Geography of the Heart

The Geography of the Heart
How US immigration law divides families
By Stephan Clark

One Sunday almost four years ago, Thomas Carson, a 50-year old electrical engineer with corporate commendations from Nabisco and General Electric, parked his KIA Sportsman near the US-Mexico border and waited.

It was after dark in Las Milpas, once the largest colonia – or border settlement – in South Texas. Since being absorbed by the City of Pharr to the north in the late-eighties, this community of low- and very low-income Hispanics had almost doubled in size, reaching a population of 17,000. It had also received the type of things most Americans believe lacking in only the third world: running water and electricity, sewer service and paved roads. With such improvements, the community no longer laid claim to the state’s highest incidence of tuberculosis, Hepatitis A and leprosy, and it had even attracted the development of a Jack in the Box.

But one thing about Las Milpas remained unchanged in July 2003: its close proximity to the border. It was that which brought people like Carson here, just as the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) had brought business to the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge, then not quite ten years old.

Carson parked near the intersection of Highway 281 and East Dicker Road. Beside him in his SUV was his son, 11-month-old Thomas Alexander, secure in his baby-seat. Further south was the boy’s mother, Carson’s girlfriend of five years, one Lucia Ramirez Hernandez. This night, she wouldn’t be traveling over Pharr’s celebrated bridge.

Hernandez had attempted that crossing in Jan. 1999, just a few months before a fire at a maquiladora in Reynosa would send Carson south of the border on work. Her crime that day was simple: after being stopped in a car with Texas plates, she made a false claim of U.S. citizenship.

Since 1996, when Congress last overhauled immigration law, this act has drawn a punishment as severe – a lifetime ban on entering the United States – as it is permanent. Hernandez cannot appeal or seek a waiver. She is no different than the terrorists, communists and practicing polygamists also singled out by law. She has no means of appeal.

“It wouldn’t matter if someone had a pistol to your side and you drove up to the border crossing and said, ‘I’m a US citizen,’” said Carson. “That’s it. You’re inadmissible. You don’t have a case.”

And so that night four years ago, while Carson and Thomas Alexander waited in the dark, Hernandez stepped into the river that runs along the Texas border between the Gulf of Mexico and El Paso. It is a tributary President Bush knows well. Going back to his days as Governor of Texas, he has frequently said family values do not end at the Rio Grande.

After emerging on the other side, Hernandez got into a car and continued toward her family. Carson spotted her passing the little strip plaza where they’d agreed to meet. He followed her to an area home, where Hernandez changed clothes and got into Carson’s SUV. The three then drove north – father, son and mother – toward the secondary inspection point at Falfurrias.

Eight months previous, Carson, a US Navy veteran, had imagined a reunion of another sort, petitioning for an immigrant’s visa on behalf of Hernandez and her two children from a previous relationship. But the false claim of U.S. citizenship derailed that effort, and so the descendant of five American veterans of five different foreign wars had been left with only what he’d been taught in the military: if you are captured, you must try to escape.

“We were desperate,” he said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.“

Parts 2-8 of this story can be purchased at Amazon.

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Under the new rules, I'd still be walking around like a single man

Got an email from Red October (pictured left with his wife), who readers of this blog may remember from this profile. His was the interview I conducted just hours before proposing to my wife, as it turns out, and perhaps the one that suggested the best possibility for happiness in the future -- he and his girlfriend seemed very close and intimate, in part because Red October spoke some Russian.

Turns out, their story won't be all happy, or at least not prompt. After returning to Kharkov with his daughter before the New Year, Red October set a wedding date with his girlfriend -- for tomorrow, in fact.

But today he got an email from the US Embassy in Kyiv saying their office, along withall other US Embassies, will no longer accept I-130 petitions from US Citizens -- the form that a US citizen must file in order for his foreign-national wife or relative to immigrate to the United States.

The email, included below, didn't say whether or not this includes petitions from US Citizens living permanently overseas, but if that's so, and this rule had gone into effect a year ago, I'd still be walking around like a single man, not just sputtering through a phone call with my mother-in-law, taking my "kto eto's?" and "Da-da-da's!" out of mothballs.

The alternative to what I did -- filing at the US Embassy in Moscow -- is what Red October now apparently faces: throwing his application into the mail and directing it toward a regional office -- for California, a suitably anonymous city named Laguna Niguel -- where it will join a tall and teetering pile of similar forms, and one man, as I imagine it, who has a rubber stamp, but walks around muttering all day, wondering where he left the ink.

I had a face in the window, a helpful hand showing me where to cross my t's and dot my i's. "Should we use her maiden name or new last name here?" Very nice. Red October, I fear, will get no such help, and so it seems he'll have to seek the assistance of an immigration attorney.

Which is the awful thing about this. Another set of forms a US Citizen can only fill out, properly at least, and if he wants a prompt and appropriate response, if he agrees to show someone the money.

Here's the email that was forwarded to me:

Per Department of State instructions, effective immediately, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine and U.S. embassies worldwide are no longer authorized to accept or adjudicate I-130 petitions. American Citizens must file petitions for their relatives with the appropriate United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) office in the U.S. Petitioners can check here to find the appropriate office. Please visit this site for more general information about filing the petition.

Petitions that have already been approved at U.S. Embassy Kyiv but have not yet undergone visa adjudication must be forwarded to the USCIS office in Moscow, Russia. Embassy staff will forward all of these in the coming week.

We will post more information on this matter as soon as it becomes available to us.

As will I.

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The Cost of Marriage (or, The Foreigner Tax)

Most young couples need every dollar they can scrape together. Car, home, new furnishings, maybe air fare to see the folks -- it all adds up. But for an American citizen marrying a non-American citizen, it all adds up a lot more quickly. Call it the Foreigner Tax.

Consider the costs of marrying in Russia and then filing all the necessary paper-work with the US and Russian governments. For us, that meant travelling twice between Belgorod and Moscow, in a four person-sleeper compartment. Cost: Approximately $280.

Once in Moscow, we had to get a marriage letter notarized by the US Embassy stating that I was unencumbered and free to marry. After paying my $30 at the cashier's window, I raised my right hand before a Foreign Service Officer, swore and affirmed that the information in the marriage letter was truthful and accurate -- at least according to the best available intelligence at the time -- and then received a raised stamp on the bottom of the page.

The next step was to get this sucker translated, along with my passport. That took another $40.

Finally we had to take the document to the Russian Federation's Department of Legalization, where it costs $30 to have the piece of paper embellished with a messy signature and a shiny sticker like those you see on a credit card. Our fee was bumped up to $130 -- call it a $100 bribe to receive same-day service -- and then we were out the door, done for the day.

When we came back, after our marriage in Belgorod, we had to feed another bureaucracy, not Russia's this time but America's. That meant a handful of documents, but primarily the I-130, a petition for Alien Relative, or -- the way you can bring your wife to America and get her a Green Card before coming. Cost of filing this document: $190. Do I swear and affirm? You bet your ass.

Add in $10 to get around on the Metro both days, $150 for miscellaneous taxi fees and a single round-trip train ticket back and forth between Kiev and Belgorod (so my wife could see me off, when ideally we both would have been leaving together) and the grand total so far is roughly $820, not including time lost on the job (wasn't I writing a novel?) so you can figure out all the forms you need and just how in the hell you fill them out. (For this, many people pay thousands of dollars to an immigration lawyer.)

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The Passport Anniversary

If one year is the paper anniversary, one month, at least for me, is the passport anniversary. How did I spend the day? Looking for apartments and telling landlords I'd like a six-month lease, because until the Department of Homeland Security clears my wife for entry, she'll remain out of the country, a suspected terrorist or welfare charge, a beautiful, lovely woman some seven thousand miles away from me. "She really should be involved in the decision," I say, to another person who agrees this is so, before telling me they really can't clean an apartment and paint the walls every six months. "We really can't do anything less than a year," they say, and so I look again.

It's strange: you get married, go on a honeymoon, and then say goodbye to the person you love, the woman you've chosen to join your life to. Married people don't usually do this, leave and not know when they'll next see each other. They can always say, "See you in two weeks," "See you in August," or "I'll be counting the days till Thanksgiving." But for us, who knows? After submitting our paperwork in Moscow, to a woman whose name I didn't get -- stupid stupid stupid -- we were essentially told, "Don't call us, we'll call you." So after almost four weeks, did they lose our paperwork? Did they find an error and place it at the bottom of the pile? Or did the man processing our case get transferred to Turkmenistan? Maybe they'll call or email next week, or in two months. Who can say?

Until then, I have to put my life on hold in a manner that's just very strange. I live the life of a bachelor, eating and rising when I like, but I wear a wedding band on my left hand and have pictures of a beautiful bride on my computer. It's almost like I've dreamt up a really good fiction, one so real I can see it and hear it and believe it -- but one that is all too elusive, there and then gone, disappearing around the corner right when I think I've caught up to it.

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