master's degrees in the United States, plus an unlimited number for exempt organizations, such as four-year universities and some non-profits.

In 2006, Citizenship and Immigration approved 109,614 new H1Bs. Workers who got them can stay in the United States for six years — but that's not black and white, either. If a person applies for legal permanent residency — which must be sponsored by the employer — before the end of the fifth year, unlimited one-year extensions are available.

Lawyers who spend their days navigating the system say it can seem "totally bipolar."

"It's like you are saying, 'Oh, yes, welcome, we are a nation of immigrants, the Statue of Liberty, freedom for all,' " immigration attorney Mejia says.

"And then, on the other side, you are like, 'God, if you want to come in here, we are going to make it hell, you are going to have to pay, you are going to owe for the rest of your life.' "

Advocates for reduced legal immigration agree the system is flawed. But the problem, they say, isn't that there are too many restrictions — it's that there are not enough.

Most such groups want to tighten recommendations made by the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, formed by Congress in 1990 and led by the late Rep. Barbara Jordan. In 1995, the Jordan Commission recommended an annual cap of 550,000 new immigrants.

The report called for welcoming a set number of nuclear-family members, skilled workers and refugees, but not siblings of U.S. citizens or non-disabled adult children of citizens or legal permanent residents. The recommendations were not followed.

Current groups that advocate tighter immigration restrictions would like at least some of the recommendations implemented. Both the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform want to eliminate the visa lottery, which grants up to 50,000 green cards each year to countries with low rates of immigrants. The lottery is intended to promote diversity among immigrants.

Then, the groups would like to take it even further. Camarota, of the Center for Immigration Studies, suggests eliminating eligibility for children and spouses of legal permanent residents who don't move here with the sponsor. The move would force immigrants to become U.S. citizens before they can sponsor family members.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform advocates a temporary moratorium on all immigration except spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents and a limited number of refugees.

The goal would be to handle the existing backlog and establish a more sensible policy that reduces legal immigration to 300,000 people a year, federation spokesman Ira Mehlman says.

"The reason we have limits in the first place is not because we want to be mean to people," he says. "Immigration doesn't only affect the immigrants themselves and their direct employers. It affects the rest of us, and those interests should be taken into effect, too. In fact, they should be the primary interest."

One family's 11-year wait to legally join father in U.S. Page A17