With the low cost of travel today, phone calls, webcams, etc., geographic separation doesn’t mean nearly what it used to. If you came illegally and have grandchildren now, your children are all grown up. You can visit them once or twice a year just like people who live on the other side of the country do, talk with them on the phone every night, see new pictures every week.
That’s very true. It’s not like the days where a letter was the #1 form of communication and a reasonable-length phone call would cost $10. (Which is the equivalent of about $25 today.) When I was in Taiwan on a business trip last year, my wife could call me at the hotel for 7 cents/minute, which is pretty comparable to a domestic call on a Trac-phone. Lots of cell phone companies have international plans that are a lot cheaper than domestic long distance charges in the 1970s and 80s.