LIFE Act

The Legal Immigration Family Equity Act of 2000, also known as the LIFE Act and as the Legal Immigration and Family Equity Act, along with its Amendments, made some changes to laws surrounding immigration for family members of United States citizens and Lawful Permanent Residents, as well as people eligible for employment-based immigrant visas, in the direction of making it easier for family members and immigrant workers to move to and adjust status within the United States. It was passed on December 21, 2000.

The LIFE Act was one of many legislative changes surrounding immigration enforcement in the United States that sought to compromise between the goal of ending unauthorized migration and recognizing the interests of United States citizens and lawful permanent residents in being together with their families.

The basic framework for family-based and employment-based immigration was laid out in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and the categories were expanded, with a clear preference ordering, with the Immigration Act of 1990.

The INA placed a limit of 20,000 on the number of immigrants from each country of chargeability within each year. For large countries in particular (such as India, China, and Mexico), this limit was much less than the number of people who sought to migrate through family-based and employment-based migration. This led to many cases of people who had approved petitions for family-based or employment-based immigration but needed to wait several years in order to be able to legally immigrate or adjust status to that of Lawful Permanent Resident. Some of these people stayed in the United States, going out of status, while others waited outside the United States for long periods of time.

Until the 1980s, most removals of unauthorized aliens happened through formal removal proceedings that involved a hearing before an immigration judge. However, in the 1990s, the United States government decided to add to its toolkit of removal strategies to deal with the scale of presence of unauthorized aliens, a trend that has continued through the 2000s and 2010s. Some of the summary removal procedures introduced over this time include expedited removal (launched 1996/1997),stipulated removal (launched 1995),reinstatement of removal (launched 1998), and administrative removal for aggravated felons (introduced 1988, expanded with the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996).

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