To have refugee status, you must apply for it before entering the country, at the border for example. If you have already made an entry, even illegally, you must apply for asylum. If you qualify, you can stay indefinitely and even obtain a work permit. Qualifying however is problematic. To qualify as either a refugee at the border or an asylee once you are here, you must establish either a history of past persecution and the likelihood that the persecution would continue if you returned or you must establish a well-founded fear of future persecution if you returned to your home country. The only types of persecution acceptable are for race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Being surrounded by gang violence and drug lords doesn't count. Being an economic refugee, in other words just fleeing a harsh economic environment won't work, as three-fourths of the planet would probably qualify. Even if you show past specific instances AGAINST YOU in particular of racial, ethnic, religious or political persecution, the U.S. immigration authorities are hard to convince. I once represented a young man from Iran in an asylum case. He had been involved since his teens in opposing the religious fundamentalists, demonstrating and distributing tracts. His name was written about in Iranian newspapers as a traitor once he was arrested. He produced copies of those newspapers for the USCIS (at the time called the INS). He was also imprisoned for several years, beaten and tortured with cattle prods and the like. The INS denied his case, questioning the accuracy of his facts. At trial, when he took off his shirt to show the many old scars and burns, the judge granted his asylum. I had another hard fought case about a family of ethnic Chinese from Indonesia who in the 1998 nationwide riots were targeted by rioting Moslems (an estimated 1,000 Chinese killed, dozens and dozens of Chinese women brutally raped). Their house was broken into during the massive series of anti-Chinese demonstrations in Indonesia, their possessions were either stolen or broken and they were forced into the streets where some of their neighbors suffered serious injuries. Even with proof, their asylum case dragged on for quite a while before the USCIS until it was finally approved.
I wish we lived in a world without borders but we don't. Immigrants simply seeking a better life such as schools, medicine, jobs, etc. don't qualify as refugees on the basis of economic factors alone under U.S. law. I wish we could take everyone and live without borders in a unified brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind.
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