Matt Frei, the BBC’s Washington correspondent, captures several aspects of the lunacy of current U.S. immigration practice in this dispatch. As a legal resident, here on an “I” visa (“Foreign media representatives”), Frei follows proper procedures, which involve leaving the country to get his visa renewed every five years. He goes off to the Bahamas to do this, taking his whole family (including a 3-yr-old daughter who has birthright U.S. citizenship).

The visa process is bureaucratic and cumbersome, involving at least two interviews and a separate appointment the following day to collect the visas. Allowing for flights from the US the whole process lasts at least three days. Shame! The tedious part is the three-hour waiting time in the embassy. This demands a suspension of all cell phone activity, monastic silence and a Byzantine queuing system enforced by large Bahamian women with truncheons and tempers. The atmosphere is a combination of fear, reverence and anticipation. Prayer vigil meets lottery. … As legal aliens, we are grilled, finger-printed and retina-scanned – but the vast majority of new arrivals still hike across the Arizona desert in search of jobs flipping burgers or making hotel beds. In the post 9/11 era, ‘fortress America’ is both paranoid and porous.

Frei would, of course, be better off–or at least no worse off–coming back across the Mexican border illegally and getting one of the proposed “Z” visas. And he’d get a waiver on back taxes!