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With just $14 in his pocket, Simón Sosa hugged his mother, took his last breath of Venezuelan air and stepped onto a plane at the international airport in Caracas. Destination: Ecuador. Future: unknown.
It was July 2017. The country where he was born and raised was continuing to spiral out of control. Electricity blackouts, rampant crime and homelessness were spiking; the economy, long buoyed by the world’s largest oil reserves, was plummeting. Think your grocery bills ballooned recently? Try hyperinflation of more than 80,000% in a single year. Almost 75% of the population lost an average of close to 20 pounds because what little was left on store shelves became unaffordable, according to Venezuela’s Living Conditions Survey that same year.
At 22, Sosa was the first in his family to graduate from college. But the new electrical engineer’s career plans coincided with the collapse of his country.
“I honestly just trusted that things were going to work out,” Sosa, a man who combines an infectious smile with relentless optimism, told me.
He’s one of 7.3 million Venezuelans who have escaped the corrupt, authoritarian regime of Nicolás Maduro since 2014, according to UN estimates. He’s also part of the greatest global upheaval of humanity since World War II. One in 74 people in the world alive today have been forced to leave their homeland, be it because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the long-simmering Syrian Civil War, or other conflict.
That migration, too, has swelled illegal crossings on America’s southern border to their highest levels ever: 2.5 million in the fiscal year that ended in October, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Sadly, our country’s immigration and asylum systems have been broken for decades — the last overhaul came in 1986 — making the onslaught all the more overwhelming for the government.
Amid the deepening crisis, three senators met for months to produce a bipartisan compromise: It would greatly enhance security of the southern border, expedite asylum cases, increase the total number of visas, and more. The three rightly recognized that the current unmitigated flow of migrants crossing into the country is unacceptable and the border must be secured.
The bill went nowhere. “We crushed it,” former President Donald Trump, the leading Republican contender for his party’s nomination, told a rally in South Carolina recently. Proud to stoke the festering situation, Trump is also reviving xenophobic rhetoric in painting immigrants as the problem.
“They’re sending people, for the most part, that they don’t want, and they’re putting them into caravans,” he said of foreign leaders on Fox News earlier this month.
But try as Trump might, he cannot contend with a universal truth: Our country needs immigrants, and an orderly way to bring them here.
The U.S. fertility rate is roughly half of what it was in 1960, resting at historic lows; the country’s population growth is at its lowest level since the Great Depression. A society that is increasingly going gray with the retirement of the baby boomers needs new workers.
Shortages already plague hiring. More than half of small businesses looked for workers in January; a staggering 89% reported receiving few or no qualified applicants in a recent survey by the National Federation of Independent Business.
Immigrants could help. Already in Washington, they account for 18.7% of the state’s workforce, including the bulk of workers in agriculture and software development. Redmond-based Microsoft employed a tech industry-leading 8,000 immigrant guest workers on the H1B visa program in 2021, according to Business Insider.
“Highly skilled immigrants are an essential part of our country’s innovative capacity, competitive advantage, and economic strength,” Barbara Leen, Microsoft’s senior corporate counsel on U.S. immigration, told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in an interview.
In the country at large, immigrants are more likely to be entrepreneurs, with nearly half of Fortune 500 companies founded by immigrants or their children, the Brookings Institution found in 2017.
Already, a resurgence in immigration that began in 2022 is predicted to continue and boost the U.S. economy by around $7 trillion in the next 10 years, according to just-released analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
This is all to say nothing of the ways in which immigration continues to enrich American life through the diversity of traditions, cuisines and cultures.
In Sosa’s own journey, America wasn’t even his first thought when he first left Venezuela; he’d never even heard of Seattle. Yet in a matter of months, he’d find himself on a long-established path to citizenship that has endured through America’s struggles with its immigration system — by falling in love.
‘Love-at-first-sight vibes’
After arriving in Quito in 2017, Sosa slept on a mattress in his brother’s apartment, browsing the help-wanted section in a local newspaper. He programmed elevators, tended bar and, fortuitously, got a job at a juice bar in a Quito park. That’s where he met Shawna Krueger, an American who happened to be studying abroad in the Ecuadorian capital.
Sosa had planned to raise money to travel to Germany, where he’d pursue a master’s degree in engineering. Krueger changed that calculus.
“It was a crazy spark — love-at-first-sight vibes,” she recalled when they met.
The more they bonded over the year, the more they could not live on opposite ends of the hemisphere.
The so-called “fiancé visa,” or the K-1, still requires a complex mountain of paperwork and deadlines, Krueger said. But attaining it is relatively straightforward: upon arrival in the U.S., the couple must marry in 90 days — and there must be “bona fide intent to establish a life together.” Sosa could get a green card. They formally wed in 2022.
‘We are very proud of Simón’
After meeting the couple at a friends’ party last fall, I went to their Fremont home earlier this month to learn the full story of Sosa’s journey to America. While there, he dialed up a video call with his parents, whom he talks to everyday. His choice to stay in the U.S. means he can’t see them in Venezuela.
His father, also Simón, sported a yellow King Felix T-shirt, homage to the Mariner legend born and raised in Venezuela — and who became a U.S. citizen in 2018.
His parents had returned from a successful trip to get water for their laundry, mother Yusmary said. Unfortunately, daughter Andrea, their only child who has not left Venezuela, was robbed of a laptop recently while job-hunting.
I could tell Sosa’s father was the likely source of that make-the-best-of-things attitude his son possesses. An electrician who helped maintain the country’s electrical grid, he’d lost his pension in retirement as government malfeasance and hyperinflation took hold.
“We are very proud of Simón and all that he’s accomplished,” his father told me.
‘A country of infinite opportunities’
The border has the country’s attention. Twenty percent named it as the most important problem facing the United States, in a Gallup poll conducted in January. Trump is already casting immigration as a liability to be vilified. Sosa’s story reminds us that immigration is actually an asset. An efficient, better-managed path for immigrants is long overdue, and the right thing to do.
Sosa said he wouldn’t risk the harrowing journey through jungles in Central America to make it to the U.S., as others have. But he can see why many do.
“They are already in the most miserable conditions imaginable,” he said. “The goal is to make it to America, a country of infinite opportunities.”
Now, in his new country, he is investing his talents to make things better here. He’s applied his Venezuelan education as an engineer, managing green energy projects for several different companies in his first few years. The long career he had hoped for in Venezuela he’ll have in America, instead.
“I’m very aware of how lucky I am to live in this amazing country. But I don’t think I have made it yet,” he told me. “There’s so much more I want to achieve.”
America’s future is enriched by those new to this country, like Sosa. In that sense, it’s imperative that an overhaul to immigration finally succeed. The discussion on the campaign trail this year should be over how we can bring more people to America for its betterment — not fewer.
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