Thread: Family chanced illegal crossing for opportunity

http://www.hpj.com/archives/2006/jul06/ ... rossin.CFM

Family chanced illegal crossing for opportunity

By Jennifer M. Latzke

Due to confusing immigration laws, a backlog of petitions, and an increasing number of foreign nationals who want to have the American dream, the legal immigration process can take years, even decades.

And, for some immigrants, that's time they can't afford to spend waiting in their home countries for legalities.

Sonia Martinez, Dodge City, Kan., is one immigrant whose family took the risk to come to the United States illegally in the early 1980s. Martinez and her family came from El Salvador to the U.S. via Mexico during a period of war in their native land.

Martinez and her family lived in the countryside. She told of walking to school in the morning as a girl, and seeing bodies left in ditches from the fighting the night before. Her parents decided to pack up their six children and move to San Salvador, the capital city, and try to leave the war and bloodshed behind. But, things grew worse and a year later it was decided that Martinez's mother would make the journey to California where jobs were easily found for immigrant women. A friend of the family who had immigrated earlier helped Martinez's mother find a job as a housekeeper/nanny for a couple in Los Angeles, who eventually helped her mother gain legal status in the U.S.

The legal steps to immigration

The path to legal immigration begins with obtaining a highly coveted immigration visa number. Once a foreign national has this immigration visa number he or she can then apply for Legal Permanent Resident status (LPR). This is commonly called a "green card." This status allows the LPR to own property, attend public schools and universities, join certain branches of the Armed Forces and apply for U.S. citizenship if and when they meet the eligibility requirements.

Of this three-step citizenship process, the first two parts are the most difficult and time-consuming.

In simplest terms, Congress sets a limit as to how many immigration visa numbers will be available to foreign nationals every year, and therefore the number of immigrants it will accept into the country legally. It divides these numbers into three main preferences: 1) family status; 2) employment preference; and 3) the immigrant's country of origin.


The surest and quickest way to get an immigration visa number is to be an immediate relative of a naturalized U.S. citizen or of an LPR. The DHS Office of Immigration Statistics estimates that immediate relatives of U.S. citizens typically account for 40 percent or more of the annual LPR flow.

The second LPR priority is given to workers and their spouses and children, and is called an employment preference. This was the category under which Sonia Martinez's mother applied. This category is limited to 140,000 preferences each year, plus any unused family preferences from the previous year.

In the case of Martinez's mother, her employer would have filed a labor certification request through the Department of Labor, stating that the family had advertised for the position and among all the applicants Martinez's mother was the most qualified to take the job. Once this request was filed, the State Department was required to give her an immigrant visa number even though she was already in the U.S.--illegally or not. At the same time, Martinez's mother started the application process for her husband and their six children to get their immigration visa numbers.

However, with more requests than visa numbers available for all of the categories, a waiting list has developed. It's this backlog that presents a bigger hurdle than any border wall to many immigrants.

"The person's place in line is the date the petition was filed," said Jim Austin, an immigration attorney from Kansas City, Mo. "They have to wait until an immigrant visa becomes available based on their place in line." In some preference categories, the backlog for petitions stretches from five to seven years or even longer.

In one preference category, Austin said, the backlog for petitions is now five years, and in that time the government has only worked through four months of petitions on the list. It is conceivable, according to Austin, that a petition for immigration filed today would have a waiting period of 49 years.

A nighttime crossing

For Sonia Martinez's family, a year passed and the official paperwork for her family was still on the waiting list to be processed. Meanwhile, the situation in El Salvador was becoming more and more bleak, and the family was losing hope of being reunited.

Martinez's oldest brother chose to join their mother illegally in the U.S., got his immigrant visa number through an employer, and began working toward legality. Then, a few months later, Martinez's father joined his wife and son in the U.S. He left a teenage Martinez and her four other siblings alone in El Salvador until they could join them in the U.S.--illegally or legally.

"One day, my mother called us in El Salvador and told us to sell everything and be ready for her to come get us on a certain date," Martinez said. Her mother traveled from the U.S. to El Salvador legally, using her immigration visa number, and got El Salvadorian passports for her and her children. From there they flew to Tijuana, Mexico. In order to enter Mexico they needed tourist visas from El Salvador, but they had none. At the airport customs office, the border guard asked to see the family's documentation to allow them into Mexico. It was the crucial point in their travels to the U.S.

"I'll never forget this man," Martinez said. "He was in his late 50s, and he asks to see our passports. My mother tells him we're Mexican, because we were supposed to have a tourist visa to get into Mexico but we didn't. He looked at our passports, which clearly said we were from El Salvador. The man reads the passports, looks at us five children, pats my little brother's head and says, 'You're Mexican, eh?' He paused for a second, and then said, 'Alright, you can go ahead, Mexicans.' And, he let us through." If that agent hadn't turned a blind eye to the family's predicament, the family would have been turned away at the Mexican border and Martinez's mother may not have been able to return to her employer in the U.S., thus halting their immigration journey.

Once the family was in Tijuana, they stayed for several weeks with a family they knew through their church in El Salvador. Then, one night, Martinez's mother told them it was time and they crossed the border into the U.S.

"They had things set up so we could come through at night," she said. "The only thing I remember is walking through hills in the dark. Then, about 4 a.m., or so we made it to San Diego. From there, we flew on a little plane to L.A., and to my father and brother." They had only the clothes on their back, and what little belongings they could carry. Everything else had been sold or left behind in El Salvador.

Martinez said that her family's crossing was easier than a lot of immigrants' tales. She and her family had enough resources to buy plane fares, while others simply hike or drive the long and treacherous path. Central American immigrants have a particularly dangerous time getting to the U.S. via Mexico today because of the rampant corruption among Mexican officials and criminals waiting to prey upon them. Many other immigrants not only have a tough time crossing the border into the U.S., but then find the citizenship process to be long and confusing once they get here.

Illegal route only choice for some

Austin, of Austin and Ferguson, LLC, is the person many immigrants in southwest Kansas turn to for help in citizenship. He and his legal partner, Angela Ferguson, are immigration attorneys with offices in both Kansas City and Garden City. Austin said the biggest problem with immigration law as it now stands is that it's a question of the "status" of that person at any point in time.

"Congress devised dozens of ways for someone who is out of status to be in status, and they can go from being in status to back out, and then somehow become a resident," he said. He likens it to curfew violations, where someone can be in the wrong place and in the wrong status at any moment. Trying to criminalize these status violations is impossible, he said.

"There are many violent crimes a person can commit and there are still some ways that he or she can retain legal status." For example an illegal immigrant who violated a U.S. weapons law may still have some recourse available to attain legal permanent resident status, he said. However, an immigrant who blatently walks through a border checkpoint by claiming to have U.S. citizenship and is found to not have citizenship, they can be barred from entering the U.S. for life.

"It doesn't matter how long you work here, or what you do," Austin said. "You could have a U.S. citizen spouse and children. You could be a pastor, and if you're 'found out' you are barred for life from becoming a legal resident."

Austin and his staff can see up to 26 people in a single day with immigration questions, and of those Austin may be able to only take two or three cases because of their past history.

"Of the people out of status in the U.S., about 55 percent snuck across the border," he said. "The other 45 percent had legal entries and either overstayed their permission to be here, or have done something that violated their visa status." Others depend on family members to help them migrate.

Chain migration, such as in the case of Sonia Martinez's family, is when immediate family members who are naturalized U.S. citizens or LPRs apply for immigration visas on behalf of their children or siblings. The Federation for American Immigration Reform says chain migration doesn't benefit the U.S. because it's based on nepotism, rather than who has talents and abilities that can truly benefit the U.S.

"We believe family migration ought to be limited to the immediate nuclear family," said Ira Mehlman, communications director. "If you make the decision to leave your extended family behind you shouldn't have the expectation that the U.S. will have a policy to bring everyone else along and move here with you."

Due to the backlog of applications, though, a minor immigrant child can often "age out" of the system, or turn 21 before their application is processed. This means they would essentially have to start the process all over under a new preference. It's this "aging out" that causes many families like Martinez's to take the chance and bring their minor children across the border illegally.

A new American family

The American dream came true for Martinez's family, even though it began on the wrong side of the law. Once she and her siblings joined her parents in L.A., they began the long path to legal status and eventually citizenship and naturalization.

Martinez and her family became naturalized citizens, and are all proud of the country they now call their own. Surprisingly, even though Martinez and her family came here illegally, she says she doesn't support giving a blanket amnesty to every illegal alien who asks for it.

"There are a lot of people who have come here, honest people, who just want to work. There are a lot of people who deserve amnesty or asylum," she said. "There are also a lot of lazy people who live off your taxes and mine. It isn't for everyone."

Martinez has never gone back to El Salvador, even though as a citizen she can do so freely now. In her mind, El Salvador will always be a country of violence and horrors.

America is her home now.

But, things grew worse and a year later it was decided that Martinez's mother would make the journey to California where jobs were easily found for immigrant women. A friend of the family who had immigrated earlier helped Martinez's mother find a job as a housekeeper/nanny for a couple in Los Angeles, who eventually helped her mother gain legal status in the U.S.

Why am I not surprised that California elitist have something to do with laying the foundation for the problem we're currently having?