Thread: Creating an American life...(give me a break)

HoustonChronicle.com

Carlos, a Honduran, is one of the lucky ones, quickly finding a steady job that included a place to live. Months after arriving, he was ordered to appear in immigration court and decided to fight to stay legally in the United States.
Andrew Innerarity: Chronicle
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DO ANY OF THESE REPORTERS EVER INTERVIEW AMERICAN CITIZEN'S THAT ARE POOR???? OR DO THEY ONLY CARE ABOUT THE ILLEGALS?

Feb. 21, 2006, 6:18PM
ONE NATION, TWO WORLDS
Creating an American life


By EDWARD HEGSTROM and ELENA VEGA
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

THE vacant house in a struggling northside neighborhood listed for $40,000. It had two bedrooms, one bath and a carpet soiled by squatters.

But Veronica, a recently widowed mother of four with a $5.25-an-hour dishwashing job, looked at the house and saw beyond the filth. She saw a solid structure and an expansive yard. She saw a stable future she could own.

So she put down most of her savings as a deposit and arranged a financing plan with the seller. She cajoled her brother-in-law into fixing the wiring. She ripped up the carpet, cleaned the walls, cleared the waist-high weeds and planted sapling fruit trees along the driveway.

And just like that, the native of Puebla, Mexico, joined the ranks of Latin Americans who are both undocumented immigrants and U.S. homeowners.

"I wanted a place where my kids could play and be comfortable," Veronica said while watching her toddler son, Israel, scamper across the newly exposed hardwood floors. "I wanted a home."

There are more of them every year, these undocumented immigrants who stay in America so long they begin to put down roots. They find steady jobs, have children, enroll them in school, open bank accounts, purchase cars and buy homes. They create a life that is in some ways typically American, except for the fact that they are not here legally.

Some begin establishing themselves the minute they arrive, knowing from Day One that America is their new home. Others, like Jose and Eva Guzman, come for a visit and settle down only reluctantly.

"We did not come here with the idea of staying," said Jose Guzman. In fact, they came to visit his brother for a short vacation. That was in 1989.

Veronica knew from the start that going north was a life-changing event, though she and her husband, Jorge, always thought of one day returning. They came from Izucar de Matamoros, a small city south of Mexico City with limited opportunities and a social conservatism they found stifling.

At first, Jorge talked of going north alone. But Veronica had heard all the stories of young men who go north and fall into a life of vice — or find other women to marry.

"If you go alone, I'll divorce you," she told him.


Heading north
So in January 1995, when Veronica was five months pregnant with their first child, the two headed north together. After crossing the border into Arizona, they made their way to Chicago, where Jorge's sister lived.

Using his sister's utility bills as proof of residency, Veronica signed up for low-income health care. She went to see a doctor, who chastised her for waiting six months for her first prenatal visit.

The first baby was a girl, also known as Veronica. Then came a boy, named after Jorge, and another boy, Enrique. Because they were born in the United States, all were automatically U.S. citizens.

The family lived at first with Jorge's sister in the suburb of Arlington Heights. But after settling in, they found an apartment in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in the heart of the Chicago.

While Jorge worked as a busboy in a local restaurant, Veronica met regularly with a group of women at the apartment complex. She taught some of the women to read; they taught her to sew.

The women also told Veronica about something called an individual taxpayer identification number, issued by the Treasury Department so that people who do not qualify for a Social Security card still can file tax returns. Many illegal immigrants are on the payrolls of companies that deduct income taxes out of their checks. The ITIN allows these immigrants to file an income tax return so they can get their refund checks at the end of the year.
When Veronica told Jorge about the ITIN, he asked if it would allow him to work legally. Veronica, who is sharp and assertive in an unconventional way, looked at him and frowned.

"Don't be so ignorant, my love," she told him.


Deciding it's permanent
Jorge's relatives lived in Chicago, but Veronica had sisters in Houston. Eventually, she persuaded Jorge to move south. They got an apartment in the Third Ward, and Jorge again went to work as a busboy.

He eventually got two jobs at upscale restaurants in the medical center and downtown, often working 12-hour days, six days a week. In 2003, the last year of his life, Jorge reported more than $32,000 in income to the IRS. He used his ITIN to file a return.

The more the family settled down, the more Jorge daydreamed of returning to Mexico. He wanted to become a Mexican landowner, so he insisted on putting $4,000 down to purchase property that belonged to his grandfather. But there were family disputes and other relatives moved into the house. Veronica now considers that $4,000 lost.

Jorge's father died in 2000, and he went back for the funeral. The border had become far more difficult to navigate in the five years since he and Veronica had crossed together. When he returned after a month, he looked gaunt.

"He was really traumatized by that," Veronica says. He was finally ready to agree with Veronica that Houston should become their permanent home.

The couple began by spending $10,000 on a little lot outside Dayton, less than an hour northwest of Houston. They thought of putting a house on it, but with Jorge doing so well at work, they thought of saving that land for retirement and looking for a home in the city to buy for now.

A fourth child, Israel, was born in 2003.

Later that year, Jorge was walking home after a night of working and drinking when he was severely beaten near his home in the Third Ward. He died in the hospital the next day.

The killing remains unsolved.

Bewildered by the loss, Veronica struggled to find her way. Returning to Mexico was not an option. Everyone in her family, even her mother, had moved to Houston. Her four children were U.S. citizens, and three were enrolled in school.

So Veronica took the only job she could find, washing dishes at night in a Mexican restaurant on the near northside. She arranged to sell the land in Dayton and started looking for a place in Houston.

Jorge's death may have left her reeling, but Veronica was determined to get herself back on stable ground.

"I have to continue with the plan, even with him not here," she explained. "The dream continues."

In July of last year, she finally found a house she could afford. It was in a traditionally black neighborhood off Quitman, between the near northside and the Fifth Ward.

Veronica called Richard Leal, who is both a real estate agent and an activist working on behalf of Latin American immigrants. Leal worked out a contract under which Veronica would make a $10,000 payment to the seller, and the seller would finance Veronica's purchase.

Though he was glad to help a widow with young children find a permanent home, Leal said he worried about the neighborhood, where prostitutes and drug dealers wander the streets openly in the middle of the day.

Jose and Eva Guzman, too, were undocumented immigrants in Houston when they bought their house in a middle-class suburb west of Highway 6 that has three bedrooms, two baths, new furniture and a big-screen television. The house is set up to accommodate Jessica, their severely disabled daughter.

The Guzmans came to the United States in 1989, on what was intended as a one-month vacation to visit Jose's brother. But the sister-in-law had work as a janitor at a school, and she offered employment to Jose and Eva.

In Mexico, Jose had an office job in the collection department of Sears. He found work in Houston as a gardener. Though he didn't like the heat or the manual labor, he made more money mowing lawns in Houston than he did wearing a suit and tie in Mexico.


Fake documents

As with Veronica's family, the Guzmans' decision to stay permanently in America came during a trip to Mexico to bury a relative. Eva's father died, and the two saved money to get her back to Mexico. While she was there, she got a call from Jose.

"He called me and said we are not going back," she recalls. They found an apartment here, then improvised to furnish it. They found a table in the garbage that looked sturdy enough, so they cleaned it and put it to use.

In addition to better pay, the two found Houston less polluted than their native Mexico City. They suffered discrimination here but say the worst offenders were fellow Mexican-Americans. Jose eventually found work as a housecleaner, preferring to work for Anglos, who he says treated him better.

Jose went to the flea market and bought a fake Social Security card for $20. He later got a fake green card for $100. He got work in restaurants, working two shifts at times. He eventually became a chef.

Eva chose a simpler route. She transposed digits from their telephone number and used that on the job applications where it asked for her Social Security number. She also worked in restaurants.

Not all their documents were false. Before 1999, it was much easier for illegal immigrants to get Texas driver's licenses. Jose and Eva each got one not long after arriving.

Eva became pregnant in 1994, and one day while working, she began to bleed. Her daughter, Jessica, was born prematurely.

Two months after her birth, Jessica had a severe brain hemorrhage. The doctors at Ben Taub strongly advised taking the baby off life support. But the Guzmans found one doctor, a Mexican, who advised them to keep fighting for the girl. They did.

Jessica spent eight months in the hospital. The treatment cost nearly $1 million. Because Jessica is a U.S. citizen, Medicaid paid the entire bill.

To this day, Jessica gets daily therapy at home and special therapy at school, all funded by taxpayers. She cannot talk or walk, and cannot see far. But her parents clearly adore her. Her pictures are everywhere in the house. During dinner, when she screams and waves one of her arms, Jose or Eva will jump up to soothe her.

The couple eventually saved up for a deposit on a car. Then they bought their house. They went to two different banks that turned them down but found a third bank that accepted Eva's fake Social Security number for the loan.
During the credit check, it found that Eva's fake Social Security number had been used to buy cars and boats. They weren't sure how that happened, but they suspected that a neighbor with the same name had stolen the number. (And no one arrested her???)
Veronica's house payment costs her $450 a month. She also pays $50 for car insurance, another $50 for the phone and about $100 for electricity. At her job, she makes less than $800 a month. The children, as U.S. citizens, qualify for food stamps, but the family no longer gets the welfare they received after Jorge's death.

"Sometimes it seems like I have to use magic to pay the bills," Veronica said one day as she waited in line at the MetroBank drive-through to deposit her weekly paycheck. The check was for $185. She got $40 cash back for miscellaneous expenses and deposited the rest to pay bills.

Eating out is not an option. The kids wear second-hand clothes. The house has no heater, and the window air-conditioning unit rarely is used.


Helpful programs
Veronica has planted her yard without spending a penny. The aloe came from a graft of a plant at her sister's house. The avocado, papaya, lemon and cherry saplings were germinated from the seeds of fruit the kids ate.

Israel stays home during the day, while his three older siblings attend classes at Sherman Elementary School. They are taught partly in Spanish, as are most of the school's students.

Sherman, at the corner of McKee and Lorraine on the near northside, was a traditionally Anglo school that made history at the beginning of the desegregation movement in the 1950s, when some black parents fought to have their kids sent there. Today it is essentially segregated again, though not by official policy. District records indicate the student body is 98 percent Hispanic.
Sixty percent of the kids at Sherman have a limited proficiency with the English language. Fully 98 percent are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-cost lunch.
Teachers and administrators have made valiant attempts to improve the school — Sherman has gone from a "Low Performing" to an "Acceptable" rating — but they admit there are challenges, beginning with the parents.

"When I arrived at Sherman (six years ago), there was a missing link," Principal Amelia Cardenas-Aguilar said. "The missing link was the parents."

Though the Houston Independent School District does not ask about immigration status, Cardenas-Aguilar says her conversations with parents lead her to conclude the majority are in the country illegally.

"Talking to them, you can tell that some have just crossed the river," she said. This creates unique problems, since undocumented parents are naturally disenfranchised and reluctant to participate in their children's education.

"They are afraid of the unknown," she said.

So Sherman has created nontraditional programs designed to make it easier for the new families to assimilate. It was one of the first HISD schools to go beyond the traditional nursing station by opening a full Harris County Hospital District clinic in the school.Students can get to school as early as 7:30 a.m. and stay for after-school programs — including tutoring — that run as late as 6 p.m. Convinced they must educate not only the kids but also their parents, Sherman offers English as a second language and computer classes for parents.

There is also a weekly program for parents called "Second Cup of Coffee." Conducted almost exclusively in Spanish, the program teaches parents how to help their kids excel. Outside speakers are brought in to help the parents adjust to America.

"They teach you how to be a better parent, how to get oriented to life here," explains Veronica, who sometimes attends the meetings. (Ok , but you aren't helping them by not making them learn English!)
A representative of MetroBank came to one of the Sherman parent meetings a couple of years ago to explain how illegal immigrants can open a bank account using a document issued by the Mexican government, known as the matricula consular. Veronica took careful notes and used the information to go out and open the family's first account.

Veronica appreciates all the school does. In a comparison she did one day of Chicago and Houston, schools came out as a real plus for Houston, along with the low cost of housing. But she still misses Chicago, where a person can get by without a car, and immigrants live in a clearly defined Hispanic area where they feel comfortable.

The school remains a key focus. With her new job, she has managed to get afternoons off for programs at the school, including a bilingual spelling bee in which Jorge participated this spring. The attention appears to be paying off. Both little Jorge, 8, and Enrique, 7, finished school last year on the honor roll.

Veronica, 10, is no longer on the honor roll, as she was in years past. But she was one of just a handful of kids in her fourth-grade class to pass the state TAKS exam, much to her mother's relief.

From early on, teachers reported that Veronica was smart but too shy. Her mother has worked on helping her express herself.


Long days
Jorge is somewhat more outgoing, but also more sensitive. He has been the most affected by his father's death, his mother says.

Of the three older children, Enrique is the most gregarious. While his siblings turn shy when a returning visitor is in the house, Enrique will walk up and extend his hand, asking: "Remember me?"

With Jorge gone, Veronica's days have become impossibly long. She enlisted her mother's help, but it still wasn't easy. She would get up at 7 a.m. and drive the kids to school for breakfast. Then she would take Israel back home and nap, if he would let her. After running errands or doing laundry and other chores, she would pick the kids up at school, take them home and get them dinner.

Her mother would then come over to watch the kids in the evening while Veronica worked her shift: 5 p.m.-midnight on weekdays, and usually until 3 a.m. on weekends.

The kitchen where she worked was always hot and steamy. Her job entailed a lot of heavy lifting for a mother of four. She carried buckets of oil, pots and pans and industrial-size grease screens.

Her hours forced her to miss important events, including the school's Mexican Independence Day recital in which Jorge sang last September.

"He wanted to cry when he heard I couldn't go," she said.

Last October, Veronica found a new job at a neighborhood burger stand. The pay wasn't any better, but it meant she could finally work days so she could be home to help the kids in the evenings.

She now spends her evenings playing word games with the kids. She helps them with their homework, and they help with hers. Veronica has enrolled in one of the parents' English courses at Sherman, and the kids, who are far more advanced in the language, have offered to help.

"They tell me: 'Mommy, we're going to put a check if you get it right, and an X if you get it wrong,' " she says.

The neighborhood has its problems. Prostitutes sometimes roam the streets, and johns drive by looking for a hookup, and they sometimes end up parking and doing their business right across from Veronica's house. She does what she can to prevent her kids from being exposed to the worst aspects of the neighborhood, but sometimes it is impossible.

One day, Veronica, not quite 10 at the time, looked out the window and asked: "Mommy, why is that car rocking?"

Veronica still doesn't feel comfortable trying to step out and improve the neighborhood — she wouldn't dream of calling the police except in an emergency — but she has worked doubly hard to improve her own home.

She spends much of her spare time working in the yard with the kids. One day, as the kids helped plant some seedlings Veronica had grown, she paused to look out at the vacant lot next door.

"Someday I'm going to buy that," she said, with the conviction of someone who had found her place. "I'm going to plant peach trees and watermelon."


Gaining legal status
Over the years, the Guzmans found that their inability to speak English hampered them more than the fact that they were illegal and had no documents. But after Jessica was born, they realized they could not risk being deported. Eva began to worry about travel, which meant she had to skip conferences in other parts of the state for parents of disabled children.

She thought: "What if they arrest me and take my girl away from me?" So she didn't go.

One day, while visiting Galveston, they saw men in uniforms, which made their pulses jump. Then they realized they were just workers at the ferry.

They had gone to an attorney who had done little for them, but as the fear increased they decided to see another attorney. This attorney advised them to present themselves to the government and ask to be deported. This meant they were allowed to go before an immigration judge, where they claimed that they needed to stay in the United States to take care of their American child.

The strategy worked. In 2003, the Guzmans became legal permanent residents. In 2009, they could qualify to become U.S. citizens. Eva is reluctant to take that step; Jose plans on doing it.

"I'll do it for me and my family," Jose said. "We will have more benefits and everything, and in my heart I'll still be a Mexican."edward.hegstrom@chron.com
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/side2/3504977.html

Great examples of world-class CON-ARTISTS!

You know gofer, I don't think I can even take reading this right now.

I'm just too mad tonight to hear another insane story. But Moosetracks, thank you for posting it. I'll come back later and read it. I think I already know what it says though. I think I've heard it a few times before.

Hey America !! What about the legal U.S. citizens who are struggling ??

Don't they matter anymore ???

I hear ya, Legal. The first paragraph is a stone dead giveaway to the slant. With the housing shortage (if not, why the high real estate prices?) that we have, it makes me sick that people that have entered this country illegally have the ability to purchase a home or business. Or even start a business. If they were totally legit, they would have been, or should have been stopped along way back..and denied these things only citizens, assimilated citizens and other people who have elected to enter our country LEAGLLY are to be able to purchase.
Speaking of housing, housing starts are down. I don't think we're looking at a recession though. Just a slump perhaps.

I just lost my appitite

this pure BS, who helps me buy a house , NOBODY!!!!

This just makes blood shoot out of my eyes. First, this business of "anchor babies" has got to stop. Period. Children born to parents who are not citizens or legal residents should not be considered American citizens. That would stop a lot of this BS.

Second, just reading through this article it is apparent to me how much support these people get from a variety of sources--banks, social service agencies, advocates and activitists, schools, etc. The average working American has to struggle all on his own. Not only that, but when you do need a little help, you have to scrape and beg for it and even then you usually don't get it.

I know, I can't read those sob stories anymore.

And I'm sick of reporters only reporting on illegals who have a hard time, it's time they talk to some laid off Americans!

she will hook up with another guy...after all only 4 kids