Thread: {SOB}'Mixed-status' household dreads losing their daughter

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'Mixed-status' household dreads losing their daughter
Tight-knit family hangs in balance while nation debates immigration reform
By Jessie Mangaliman, MEDIANEWS STAFF
Article Last Updated: 04/01/2007 02:54:18 AM PDT


On Sofia Alvarado's 46th birthday, she stood beaming at the stove in her South San Jose home, mashing and stirring a claypot of pinto beans. The rare afternoon was a mother's coveted gift: All five of her adult children and four grandchildren were relaxing at home together at the same time.
Her eldest daughter kicked a ball out front with her own young daughter. A son watched over a grandchild while another son slept off his graveyard shift. Another daughter cooed over an infant; the youngest daughter arrived from school.

This is a celebration, but one with a painful center: Alvarado's eldest, daughter Aime Alvarado, 26, a beloved and integral family member, is also an illegal immigrant. All the others are U.S. citizens or permanent residents; Aime Alvarado's own 4-year-old daughter, Evelyn, is a United States citizen by birth.

"I have everything," Sofia Alvarado says, slowly stirring the bubbling beans, "but I don't have everything. I want my family together." She repeats: "Together."

While last year's tumultuous national debate over immigration reform focused largely on individual illegal immigrants, little was said about the impact of legislation on millions of "mixed-status" households like the Alvarados'.

The myriad compositions of these households underscore how legal and illegal immigration are intimately linked. Congress ultimately ducked the problem last session.

And no wonder: How do you break apart, with legislation, families composed



of U.S. citizens, permanent residents with "green cards," temporary residents with pending card applications, and illegal immigrants? And what is the emotional toll on families under the threat that a loved one might suddenly be deported?
Last May, when millions took to the streets nationwide in support of immigration reform, the Alvarados joined San Jose's throng of 125,000. On Labor Day, the family marched again on crowded streets to support a legislative path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants.

In the middle of that throng beneath banners that proclaimed "Human Rights for Immigrants," Aime Alvarado said, "I need my papers. There are many people like me with kids."

Keep our families together.

The common perception of illegal immigrants is that they are solo males, said Jeffrey S. Passel, demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C.

But census surveys from 2005 show that to be untrue.

"The stereotypical situation is a family," Passel said of the nearly 2.7 million "mixed status" families like the Alvarados in the United States. In those homes are almost 2 million children who are like Aime Alvarado's daughter, Evelyn — U.S. citizens.


Deportation of an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, as called for by some opponents of illegal immigration, would affect millions more — family members linked in mixed-status households.


The Alvarados, for example, break down like this: a legal mother with an illegal daughter; an illegal daughter with an American-born daughter; a U.S. citizen father with an illegal daughter and siblings with an illegal sister. Everyone in the family said the threat hanging over Aime Alvarado is a silent torture on a household bound together by culture, financial necessity and emotional and familial ties.

Even opponents of amnesty for current illegal immigrants acknowledge the dilemma.

"That they have children here," said Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, "creates all sorts of consequences for schools, social service networks."

On the other hand, he said, "You never start the debate with amnesty."

The solution favored by Camarota, one now being advocated by both Republican and Democratic legislators, is a multi-pronged approach: tough enforcement of immigration laws, an employee verification system, deportation of illegal immigrants who face standing deportation orders, more border agents, and limits on legal immigration.

Like many critics, Camarota argues that legal immigration feeds illegal immigration. That problem is most evident in mixed-status households.

"You can break these social networks with strict enforcement, and by bringing down the legal immigration numbers," said Camarota. "You have to do both."

In recent months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has made sweeps of illegal immigrants around the country. Many immigrant families are facing deportation.

"There may be families that could potentially be separated," said Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for ICE. "They have a right to go before an immigration judge," who determines whether someone is deported. "But ultimately, it's ICE's responsibility to enforce the law."

The story of the Alvarado family in America begins in 1985 in industrial Toluca, a town just west of Mexico City. Diego Alvarado was 29, supporting his wife and three kids as a taxi driver.

Aime Alvarado remembers those years as content. She had university plans — to study to become an accountant or a preschool teacher.

Then the North beckoned with better paying jobs. Diego Alvarado crossed from Tijuana on a Mexican passport and a temporary visitor's visa. Winding up in Long Beach, he worked many jobs, from window washer to painter.

Months grew into years of torturous separation from his wife and kids. He could only return home from time to time but, because he was earning good money and was sending it back to his family, he endured. The Alvarados still treasure their trove of love letters and family correspondence from that difficult time.

One letter — from 12-year old Montse, written in 1999, a year before she came to the United States — still brings tears to her parents' eyes.

"Dadato, remember the old times when no one could separate us even if they tried? Now it hurts but I know that very soon, we will be together again," Montse wrote. "Now we are going to be closer than ever. I love you."

Then in 1986, Congress gave legal amnesty to nearly 3 million illegal immigrants. Diego Alvarado received a green card in 1992, moved to San Jose in 1994 and became a citizen in 1997. Soon he applied to bring his family.

His wife and the four youngest children — Ruth, Diego Jr., Sergio, and Montserrat, got legal status based on Diego's U.S. citizenship. The minor children became legal residents almost immediately.

But timing, age and luck were not on Aime Alvarado's side. She was 21 when she entered the United States in 2001, too old for legal status under her father. She also missed by two days a family reunification provision from December 2001 that would have allowed her to circumvent the age barrier.

There remains one glimmer of hope.

The law allows U.S. citizen parents to petition for adult children. Diego Alvarado has applied for Aime. But in the perpetually backlogged immigration system, adult children rank lowest among family members who can receive "preference" for a visa to immigrate. She must wait six years to begin the process of legalization.

Just home from her part-time job serving food at a local cafeteria, Aime sighed, "What am I going to do?"

In the Alvarado household, a modest four-bedroom, one-story home in a South San Jose neighborhood populated by Mexican and Central American immigrants, everyone contributes to pay the $3,800 monthly mortgage. Six adults and two children live there on an estimated total annual income of about $100,000.

Money is tight. For at least one month last summer, the phone was temporarily disconnected for non-payment.

The family's collective income covers only necessities. Sofia Alvarado's simple birthday party meal was beans, rice, corn tortillas, a little grilled beef and Diego's homemade chili and cilantro sauce.

Everyone works, often doing overtime. Diego works two jobs: driving disabled people and seniors to appointments during the week, and driving an auto parts truck on weekends. Sofia works as a night maid at the Santana Row hotel.

Aime Alvarado doesn't have a driver's license, so every morning sister Montserrat Alvarado, now 19, drives Aime to work and Evelyn to day care.

Care of the two grandchildren is a family affair.

Because Aime Alvarado arrives home earliest, she baby-sits her 21/2-year-old nephew when his father goes to work at night.

"You're dealing with people with families. If you don't take that into account when you're creating policy, you're ignoring one of the basic realities of the population you're dealing with," said Hans Johnson at the Public Policy Institute of California. "In this debate, we didn't have the balance of reality with ideology."

For most American families, it would be easy to expect 26-year-old Aime Alvarado, a single mom, to leave the family nest and start a life of her own.

"I want to go to school so I can have a better job, so I can give my daughter a better life, so I can help my parents more," she said. "But I can't. I don't have papers."

During the years the family was separated from the father, Aime Alvarado became a second mother to her siblings. When they were still in school in Toluca, she took charge of her siblings while her mother was at work. She was and remains today their confidant.

"We're pretty close," Montserrat Alvarado said, cuddling close to her sister on the sofa late one night, waiting for their mother to return from work. Waiting up to welcome her mother is a nightly ritual for Aime.

She is also the one who makes the weekly grocery list — and the one who knows how to make rice the "right" way. On Sofia Alvarado's birthday, Aime stopped her dad from preparing the rice in a stainless steel pan.

The family's rice, Aime said firmly, is like the mother's beans and must be lovingly cooked only in a claypot. She deftly smashed a clove of garlic and threw it into hot oil, preparing what they all call "Aime's Rice."

Contemplating her future, Aime Alvarado swings from hope to despair. One moment she is crying, imagining that she may be forced to leave. At other times she is certain that returning to Toluca would be the better choice.

As Congress takes another stab at immigration reform, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, new chair of the subcommittee on immigration, said part of the debate will be about families.

"Does it make sense to separate families?" said Lofgren, D-San Jose. "Does it serve U.S. interest?"

If Aime Alvarado were to be deported — she can be deported despite an immigration petition filed on her behalf — she would not be able to return to the United States for at least 10 years. If her daughter, Evelyn, were to stay behind with the grandparents, she would have a childhood without a mother.

If Evelyn joined her mom in Mexico, the family says the loss would be unbearable.

"I don't want to think about that," Sofia Alvarado said. "Aime's situation makes us feel powerless."

Every member of the Alvarado family has reflected with much sadness on the years of separation, and their toll. It took Diego Alvarado 15 years to bring his first two children to San Jose, and two more to reunite his entire family. Thinking about the possibility of another separation, he said, paralyzes.

One afternoon last summer, his son, Sergio, 21 and a U.S. citizen, lamented that to many Americans, adult children living with their parents seem anomalous, but to families like his, it's not mere tradition.

"We came here to get closer," he said. "But this country gets between us."


Contact Jessie Mangaliman at jmangaliman(at)mercurynews.com or (40 920-5794.

http://origin.insidebayarea.com/dailyre ... ci_5570420

If Evelyn joined her mom in Mexico, the family says the loss would be unbearable.

Than by all means go with her!!! Keep the family intact!

Sergio, it is not our country it is your family's contempt for American immigration law. To have brought you sister here should be a cause for reuniting your family... south of the border.

This gets really old, do these people think American families never get split up, Ha!! All the time.
We have to move for various reasons away from our families, like Jobs we are losing because of cheap labor, the town I grew up in, down in Calif. I moved from because they took it over and we could not understand anyone anymore, but I left 2 sisters down there and their families, for many reasons Americans are leaving their families and this whinning gets really old, especially when these people have forced many American families to spit up!!GET OVER IT!!!

My Great Granmpa who came from the Ukraine, left there at age 14. That was 1906. He left 2 brothers, and 7 sisters behind, along with his mother. 11 years later, the October Revolution sealed his country of origin off from him. His family weren't weathy enough now to come visit him here, and had he gone back to visit them, he would have been imprisoned or shot as a traitor.

So for my Great Grampa, who passed away at the age of 92 when I myself was a young man, hadn't seen nor heard from his family for over 60 years.

These people should be happy that at least they can visit one and other. Send letters, and phone each other.

If they think they have it bad, they should know about my own ancestors, and what they had to endure.