Oh yes!!!!! News story DOES contain the required buzz words!!!!
"Since he’s been here, he said, “I respect all the laws they have.”
“I think what they’re saying is that we are nation of immigrants,”
“it’s an extreme hardship on the family,”
"just another sign the immigration system is broken."
Okay, everybody, get ready to weep. Of course, just repest the same or similar story millions of times and really weep!!!!
http://www.journalstar.com/articles/200 ... 203600.txt
Lincoln couple awaits consulate appointment
BY ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star
As the U.S. Senate tries to move toward meaningful immigration reform this week, Jacqueline Cerda and her husband, Jesus Meza, anxiously await the arrival of a long envelope from another branch of government.
News of an appointment date at the American Consulate in Juarez, Mexico, could result in permanent residency for the Lincoln man who slipped across the border illegally in the Tijuana darkness 11 years ago at age 22.
Or a brief interview that must be conducted on Mexican soil, an estimated six to nine months after his return to the country, could take a grimmer turn. It could prevent him from legally recrossing the border for 10 years or more — even though he’s now married to a U.S. citizen.
Either way, Jacqueline Cerda, 38, is ready to take the risk.
“I have a dream for my two sons to become something,” she said in an interview in the couple’s apartment. “Go to school and to college and everything, to do what they love to do. Life is for that.”
But in order for that dream to come true, husband and wife need the stability that comes with him holding a Nebraska driver’s license, a valid Social Security number, and in being able to assure bank lenders he’ll be around to help pay back a home mortgage.
“If he doesn’t come back and we have to go to Mexico, we will go to Mexico,” said Cerda, who was born in California. “Because what else can I do?”
No matter the vantage point, waiting and wondering seem to be the answers to just about every immigration-related question.
Cerda filed a petition in 2001 as a first step toward resolving her husband’s residency, only to see it swallowed up in the border chaos that followed 9-11.
In 2004, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke hopefully of the first major changes to immigration laws in 18 years. Powell has since stepped down and talk of allowing undocumented workers to stay in the United States got lost in loud argument.
Yet another surge of energy from Congress went nowhere in April, when advocates of harsher and more lenient approaches turned their backs on compromise.
Powerfully built construction worker Meza, waits and wonders and says he wants to do what’s right. But he’s ready to argue with anybody who regards him as a security risk.
“They destroyed the Twin Towers. It wasn’t Hispanics,” he said in the English he learned over three years of classes at Southeast Community College. “When they blew up the Oklahoma bomb, it wasn’t illegal people. It was people living here.”
Since he’s been here, he said, “I respect all the laws they have.”
Cerda and Meza met in a Los Angeles bank in 1998, where she handled money transfers for a largely Latino clientele sending money back to Mexico.
Meza lost his job at a sewing factory after five years. She had a friend in Nebraska.
“So,” she said, “we just came with $600 and to live with her for a couple months.”
They arrived July 4, 1999, and lived in Crete, where she worked at the Farmland meatpacking plant south of town.
Meza made job connections in Lincoln. “He got two jobs here right away, in a restaurant and a hotel cleaning rooms.”
They moved to Lincoln in September and got married in 2001.
Three years later, Cerda got a letter from federal immigration officials asking her to come to Omaha. There, she was told, “We cannot fix him here. He would have to go to the border.”
Since then, she has checked the mailbox every day for another letter about a consulate appointment.
As they wait, a U.S. citizen and her undocumented husband try to assemble enough documents to make a case for permanent residency and a green card.
It weighs in their favor if they can present convincing evidence he crossed the border illegally only once and the loss of his financial contribution to the household would create a severe hardship.
“If something is wrong,” Meza said, “I will have to stay down there for 10 years.”
Jerry Heinauer, district director for Citizenship and Immigration Services in Omaha, acknowledged the 10-year ban as one of several possible outcomes. Heinauer is also aware of instances in which applicants never returned to the United States after consulate appointments.
“It happens at times,” he said.
Why does the person seeking permanent status have to leave the United States?
“I think what they’re saying is that we are nation of immigrants,” Heinauer said, “but we are also a nation of laws. And we’re just not going to allow people to come in illegally, without inspection, to stay here.”
As recently as April 2001, a residency candidate fitting Meza’s profile could have paid a $1,000 fine and gotten a green card, Heinauer said. But Meza and Cerda were married just weeks after the immigration bar was raised.
Max Graves, Lincoln-based director of United Methodist Ministries’ Equity in Nebraska program, said he’s personally helped 1,200 to 1,500 people in residency cases over the program’s five-year life.
Under the most recent restrictions, “it’s an extreme hardship on the family,” Graves said. “Can you imagine being gone six (to) nine months? And that’s if everything is fine. If he has a problem with a waiver, he could be down there 10 years.”
“You feel so much out of control when you get to the consulate, because there’s no appeal process. Whoever is in charge of the interview has total control over the person’s life.”
Just to get to the interview stage, families must wait out a cycle that moves paperwork from a Nebraska service center to California, then to New Hampshire, and finally to Juarez.
“I have not dealt with anybody that did not come back,” Graves said. “We look very closely at the case. And if we felt like it would be denied, they just don’t go to the interview.”
Still, things happen. That includes a situation in Honduras in which an applicant had to wait an extra month because a consulate official claimed there was no birth certificate in the packet of paperwork.
Graves knows it was there because he saw it there.
“It can be something as simple as that.”
Milo Mumgaard of Lincoln’s Appleseed Center, a nonprofit advocate for immigrant rights, said the long wait for Cerda and Meza is just another sign the immigration system is broken.
“Most Nebraskans would assume that, if a citizen has a spouse, they should be sort of automatically able to get it done,” he said. “And the answer to that is, ‘not at all.’”
Cerda has felt the strain of the uncertainty. A detailed medical examination that followed chest pains last year left her thousands of dollars in debt. She said she’s paying it back at the rate of $200 a month.
She’s also getting mental health attention.
“I feel better because I go every month to talk to a counselor. I feel a little bit more relief.”
Meza listens quietly as he’s asked what should be done with a situation in which thousands more people cross the Mexican border every month. Must it stop at some point?
He breaks a brief silence, but not with a yes or no.
“That’s kind of hard question. It is a hard question for me.”
Reach Art Hovey at (402) 523-4949 or ahovey@alltel.net.
