The tragedy in San Bernardino last month has prompted numerous suggestions for changing our immigration policies to prevent such events. One of the shooters was a recent immigrant who had been allowed to come to the U.S. through her marriage to the other shooter, a U.S. citizen. Soon after the shooting, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, commented that the U.S. State Department "sloppily approved" Tashfeen Malik's temporary K-1 visa which let her enter the U.S. to marry Syed Rizwan Farook.
This and other criticisms suggest that visa approval through family sponsorship is relatively easy and unsupervised. Furthermore, it suggests that family sponsorship programs allow families to live together easily and quickly.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, our family sponsorship policy keeps families apart for years through application costs and delays. Most Americans are not aware of the hurdles of sponsoring a relative. Perhaps a story from my research on Ghanaian immigrant families can bring perspective to help us see how our immigration system could be fixed and how to prevent terrorism that is simultaneously home-grown and imported from abroad.
Family sponsorship is slow and expensive. The application fee for a single green card is $420. Such official fees are only a small part--applicants also spend money on brokers, lawyers, transportation, and health documents, vaccinations, photographs, and DNA tests. Immigrants' sponsors have trouble paying such fees not only when they work in low-wage, fast-growing sectors of the economy in the U.S., but also when they are middle-class, educated professionals of low- to middle-income countries.
Take the case of Afua, for example. Afua's father, a contractor, came from Ghana in 1993 when he was harassed by the government. Two years later, through the diversity lottery, Afua's mother won the opportunity to apply for green cards for herself, her spouse, and her unmarried minor children which included Afua and her four siblings. Applying for six green cards was simply too expensive for a part-time religious worker in the US and a mid-level government bureaucrat in Ghana. Afua explained, "They couldn't bring all five of us because of financial problems."
Afua's mother made the difficult decision of coming with her two youngest children and left the three oldest in the care of her sister in Ghana. In the U.S. as a permanent resident, she applied for family-sponsorship visas for her older children and saved up for the fees. However, a quota on green cards for the relatives of permanent residents meant she had to wait years.
One way that permanent residents can speed up the application process is by becoming U.S. citizens. Afua said, "So, my mom, her only hope was to be a citizen and then file all together again for all of us." A permanent resident can apply for citizenship after living five years in the U.S., and processing the application currently takes around five months after that, although it took longer in the past when Afua's mother applied. Afua observed, "You know, it was years and years and years"--seven in all since her mother's departure. In the meantime, Afua and her two brothers grew up in Ghana, in the care of an aunt they did not like very much.
After seven years, in the happiness of reunification, tragedy struck. Afua's mother died two months after Afua arrived in the U.S. Afua said, "What I was holding onto, eventually we would come over here, be a family again, and everything would be fine. That was what I was hoping for, we'd all come together again, be what we have always been. It never really happened."
Afua's story is a common one--financial constraint and administrative backlogs combine to keep parents and children separated for many years. Immigration fees and processing delays have come down in recent years. While welcome, if we care about family togetherness and solid communities, the fees need to be reduced dramatically, and more fee waivers granted, to put them within the reach of immigrants.
The experiences of Ghanaians migrating to the United States suggest that our family reunification policies are not at fault for the San Bernardino shootings. Family reunification is already too expensive and takes too long. Rather than simply blaming our immigration system, we need to account for the complex sources of such an event, in which Syed Razwin Farook and Tashfeen Malik relied on multiple traditions--both American revolutionary and jihadi--which created the conditions for a mass shooting fueled by terrorist ideology and easy access to arms.
Cati Coe is professor of anthropology at Rutgers University and the author of "The Scattered Family: Parenting, African Migrants, and Global Inequality" (University of Chicago Press, 2013).