Thread: Legalize Me (Another Sob Story from an Illegal Alien)

http://www.longmontfyi.com/Local-Story.asp?ID=6507
Publish Date: 3/5/2006

Legalize me
If they’ve entered undocumented since 2001, legalization is nearly impossible for immigrants

By Ben Ready
The Daily Times-Call

LONGMONT — He’s worked in the United States since 1973: for 16 years under the table, 14 years on the books and again illegally for the past three.

After Hidalgo del Parral, Mexico, where his wife and kids have always lived, Longmont is where 56-year-old Rafael Corral has called home for the past seven years.

He came here after slipping undetected across the border as a young man of 24, promised by a cousin that Longmont had good jobs that paid well.

When asked what he’s given America in 33 years and what he’s taken, Corral’s answer is the same: “My work.”

In slaughterhouses, construction sites, lawns and gardens, corporate bathrooms and fields of harvest in seven other states and dozens of Colorado cities, he’s worked without guilt, but often with the anxiety of being found and deported.

“I came to work, to look for a ‘peso’ better than in Mexico,” Corral said in Spanish from his rented room in Longmont. “But I can’t be at ease without papers. Never. Sure, they give me work, but I can’t live free and open.”

An estimated 11 million to 20 million illegal immigrants live in the United States, and Corral, like many, simply wants to stop living on the fringes of society and to have his 33-year presence in the country recognized by the law.

“I just want my papers again,” he said.

Through an amnesty program in the 1980s, Corral won a work visa requiring yearly renewal, but three years ago — because of his own forgetfulness, he admits — he let it expire.

Now Corral, who dropped out of school after the sixth grade and speaks and reads only rudimentary English, wants his work permit back. But on Jan. 10, the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services returned his application as “unacceptable.”

Even if he could understand the legalese, said Laurel Herndon, director of the Immigrant Legal Center of Boulder County, his chances of winning lawful recognition are slim.

“People who have had to renew something every year and haven’t done so have taken themselves out of the race,” said Herndon, who is not familiar with Corral’s case.

In fact, illegal immigrants living in the United States today have virtually no chance of “legalizing” unless they had a family member who also is a U.S. citizen file a petition for them before April 2001.

“Even then, there is a long waiting line, and family members are supposed to wait out of the country until they get to the front of the line,” Herndon said, adding that Mexican adults petitioned by a family member wait an average of 14 years to come to here legally.

“We welcome their arms to do our work, but we don’t acknowledge their humanity and their need to be treated as human beings,” Herndon said.


Outlaws or pawns?

According to some immigration-reform proponents, the faster that undocumented residents like Corral are deported, the faster American wages and standards of living will rise.

Anyone who comes to this country illegally, they say, undermines the nation’s authority to decide for itself what it “needs.”

“We Americans are so good and so nice, but we’re really getting taken advantage of,” immigration-reform activist Frosty Wooldridge said Monday night during a rally in Longmont. “If Mexicans are allowed to continue their lawless population of our state, you will see dire consequences in every quarter of Colorado.”

But immigrant advocates argue that illegal immigrants are the ones getting taken advantage of. They say America’s economy has long needed the cheap underground labor provided by undocumented workers, but the U.S. immigration system exploits them and denies them the dignity of lawful recognition.

“If they get work, it’s because the work is necessary. If the country didn’t need them, they’d never find work,” Longmont resident Graciela Bartlett said.

Bartlett, born in Mexico, waited 13 years to come to the United States after her mother-in-law supported her residency application. Six years later, she became a U.S. citizen.

Though she immigrated legally, Bartlett doesn’t fault people like the poor farmers with whom she grew up for risking it all for a better life.

“We know how they lived,” Bartlett said. “It’s not that you don’t want to work (in Mexico). There isn’t work. For campesinos, it rains or it doesn’t rain.”

Herndon believes American policymakers and business leaders are clearly exploiting undocumented workers.

“It’s a little frightening to see what this country did to the Chinese in the late 1800s and what it’s doing to Mexican people today,” she said.

The Chinese Exclusion Laws from 1882 to 1943 severely limited immigration from China after Chinese workers helped build the Transcontinental Railroad. Born of competition with American workers and widespread nativism, the laws also limited the rights of Chinese workers.

“Immigration laws today are causing millions of Mexican workers in the U.S., who are doing vital work, to take on the risks, all the exploitation, that should not exist in a democratic society,” Herndon said.


Enforcing the law?

Technically, Corral should not be working in the United States.

But he has a valid Colorado driver’s license and a valid U.S. Social Security card, so he has little trouble filling out I-9 work forms and finding jobs.

The Social Security Administration didn’t start issuing separate cards labeled “Not valid for employment purposes” until 1982; Corral’s older card has allowed him to land plenty of jobs.

In fact, the federal government knows he’s here and has tracked his earnings.

His rejected work permit application documents his earnings from 1974 to 2003 and lists tax contributions during that time — he has made as much as $14,100, in 2003. The document also shows six years with no income, years he said he was paid cash under the table.

Still, said Doug Smith, spokesman for the Denver regional office of the Social Security Administration, “the zero earnings don’t cause a red flag.”

“We’d think perhaps it’s a woman raising kids or federal worker paying into the civil service system,” he said.

That leaves the burden for determining the legitimacy of Corral’s Social Security card on employers. But even companies that try to adhere to immigration law find themselves fighting a contradictory bureaucracy.

“An employer can be charged with discrimination if they investigate documents further for some employees and not others,” Herndon said. “An employer who verifies (work authorization) numbers with Latinos but not with non-Latinos is likely violating the law.”

Smith said employers may use the Social Security Administration Web site to verify a worker’s Social Security number and eligibility, but only after they’ve hired someone. But if the numbers don’t check out, employers would be breaking the law if they fired that person immediately.

The reason, Smith said, is to protect workers from what “may be a clerical error.”

Essentially, Herndon said, the system is set up so employers willing to hire illegal workers to save money not only have a competitive advantage, but they also face few repercussions.

“An employer who wants to follow the rules is at a distinct disadvantage with competitors,” she said. “That employer who wants to do the right thing should be rewarded, not punished, and that’s what’s happening now.”


One lonely worker

Though he’s gone nearly a month without a drink, Corral admits he’s no saint and no stranger to the bottle.

Living alone so many years, he said, has often led him to take comfort in alcohol. And worse, Corral has racked up three DUIs in the United States.

Should he be denied legal status for that reason alone? “I don’t know,” he said.

He doesn’t think about systems or the latest decisions made by legislators in Denver or Washington, D.C. He makes about $2,000 a month in cash, gardening and mending fences and equipment on a small farm in Boulder County.

Corral admits he’s tired and getting more homesick by the year. He plans to work another five or so years in the United States then return home. And considering he’d make about $160 a month in Mexico, he said he can’t complain.

He pays $400 a month in rent and wires about $600 a month home to his sick older sister, his wife and his three children. He bought a $2,000 car last year, which he fixed up and points to proudly if you ask him about it.

Below the bare walls of his modest room sit a single bed and four plywood tables crowded with his possessions: bags of chips, eggs, canned food, a hotplate, a mini-refrigerator, a microwave and a small black-and-white television.

“I’m a poor man in this country, but I hope to live well in Mexico soon,” said Corral, who recently bought a plot of land in Parral for $5,000 and wants to build a barn and put some pigs and chickens in it.

“Papers would be nice,” he said, “but soon I’ll be back there, maybe for good. Here they say it isn’t my country, so ... I’m just here to work.”

Ben Ready can be reached at 303-684-5326, or by e-

Through an amnesty program in the 1980s, Corral won a work visa requiring yearly renewal, but three years ago — because of his own forgetfulness, he admits — he let it expire.

Okay, so let me get this straight: this guy was handed the keys to the kingdom by Ronald Reagan in the 80's; amnesty citizenship.

He let it go because he forgot? If it was me and I was rewarded like that for breaking the law I would have marked it on about ten calendars and put it on the fridge about 5 years before I had to do it!

I feel like an idiot if I forget to take my lunch with me in the morning. This guy is a class A tard. I can't feel sorry for him with a ridiculous story like that.

How many bastard "citizens" did he make while he was here?

The discretionary income earned by the average illegal alien is enough to re-establish themselves comfortably at home if they use it and plan right. Unfortunately most of them do not. A policy of increasing restrictions is going to force them to focus on doing the right thing.

The discretionary income earned by the average illegal alien is enough to re-establish themselves comfortably at home if they use it and plan right. Unfortunately most of them do not.

And that is not to mention the amount of shoplifting they do to supplement their income!

I don't feel sorry for some idiot who "let it expire" because he "forgot." Get real!

You CAN be legal just go back to Mexico, you'll be legal there

You CAN be legal just go back to Mexico, you'll be legal there

Now there is the best idea I've heard in weeks!

3 DUI's

How come he is not in prison?

Most states have a 3 srtikes and go to prison for DUI violations.

How does he have a drivers license after 3 DUI's.

Originally Posted by ScottyDog

3 DUI's

How come he is not in prison?

Most states have a 3 srtikes and go to prison for DUI violations.

How does he have a drivers license after 3 DUI's.

He has 3 kids and a wife too that I doubt he is supporting on his own.

Ahhh....so sad. I feel so sorry for him. NOT!!!
What I fail to understand is leaving behind your family. It is an uacceptable practise to me, and it really makes no sense whatsoever. When you are a family, you stick together, no questions. If you live in a bad place together, then you stick together there instead of the "man" (and I question that as what real man leaves behind his wife and children for another country, just for a job?) leaving his family, as though money can make up for the lack of him in his children's lives? What kind of nonsense is that?

Just goes to show you why Mexico is the backwards country it is, and why they are always dealing with corruption, this kind of thinking!!!

As soon as the people of Mexico start thinking more about what is right and less about money only, they would become a more successful nation.
They think literally only about themselves, not wondering how their actions will impact their families and neighbors future, only about the here and now of daily money making and spending.

We are all concerned with our families needs, and how to earn the best we can for those needs, but to give up your family totally, only so you can send them money so they can have more stuff, afford more luxuries than if you were there, is just ridiculous.

Now if they were actually starving, there was a huge drought in Mexico and nothing would grow, water had all dried up, then well, I suppose there was good reason.

What did our grandparents do during the depression? They usually all started gardens if they did not have one. They grew food, they raised some type of animals to use for food (or eggs), they might have fished, but the fact is that they did something proactive (to use a new phrase for their actions) where they were already to make sure they had what they needed, not leave their families for another country.

Just goes to show you why Mexico is the backwards country it is, and why they are always dealing with corruption, this kind of thinking!!!

As soon as the people of Mexico start thinking more about what is right and less about money only, they would become a more successful nation.

Before Americans start disparaging other countries, Americans should know that there are many things about the US that Americans are not proud of.

Here I would just tell a story. There are scores of Filipino women working as domestic helpers in Hong Kong right now. What many Hong Kong people don't know, or don't want to know, is that not so long ago when Hong Kong was still a poor developing economy, Hong Kong Chinese women had to go to the Philippines to work as domestic helpers.

What if American Elizabeth is not born in the US and born in Mexico? Would Elizabeth not want to have a better life and more opportunities? And if everyone should stay in their own country no matter how bad life is, then how do Americans justify their existence in the US? Aren't most of them immigrants from Europe and all over the world fleeing hardship - from famines to political persecutions?

It's sad to see Americans go backwards from enlightenment to the dark ages.