Apostilles, acronyms, and the asylum circus: In the new immigration chaos rules don’t apply anymore

I’ve spent a decent chunk of my life standing in government offices clutching a folder full of notarized, apostilled, cross-referenced documents, while someone behind a glass screen frowns at page 7 and tells me it should’ve been printed on A4 paper.

If you’ve immigrated legally, you know the dance. I did it in the U.S. once upon a time. My wife and I were separated for nearly three years, with visiting privileges about as generous as a medium-security prison. Every six weeks I’d get on a plane, fly across the ocean and come back with just enough paperwork to keep the visa clock ticking. Our marriage survived, but I sometimes wonder if my sanity did.

Fast forward a few decades and now I live in Cuenca, Ecuador — happily so — but with one eye still on the slow-motion train wreck unfolding at the borders of wealthier nations. And it’s hard not to notice that the people who jumped the fence are already home, while those who waited in line are still holding the gate open.

Take the United States. Millions of undocumented people have been living there for years, working, paying taxes (mostly), raising American-born kids, and hoping nobody knocks on the door. Meanwhile, the legal immigration system is so backlogged it makes the Ecuadorian cedula line-up look like a Swiss watch.

Congress won’t fix it, courts can’t cope, and presidents just slap on duct tape in the form of acronyms like DACA, TPS, or “Remain in Mexico,” which sounds like the title of a bad travel podcast.

And the UK hasn’t fared much better. They left the EU to “take back control” and promptly lost it again. A former government floated the idea of flying asylum seekers to Rwanda — a policy so surreal, even Monty Python might have rejected it as too implausible. Still, I couldn’t help noticing that Rwanda, like Ecuador, sits at a lofty elevation and enjoys a fairly temperate mountain climate and lots of fresh vegetables. The big difference is that no one here is being deported in handcuffs.

All this drama comes back to one rather brittle document: the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. Originally written to deal with Nazis and Soviets and fleeing Jews being turned back at the Swiss border, it’s now being stretched to cover everything from gang violence to climate collapse, cross-dressing, and plain old poverty.

And while some claims are legitimate, others are — how shall I put this — opportunistic improvisations.

The truth is, no one wants to touch the Treaty or its 1967 add-on the Protocol. Governments fear that updating it might mean having to take more people, or worse, having to admit publicly that they already are. So they don’t revise it. They just work around it. Or ignore it. Or, occasionally, shout about it on cable news.

But here’s the thing that gets me—and maybe you, too, if you’ve ever waited months for a police certificate or watched your birth certificate go through a three-step authentication process with notarized translation in three different countries: why are we still the only ones punished for following the rules?

I’m not angry at the people who flee war, persecution, or desperate poverty. I’d do the same in their place. But I am angry at systems that reward chaos and penalize order, that tell you to do things the right way and then quietly reward those who didn’t bother.

And lest we forget, a large percentage of the undocumented population in the U.S. today are people with ancestry that predates the United States itself—descendants of Indigenous peoples and mestizo communities who lived on the land long before anyone drew a border through it. So when they “cross illegally,” into Texas or California, they are often crossing into territory their own ancestors never consented to give up.

And I’m tired of the myth that this is somehow compassionate. It’s not compassionate to create a system so murky that only the desperate, the lucky, or the dishonest make it through. It’s not progressive to outsource moral judgment to overworked immigration judges playing triage with lives. And it’s certainly not just to tell legal immigrants, “Thanks for your patience—now kindly move aside while we fix this backlog we created.”

So here I am, enjoying the sun in Cuenca, where at least the visa rules are weird in ways I’ve learned to expect. And I have a modest proposal: how about a little honesty?

Let’s admit that the global asylum system is broken. Let’s acknowledge that mass migration today is driven by more than persecution — it’s driven by hope, despair, economics, and entropy. And maybe — just maybe — we stop making suckers out of the people who did things properly.

Because if we keep sending the message that the rules don’t matter, we shouldn’t be surprised when people stop following them.

Yours, from the bureaucratic borderlands.