False dichotomy territory there.<p>I had to deal with immigration lawyers for a friend about 2 years ago after deferred action took place. She was born in Mexico, but her parents came over here shortly after she was born. With deferred action, if you have a high school degree, are younger than 35, never left the US after you originally arrived here here and don&#x27;t have anything on your &quot;record&quot; (which is a fuzzy thing in itself), you get a work permit with an SSN.<p>Now.. my friend is the most organized person you&#x27;ll ever meet. For whatever reason, she decided to keep all of her homework, documents, mail, etc from high school 8 years prior. She never left the US, got mostly As, was good standing on jrotc. As a small anecdote, she also just got top employee award at a thousand person company without even working there for a year. Really, she was the kind of person that should have had a little bit of wiggle room.<p>Nope. She had a two month period of time that she couldn&#x27;t find any documents from right after high school. They rejected her on the basis that she could have left the US at that time. It took 6 weeks to get a letter stating that. She immediately found some random mail and went through the whole process again. She got accepted, but it took another 6 weeks to get confirmation.  THEN.. she had to 2 months to go to the SSN offices specially prepared for the &quot;high traffic&quot; where we were the only ones there, along with about 20 staff.<p>Oh, and then her brother who&#x27;s been pulled over for speeding multiple times, dropped out of high school (he got his GED in fairness)... got a work permit with extreme ease.  Hell, he even filed late without even using a lawyer.<p>Rant over, but you get the point.  It&#x27;s a frustrating process where there&#x27;s a mold, but it&#x27;s an ineffective baked-shit mold.<p>Edit: I helped another friend out who had a somewhat uncommon situation that let her get a greencard without going through the usual process. When DHS said she was good to go, the SSN told us it was &quot;impossible to input the alien number&quot; because it didn&#x27;t have the correct amount of digits and <i>couldn&#x27;t be typed in their system</i>. We were told to fill out a form that would take <i>6 weeks</i> to process. DHS and the SSN office both refused to work with each other and we weren&#x27;t allowed to use cell phones in the building. When we tried again about a month later, the person at the counter gave her an SSN on the spot without any issue. Frustrating.