NY Times - Julia Preston
April 11, 2008, 5:32 pm
Readers Share Immigration Stories
By Julia Preston
During two years as the national immigration correspondent for The New York Times, I have received many e-mail messages from readers recounting their struggles with the United States immigration system. These readers were often American citizens and legal immigrants who said they were determined to follow the law. Yet they described heavy burdens the federal bureaucracy imposed on them as they tried to play by the rules.
They wrote of being separated from loved ones because of unpredictable backlogs and delays, or immigration officers’ hasty decisions, or inadvertent missteps by family members in the labyrinth of federal paperwork. In some cases, immigrants who spent years completing advanced studies here and had job offers lined up instead left the country because of quotas on employment visas.
The readers described shuttling between United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and the State Department, two agencies that divide immigration tasks in confusing and sometimes conflicting ways. Both bureaucracies, they said, seemed overwhelmed, hobbled by inadequate resources and by a limited supply of legal visas compared to the numbers of immigrants seeking them.
“I think more Americans need to understand how the current system is making things difficult for people who are trying to do things the legal way,” wrote Kelly Phillips, a Coast Guard seaman from California whose husband is Mexican. “I feel that more individuals would do things legally if the manner for doing so was more reasonable.”
Below are stories I compiled from e-mail and interviews of six people, including Ms. Phillips, who are representative of many more Times readers. If you have a similar story to share about difficulties you have experienced trying to do the right thing in the legal immigration system, please do so by submitting a comment below (briefly – a paragraph or two, please).
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KEITH HARRIS, United States citizen, North Carolina
In early March Mr. Harris’s wife, Claudia Solano-Lopez, and their three small children left their home in Raleigh, N.C., to move to Mexico City. To comply with immigration law, the family now must live apart for two years.
Mr. Harris, who is 37 and a veteran of the first Persian Gulf war, met his future wife in 1997 when they both were studying for doctoral degrees in food science at Ohio State University. They married in 2001. They completed their Ph.D.s, and last year Mr. Harris became an assistant professor at North Carolina State University.
Ms. Solano-Lopez, 45, had come from Mexico on a visa for advanced studies (its official name is J-1) that requires immigrants to return to their home countries for at least two years after completing their academic work. Distressed by the prospect of separation and its impact on their children (3-year-old twins and a toddler), Mr. Harris and his wife consulted several lawyers. On their advice, they applied for a hardship waiver from the two-year foreign residency rule, as it is known.
“We understood that we were doing the correct thing, and this waiver was the way we would keep our family together,” Mr. Harris said. But the letter they received from Citizenship and Immigration Services denying the waiver said the family’s separation would not be “exceptional hardship.”
“If they think this is minor emotional anguish, they don’t know what they are talking about,” Mr. Harris said.
With his first-year professor’s schedule and salary, he felt he could not care for their three children alone in Raleigh. The couple did not appeal the waiver denial, because their lawyers said their chances of success were small.
Noting that many Mexicans live illegally in North Carolina, Mr. Harris said, “I feel this is almost a punishment for following the rules.”
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RONALD PERKINS, United States citizen, Illinois
After his first wife died five years ago, Mr. Perkins, a 63-year-old postal worker in Champaign, Ill., met a woman from the Dominican Republic and married her there in June 2005. He is still waiting for his new wife, Ana Perkins, to be allowed to come to the United States.
In general, residence visas should be easier to obtain for spouses of American citizens than for other immigrants because there are no annual limits on spouse visas. In November 2005, Mr. Perkins applied for a conditional visa for his wife that would make it relatively easy for her to get a permanent resident visa, known as a green card, after she entered the United States. By July 2006, visa authorities confirmed that Mr. and Mrs. Perkins had submitted all the required documents and their file was complete.
They were placed in line to wait for a required consular interview at the United States Embassy in Santo Domingo — behind more than 26,000 other people. By October 2007 they had inched forward, but more than 7,000 people were still ahead of them.
“Then,” Mr. Perkins wrote in an e-mail message, “they changed the rules.”
The embassy announced it would no longer manage scheduling of its consular interviews. Instead, the scheduling would be handled at the National Visa Center, a State Department site in Portsmouth, N.H. Mr. Perkins was told that their file would be sent there but that it might no longer be complete. Since the file would now be examined by officers in New Hampshire and not Santo Domingo, Mrs. Perkins’s Dominican documents would require certified translations from Spanish to English.
That turned out to be a lesser problem. Recently, their file seems to have been lost in the system. The National Visa Center currently reports it has “no record” of their case.
“I am told to be patient,” Mr. Perkins wrote. He looks at the immigration agencies’ performance with the eye of a citizen who is also a federal employee.
“Someone has created a monster here,” he commented by telephone. “There are so many places that could be streamlined, I don’t even know where to start.”
He tries to keep his sense of humor. “If you only see your wife three times a year, you have three honeymoons,” Mr. Perkins said. “But that doesn’t make up for the time apart.”
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KELLY PHILLIPS, United States citizen, California
Ms. Phillips met her future husband, a lawyer and officer in the Mexican Navy, when his ship paid a California port visit in the summer of 2005. They married in Mexico in March 2006. They are currently going through the routine procedures to obtain his permanent resident visa. So far it has cost them about $2,800 in fees and travel expenses, and he may still be years away from receiving the green card.
At first Ms. Phillips, who is 29, and her husband, Juan José Castillo Zarate, 40, intended to live in Mexico. But her husband’s naval unit, based in Baja California, faced threats from drug traffickers, she said. A friend of Mr. Castillo, another Mexican naval officer, was abducted and beheaded by a drug gang, and his head was sent to his family, she said. Ms. Phillips and Mr. Castillo, fearing for the safety of their infant child and also struggling financially, decided to move to the United States. He resigned from the Mexican Navy, and she joined the United States Coast Guard.
In October 2006, they began the process of filing for a type of visa (known as a K-3) that would allow Mr. Castillo, as the husband of a citizen, to live and work in the United States while pursuing his green card. It was the beginning of a dizzying bureaucratic journey, with one form leading to another (I-130 to I-129F to G-325A to AR-11 to I-131 to I-864 to I-485, etc.), and many forms bringing their own filing fees. Since fee increases last year, the most important form, the green card application, now costs $1,010.
Last August, Mr. Castillo flew from Baja California to Ciudad Juárez ($380 round trip) for an interview at the only United States consulate in Mexico that processes K-3 visa applications. The appointment nearly failed because Mr. Castillo, following instructions on the forms, had filled them out by hand, but the consulate accepted only typewritten forms. After paying $50 to have the forms typed on the street and $50 for an extra night in a Ciudad Juárez hotel, in addition to $135 for a required medical exam, Mr. Castillo passed the interview.
Last fall he was admitted to the United States. From her Coast Guard salary, Ms. Phillips has been supporting the family and paying the immigration fees — just barely. In February, after more trips and fees, Mr. Castillo received his authorization to work.
“I did everything that was expected of me legally, and at times it was very hard and almost out of my reach financially,” Ms. Phillips said. “You get in line with everyone else, but you have no idea how long that line is and how many fees there are.
“It is worth it to do it the right way; it really is,” she said. “I just think more people would not resort to sneaking if it were easier and more affordable to do it the legal way.”
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NANCY KUZNETSOV, United States citizen, North Carolina
Nancy Kuznetsov, a car sales manager in Durham, N.C., must wait nearly nine years before her husband, Vitali Kuznetsov, can return to the United States. He was deported in January 2007.
Nancy and Vitali Kuznetsov.Mr. Kuznetsov, a 32-year-old citizen of Belarus, is a hockey player. He came to the United States legally in 1998 to try out for a team in West Virginia. Due to an injury, he failed to make that team, but was eventually offered a place on a team in North Carolina. Friends of that team filed papers to extend his visa.
Mrs. Kuznetsov said, in an interview, that she met her future husband through friends in October 2000. By then Mr. Kuznetsov, without seeking an experienced immigration lawyer, had filed additional documents trying to straighten out his status that only made his situation worse.
Drawn together, the couple married in April 2001. But lawyers told them that even though Mrs. Kuznetsov was an American citizen, her husband’s prior problems left him no way under immigration law to recover his legal status without leaving the country for 10 years.
Mrs. Kuznetsov, who is 47 and supporting a daughter still in high school, felt she could not leave. An Army veteran, she has another daughter and a son-in-law on active duty in the Air Force who rely on her for child care when both are deployed. She runs an on-line family clothing business in addition to her job in car sales. She and Mr. Kuznetsov decided to remain in the United States, hoping for a change in the law to help them.
Immigration agents arrested Mr. Kuznetsov at their home in December 2006. He is barred from coming back to this country for 10 years from the date of his deportation.
“What is painful is not having a way to fix things,” Mrs. Kuznetsov said. “Separating a married couple for 10 years seems so cruel and out of proportion to the violation.”
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POONAM SHARMA, 32, Legal immigrant from India, New York
Poonam Sharma came to the United States from India as a legal immigrant with her parents 17 years ago, when she was 15. At the current pace of the immigration system, she will be at least 42 before she receives a permanent resident’s visa.
Ms. Sharma said she had always been careful to maintain her legal status and pay her taxes. On student visas, she completed her education with a master’s degree in psychology from the City University of New York. (As an immigrant, she paid higher rates than in-state students.) Six years ago she obtained a temporary H-1B visa for highly educated immigrants.
She applies her psychology skills at a job with a nonprofit organization in New York assisting students with disabilities.
“I am teacher, counselor, friend to the students,” she said. Part of her work is to help disabled high school students prepare to find and hold jobs once they graduate. “I am an immigrant trying to ensure that American children are employable in the future,” Ms. Sharma said in an interview.
Certain that the United States has become her home, she applied last year for an employment-based green card. The waiting list is about 10 years’ long. While she waits, she cannot change employers or accept a promotion.
“It’s 10 years in limbo,” she said. “I can’t think of my life, of buying a house, of my growth at my company.”
She wrote in an e-mail message: “I went through hell to keep myself legal. But no one cares.”
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GLENYS OLD, United States citizen, West Virginia
Glenys Old came to live in the United States from her native Britain after an on-line romance with Curtis Old, an American who is a computer systems administrator living in Wardensville, W.Va. They married in 2002, and Mrs. Old and a daughter have become United States citizens. But her son, Michael Head, spent the last five years fighting the immigration system because of a bureaucratic glitch.
The Old family.After Glenys and Curtis were engaged, her daughter, a teenager, came with her to the United States on a temporary visa as the minor child of a fiancée. Her son, Mr. Head, came on the same visa in May 2003, and he immediately applied to adjust to a green card. Mr. Head turned 21 in July 2003, between the time when he presented his application and the August date he was given by Citizenship and Immigration Services for a required interview. To the family’s shock, the examiner who interviewed Mr. Head said that since he was no longer a minor, he had “aged out” and could not adjust to a green card.
Immigration officials insisted that Mr. Head’s eligibility was not pegged to the date when he filed his application, but to the agency’s processing, which is chronically backlogged and unpredictable. They said Mr. Head would have to leave the United States to start over applying for a different visa, one that had a waiting list at that point of at least five years. While Mrs. Old and her daughter received their green cards, Mr. Head received a deportation order.
Mrs. Old, who is 47, has been battling her son’s case ever since. He has a steady job as a truck driver and a steady girlfriend in the United States, and no immediate family in Britain.
“It just has put so much strain on our family; it’s just been hell,” Mrs. Old said. “Families really are being torn apart by such unfair treatment.”
While Mr. Head currently has no permanent visa to remain in the United States, he also cannot leave freely. The authorities declined to give him permission to travel this year with his family to Britain for his grandmother’s funeral. If he had left the United States, he would not have been able to return.
