I MARRIED AN ILLEGAL ALIEN!

From the 11/12/06 NYTimes: Immigration, a Love Story

I think this article from the NYTimes accurately describes the issues with marrying an illegal alien:

November 12, 2006
Immigration, a Love Story

By MIREYA NAVARRO
WHEN Kenneth Harrell Jr., an Assemblies of God minister in South Carolina, invited Gricelda Molina to join his Spanish ministry in 2000, it didn’t take him long to realize he had found the woman he had been waiting for. On the telephone and during romantic strolls they talked about their goals, their commitment to God and how many children each would like to have. Six months flew by, and he asked her to marry him.

“She’s a beautiful woman with a beautiful spirit, very gentle, very sincere,” Mr. Harrell said. But Ms. Molina, a factory worker, was also an undocumented immigrant from Honduras, who had crossed into the United States twice, having once been deported. Mr. Harrell, the pastor of Airport Assembly of God church in West Columbia, said he was not too concerned. “Whatever came, we would walk through this path together,” he said.

Mr. Harrell and Ms. Molina, both 35, married in 2001, in a large wedding attended by family from both sides and blessed by pastors in English and Spanish. But the Harrells no longer live together, not because of divorce, but because Mrs. Harrell, now the mother of two sons and four months pregnant with their third child, has been deported. She had applied for legal residency, or a green card, with her new husband as her sponsor, Mr. Harrell said, but she was sent back to Honduras 20 months ago because of her illegal entries and told she would have to wait 10 years to try again.

“Illegals are pouring over the border,” said Mr. Harrell, who has visited his family five times. “We meet them, we fall in love with them, we marry them. And then the government tears your family apart, and they take no responsibility for letting them in, in the first place.”

Falling in love and marching toward marriage is not always easy, but a particular brand of heartache and hardship can await when one of the partners is in this country illegally. The uncertainty of such a union has only been heightened by the national debate over illegal immigration. Whether the new Democratic leadership in Congress will help people like the Harrells remains to be seen.

It is hard to quantify how many people find themselves in Mr. Harrell’s situation, but with stepped-up enforcement in recent years, deportations have increased, and so have fears of losing a loved one in that way. (There were 168,310 removals in 2005, compared with 108,000 in 2000, immigration officials said.)

And that is only one byproduct of love between two people with such uneven places in society, immigration lawyers say. Many relationships strain under the financial burden of hiring lawyers for what can turn into years of visiting government offices, producing pictures, tax records and other evidence of a legitimate marriage in the quest for legalization. And while instances of immigrants faking love for a green card are in the minority, according to immigration officials, some couples feel pressure to marry before they are ready, hoping that marriage will prevent a loved one’s deportation.

Raul Godinez, an immigration lawyer in Los Angeles, said: “I ask people, ‘How much do you love this person? Because immigration is going to test your marriage.’ If you don’t feel it’s going to be a strong marriage, I wouldn’t do it.”

Many people may still believe that obtaining legal status through marriage is easy, because of periodic reports of marriage scams. In a three-year investigation called Operation Newlywed Game, immigration and customs enforcement agents caught more than 40 suspects in California for allegedly orchestrating sham marriages between hundreds of Chinese or Vietnamese nationals and United States citizens. But such fraud occurs in only a minority of cases, federal officials said.

In reality, immigration lawyers said, marrying a citizen does not automatically entitle the spouse to a green card and is only the first step in a long bureaucratic journey. The lawyers noted that changes in the law in the last five years have made this legalization path increasingly difficult, one worth choosing only if true love is at stake. (Other routes include sponsorship by immediate family members or an employer.)

The Harrells said they had no idea how difficult it could be and were shocked when Mrs. Harrell’s application for permanent residence was turned down, leaving them only 12 days to prepare for her departure. In that time, Mr. Harrell said, they decided that the children, now 4 and 3, would go with her. So Mr. Harrell obtained passports for them, and the church held a farewell service.

“It was very traumatic,” he said. “Our whole world was crashing around us.”

In Yoro, in north central Honduras, where Mrs. Harrell and the children live with her parents, she said the older boy constantly asks for his father, begging, “Let’s go to my papa’s house.” She has coped with her own dejection, too. “I know how much work he has over there,” she said by telephone. “He needs his wife.”

But even in the best of circumstances, when an immigrant enters the country legally, couples may have to rearrange their lives and defer their dreams.

Paola Emery, a jewelry designer, and her husband, Randall Emery, a computer consultant in Philadelphia, said they delayed having children and buying a house for the nearly four years it took the government to complete a background check for Mrs. Emery, who had entered the country from Colombia with a tourist visa and applied for permanent residency after they married in 2002.

Mrs. Emery, 27, said lawyers advised them it was not wise for her to risk trouble by visiting her close-knit family in Colombia and then trying to re-enter this country. She said she was absent through weddings, illnesses and even the kidnapping and rescue of an uncle.

“I felt like I was in jail,” Mrs. Emery said.

Officials with the Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Homeland Security Department say that delays lasting years are rare, but some immigration lawyers say they see clients who wait three to four years for security clearance. Mrs. Emery and her husband, 34, sued Homeland Security over the delays, and she was finally cleared last May. By then Mr. Emery had helped form American Families United, a group of citizens who have sponsored immediate family members for immigration, and which advocates immigration-law change to keep families together.

Immigration Services officials say they are not out to impede love or immigration. Nearly 260,000 spouses of citizens received permanent residency through marriage last year, out of 1.1 million people who became permanent residents, according to the Immigration Services office. “The goal is to give people who are eligible the benefit,” said Marie T. Sebrechts, its spokeswoman in Southern California. She said the agency does not comment on individual cases.

When a legal immigrant is sponsored by an American spouse, she said, the green card can be obtained in as little as six months. But with complications like an illegal entry, laws are not that benevolent, Ms. Sebrechts said. In those cases, the immigrant usually must return to the home country and wait 3 to 10 years to apply for residency, though waivers are sometimes granted.

Such obstacles are far from the minds of couples when they meet. And for some, so is the idea to question whether the beloved feels equally in love with them.

Sharyn T. Sooho, a divorce lawyer and a founder of divorcenet.com, a Web site for divorcing couples, said she has represented American spouses who realized too late that the person they married was more interested in a green card than in living happily ever after. “They feel conflicted, used and abused,” she said. “It’s a quick marriage, and suddenly the person who was so sweet is turning into a nightmare.”

But more often, said Carlina Tapia-Ruano, the president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, couples marry before they are ready because “there’s fear that if you don’t do this, somebody is going to get deported.”

Krystal Rivera, 18, a college student in Los Angeles, and her boyfriend fall into this group. Ms. Rivera is set on marrying in April 2008, even as she worries that it may put too much pressure on the relationship.

“I never wanted to follow the Hispanic ritual of getting married early,” said Ms. Rivera, a native of Los Angeles whose parents emigrated from Mexico.

She said she fell in love at 13 with a Mexican-born boy who sang in the church choir with her. “He started poking me, and I said ‘Stop it!’ ” she remembered.

Ms. Rivera is still in love with the boy, now 19, who was brought into the country illegally by his mother when he was 12. He goes to college and wants to become a teacher, while she hopes to become a doctor.

But for those plans to work, Ms. Rivera said, she needs to help him legalize his status. She said she has witnessed his frustration as he dealt with employers who didn’t pay what they owed him or struggled to find better jobs than his current one as a line cook. Because of his illegal status, he is unable to get a driver’s license or visit the brothers he left in Mexico. “We want to be normal,” Ms. Rivera said.

The Harrells, too, have decided to take charge. After months of exploring how to reunite the family and spending thousands of dollars on lawyers, Mr. Harrell has decided to leave his small congregation, sell his house and join his wife in Honduras. He will be a missionary for his church for a fraction of the $40,000 a year he makes as a minister.

“I finally said: ‘You know what? I don’t want to spend another Christmas away from my family,” said Mr. Harrell, who plans to move by late December. “We’d still be waiting for the laws to change.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Oh, Innocent Souls

I am now getting most of my site traffic from people looking for information on illegal aliens. Most of the time, marriage is included in the search. In the last few weeks, I got a lot of people coming to the site through searches on illegal alien "rights" and such. I am posting an opinion piece here from "The Valley Patriot", a community newspaper in Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts House recently voted on whether or not illegal aliens should be eligible for in-state tuition rates at the state community colleges and the University of Massachusetts. Currently, nine states offer this benefit to illegals: California, Illinois, Kansas, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Washington. The article from "The Valley Patriot" addresses the issue with a minimum of hyperbole.

Again, you know I don't know how to link pages or what have you, so I'm just cutting and pasting:

Snake Oil Salesmen
Defend Illegal Aliens

A. Robert Casimiro

The bill to grant lower In-State Tuition rates to illegal alien students is still marking time on Beacon Hill. It has been on the House Calendar for six months, and there it remains because there are not enough votes to override a promised veto by Governor Romney.

Well-funded advocates and lobbyists are spinning their stories of hardship, sympathy, and justice in an attempt to get the necessary votes, to no avail.

They distort the argument by using deceptive terms such as “undocumented immigrants,” try to pass over their illegal acts by saying they are without “proper papers;” and justify their demands because illegal aliens “pay taxes” Of course they do.

The truth is catching up with them as talk radio and grassroots immigration reform groups are getting heard and are challenging the Snake Oil Salesmen, advocates and lobbyists like MIRA, ACORN, the Irish Immigration Center, the Brazilian Immigration Center, HOPE, and the lobbyist Charles Glick.

Their nearly two-decades-long spin machine is starting to break down.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) properly classifies these “undocumented immigrants” as “illegal aliens.” The sixty percent who cross our borders are criminals; the forty percent who overstay their visas can be deported and are barred from reentry for three to ten years, depending on how long they have overstayed their visas. This is not trivial stuff, nothing as simple as not having the “proper papers.”

But they “pay taxes,” don’t they? Yes, they pay the taxes they cannot avoid, like sales taxes. Remember, illegal aliens cannot get valid Social Security numbers, so how do they pay income taxes? Many are paid “under the table,” so they are tax cheats; or, if you prefer, tax evaders, making them felons. Just ask former Speaker of the House Charles Flaherty and current State Senator Dianne Wilkerson about tax evasion.

Those who are required to produce a Social Security number to get a job do so with a fraudulent Social Security number, another violation of the law. The Massachusetts Department of Revenue is shortchanged tens of millions of dollars a year by these tax scofflaws. This means all the loyal taxpaying residents of the Commonwealth are paying for these cheats.

This does not prevent the advocates and their lobbyist-trained “students” from trying to spin away these realities.

They have been trotting out two “students” who claim they have valid Social Security numbers and legal status. It turns out that they are claiming to be legal simply because they have “applied” for change of status. If they in fact have valid Social Security numbers, it would be because they are in a narrow range of illegal aliens, like those under TPS (Temporary Protected Status) countries, who are allowed to work while in the United States.

Some pay taxes by using the Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), a procedure employed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to capture taxes not being paid by those who do not have valid Social Security numbers. You have to ask yourself, though, why serial lawbreakers would now be concerned about paying taxes.

The Snake Oil Salesmen have falsely claimed that the ITIN gives illegal aliens authorization to work; it does not. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on its website has an emphatic answer to that question: “Are ITINs valid for work purposes? No. ITINs are for federal income tax purposes only.”

The most troubling aspect of this push to give de facto acceptance to illegal aliens is the destructive effect it is having on our society and culture.

If the high illegal alien urban areas such as Framingham, Somerville, and Lawrence gain ascendancy, then the whole Commonwealth will be affected by these alien attitudes and they will continue to eat away at the proud heritage of this country, and its respect for the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution that have made this such a successful democracy. We will be on a one way trip to third-world status.

The illegal alien populations in these cities are serial lawbreakers – border violators, visa overstayers, drivers without licenses, tax cheats – who probably feel that they are being deprived of their rights when they are denied scholarships and tuition breaks. This is not what founded and sustained our nation and enabled us to achieve what we have.

Fortunately, time may be running out on the purveyors of distortion and misinformation as the federal government is being forced to do something about our porous borders and the lax enforcement of immigration laws. The U.S. House of Representative recently passed the “Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005,” a strict measure that emphasizes border control and internal enforcement. There will be a battle with the U.S. Senate and with President Bush, who wants a temporary guest worker/amnesty plan, but it will at least assure that the issue will be in the news and, the more the taxpayers, voters, and citizens of the Commonwealth are made aware of the issue, the more likely it is that the Snake Oil Salesmen will be unable to sell their tainted nostrums.

Bob Casimiro can be reached at arcasimiro@msn.com

Help, I'm in Love with an Illegal Alien!!

Um, how should I say this? Look, I see that about half of the visitors to this site access it through a search engine. Often, the search term is some variation of "marrying an illegal alien". I have seen "my boyfriend is an illegal alien", "in love with illegal immigrant", "can I legalize my girlfriend", and "can I get in trouble for marrying an illegal alien". I'm not going to go into much more detail, but I just can't hold it in any longer. So, for those of you who happen to find this site while you are searching for information to help your illegal immigrant girlfriend/boyfriend/friend, please give me a moment.

Maybe you have found the love of your life. Maybe you are trying to help out a friend. Maybe you are afraid, or being bullied into doing it. Maybe there are children involved. There is never a good enough reason to be involved in a crime. An illegal immigrant is *illegal*. They are breaking the law by being here. You may feel, "What's the big deal? She came here to go to school, and just stayed here after graduation" or "He came here with his family when he was young, and so he's really just American". Maybe your significant other is a fantastic person, and they are stuck in a bad situation. i am truly sorry, because that's rough. But you don't have to get involved in their ICE struggles to show your support. Frankly, if she or he loves you, s/he will understand that you don't want to be implicated in anything illegal. Shady dealings are not the best start to a relationship. Perhaps they can obtain their papers through their employer or one of the several government loopholes for illegal immigrants. Look at it this way: if s/he gets her life in order, you can have a fresh start, with no baggage hanging over your heads. You will not feel used or tricked, and, very importantly, your family will not feel that you were used or tricked. Your significant other will feel good knowing that their love is true, and cannot be questioned by anyone.

And if you are trying to "help out a friend" or make a few bucks by marrying someone so they can obtain residency, I have one thing to say. In today's world, with Homeland Security overseeing everything, do you really want to be involved in something that could bring Big Brother down on you and your loved ones??

Narrative Break 3-Almost There, Guys!

Okay, so now I am on spring of 2004. Only one more year of background, before I can write about what's happening currently.

For those of you who are new, please begin reading at the "background 1996" category. From there, continue on through sequential years, so you get the whole story.

For DTS, and others who have wondered: Nos is fine. He is in second grade at a Catholic school. He loves it. He wants to be an actor, or a paleontologist, or so he has said since he was 4. He likes to dress up as a pirate. He thinks Johnny Depp is cool. Lindsey Lohan's transformation makes him sad. He likes to watch Alias, and is very excited about the new Star Wars movie. He says being a big brother is an important job, and he takes it very seriously. If he were someone else's child, I would envy his parents.

Narrative Break 2 - Sidney Bristow Got Nothin' on Them

No, my family did not know anymore than whatever they had guessed. Ditto for my friends. I never complained, because I felt it was one of those "you made your bed, now lie in it" situations. I was ashamed; I am very hard on myself, so the last thing I wanted/needed was to have anybody else judging me harshly.

You got it exactly right by saying their illegal status gives them a sort of power that we law-abiding stiffs can't possibly understand. If Alien didn't like a job, he quit and found another. If he didn't like a boss, he told him to screw himself. He and his family had no fear, not even of INS. On the very slim chance they were brought to INS' attention, they would simply pull up stakes and disappear. His family looks more like the typical "American" phenotype than I do. They blend in.

Who cares about getting deported, when your family can just pay the going rate (10K, last I heard) to smuggle you back through Mexico?

Narrative Break 1 -Shoulda Coulda Woulda

Thank you for reading my story.

I started writing this because of the issues my son and I are going through now with his father; I figured a blog was a good way to keep my family and friends updated. While I am frustrated that I haven't yet reached the present day, I find that it has been very therapeutic writing the background information down.

Although I mostly cringe when I remember my life back then, I recognize all of my mistakes and why I made them. Burying my head in the sand, hoping for the best, keeping a low profile--none of these "coping strategies" did me a lick of good. Yeah, I had low self-esteem, was a victim, was a fool; now I am trying to acknowledge it and move on. All the fears I had, from being socially ostracized as a single mother to being afraid for my physical safety from my ex-husband, were nothing compared to the mess my child and I are dealing with now. If I had been strong enough to stand up to my ex-husband back then, my son would not be his bargaining chip, his tug-o-war rope, his monkey-in-the-middle.

Maybe one of you knows someone in a similar situation, or going down a similar path. Tell them about me. Tell them to read my blog. Tell them you care. Tell them they are not alone.

I appreciate your attention, and I welcome your comments.