When survival’s at stake, there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to immigrate

Members of the Nevada Immigrant Coalition protesting executive orders targeting immigration in January, 2025. (Photo: Michael Lyle/Nevada Current)

A myth often repeated in the debate around immigration suggests there is a “right” way to come to America and a “wrong” way.

The supposed distinction is sometimes equated with “legal” or “illegal” entry into the U.S. It’s sometimes likened to waiting in line versus cutting the line.

This framework does not reflect reality. The experience of countless immigrant families in the U.S. shows there is no unambiguous division between right and wrong ways to immigrate.

Certain individual cases might map onto a straightforward conception of good and bad. Some people have filled out paperwork and waited years for authorization before crossing the border. Others have snuck across with criminal intent. It is also true that a country has a right and obligation to control the flow of immigration across its borders.

But for millions of immigrants, whose journey to America involved extreme hardship, outmoded laws, dysfunctional bureaucracies, complicit American employers and life or death decisions, reality refuses to fit into tidy policy abstractions, and it defies simple notions of right and wrong.

For years, U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans has told the story about how his grandfather immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico “the right way … the legal way.” The Fort Lupton Republican, who represents Colorado’s 8th Congressional District in Congress, leveraged the story to boost his credibility as he endorsed President Donald Trump’s plan for mass deportations. He contrasted his own family’s purported “right” immigration story with the “wrong” one of millions of U.S. residents to argue they deserve to be deported.

“You need to go stand in that line and do it the right way, do it the legal way, so you are not leapfrogging over those folks like my grandfather, who did it the right way and did it the legal way,” he said in January.

But as Chase Woodruff, Newsline’s senior reporter, discovered through a search of public documents, Evans’ grandfather, Cuauhtemoc Chavez, entered the U.S. with his family without authorization and lived unlawfully for many years in El Paso. He was once arrested for an immigration violation and faced deportation proceedings.

Woodruff’s investigation was news because Evans had made the false story about his grandfather, who died in 2014, central to his support for a cruel federal policy that is causing immense harm to families and communities across the country. But the real falsehood was not that Chavez had actually immigrated the wrong way. It was that it was ever so easy to define what the wrong way even is.

Immigrating to America is very hard to do. Even immigrants who follow strictly legal paths to U.S. residency face a monster bureaucracy of restrictions and complexity, and even those legal paths are part of a system that American lawmakers of all stripes admit has been broken for decades.

For too many migrants, the journey is more than hard — it’s fatal. The U.S. southern border is among the deadliest land migration routes in the world. Last year almost 1,300 migrants in the Americas died or went missing, most of them at the U.S.-Mexico border. A stretch of the border along New Mexico and west Texas is especially deadly for migrants, according to a joint investigation by Source New Mexico and The Texas Tribune. From January 2023 to August 2024, 299 human remains were reported in the region, known as the El Paso sector.

But many people decide that the journey is worth risking, because conditions in their home country are too difficult or impossible. They might be motivated by economic destitution, political violence, crime or a natural disaster, against which points of administrative rectitude can appear petty or misplaced. The way that a representative in the U.S. House labels “wrong” could be the only way an immigrant has found to keep loved ones alive. Sometimes the choice is not between right and wrong but between wrong and death, which is hardly a choice.

Chavez was 5 years old when his mother took him and five siblings across the border to El Paso in December 1929. Chavez’s father had died only two months earlier, records obtained by Woodruff show. The family settled in El Segundo Barrio, an El Paso district that one resident, Chicano poet Lalo Delgado, described as a “square mile of poverty and misery.” But despite difficulties the Chavezes immigrated based on the same factors immigrants must weigh today.

“My family fought tooth and nail for the American dream so that future generations like me could have a better life,” Evans himself has said.

Cuauhtemoc Chavez went on to serve honorably in World War II and earned U.S. citizenship in 1946. He was later president of a union representing civil service workers at Fort Bliss in Texas. America is better off for his presence in the country.

After Newsline published Woodruff’s investigation last week, Evans — who declined to speak with Newsline about the story — seemed to acknowledge that rigid moral categories resist application to human beings struggling to survive and thrive.

“I think I’ve always talked about doing it the ‘right way,’ which is in reference to the fact that (my grandfather) joined the military and served his country,” Evans said when questioned by a CPR reporter about Woodruff’s findings.

In other words, what immigrants contribute to their adopted country can outweigh the infractions of their arrival, and the totality of their experience can overcome particular episodes of blame. The Trump administration’s immigration policy would be a lot more humane, and it would better serve America, if it operated under the wisdom of this insight.

This commentary was originally published in Colorado Newsline.