Greencard » United States Congress

Immigration reform again coming into national focus

admin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:31:20 +0000

Patricia Hernandez has the unenviable job of cleaning up the mess left by undergraduates at UC Berkeley.
“Whatever they break, we fix it,” she said, sitting on a dormitory couch during her morning break. “Change light bulbs, fix furniture, fix toilets, unclog toilets, replace toilets.”
Hernandez, 48, is not complaining, just describing. She is proud of the job she has held for 18 years and the financial security it brings. She loves that her brother is a cook at a nearby campus cafeteria and that her daughter works as a pharmacy technician a few blocks away.
She loves it because 40 years ago, she was living in a Mexican orphanage. Twenty-five years ago, she was living in a car in Southern California and struggling to find work because she was an illegal immigrant.
“Like everybody else, I jumped the border,” she said. Then, about 23 years ago, she got lucky.
For Hernandez and thousands of other Bay Area residents 1987 marked the end of a life of hiding and the beginning of life as an American.
It was the year the Immigration Reform and Control Act, approved by Congress in 1986 and signed by President Ronald Reagan, went into effect. In a matter of months, Hernandez went from being undocumented to having a greencard, and years later she was able to obtain citizenship. She sighs today as she imagines how life would be different without it.
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The legalized immigrants have joined the ranks of other Americans, raising children and welcoming grandchildren, and the once-a-decade national census does not differentiate them from their neighbors. Some stuck with their pre-amnesty occupations or moved up the career ladder. Some have retired or will soon. More than half — about 1.6 million — lived in California when they won their greencards, but researchers believe thousands eventually dispersed to other states that offered new opportunities.
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Road to a better life
For Rosalinda Rodriguez, though, and many like her, amnesty was a road to a better life. Rodriguez remembers her visit in 1987 to the Franklin Street immigration office in downtown Oakland, where she brought utility bills and other paperwork — anything she had that would prove to interviewers she had been living in the United States since the 1970s.
In the Bay Area, the law’s potential beneficiaries were cautious, arriving over a yearlong period in a trickle, not a rush, according to newspaper reports from the time. The deadline to apply was May 1988.
The requirements were simple: To get a greencard, immigrants had to be living in the United States since before 1982 and have the documents to prove it. They would also have to pay a $185-per-person fee.
Rodriguez’s visit, she knows now, would change her life, transforming the Mexican immigrant from someone who was fearful and working in the shadows of the East Bay economy to a union hotel worker and grandmother confident to speak up for herself.
“They treat people differently when they know they can take advantage of you,” said Rodriguez, who has cleaned rooms at the downtown Marriott hotel for nearly 20 years. “In my job now, I can speak up. I can speak without fear.”
Rodriguez later bought a home in West Oakland. Life for her family in this recession is not easy, she said, but it is far less stressful than if she had no authorization to be living here.
“We’ve tried to progress,” she said. “If you don’t have papers, you can’t qualify for a loan, and everybody dreams of having their own house.”
By the end of the first phase of the amnesty program, 15,564 immigrants had won their greencards through the Oakland office, 22,580 from the San Francisco office and 23,185 from the San Jose office, according to government records. The Bay Area numbers were higher than many parts of the country but a fraction compared to Southern California, where more than 583,000 people obtained their legal residency through the Los Angeles/Long Beach immigration office alone. The majority of California’s amnesty recipients were originally from Mexico, though Asian immigrants and other Latinos were also prevalent.
Once the first phase was completed, undocumented agricultural workers had their own chance of becoming legal residents. That program was more generous, saying farm workers needed only to have been performing seasonal farm work in the United States for 90 days, not five years, and it was also more vulnerable to fraud as opportunists charged hundreds of dollars to forge letters of support from farmers. The deadline to apply was Nov. 1988.

Read the full story on Inside Bay Area

Immigrants watching health care debate

admin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:02:37 +0000

Immigrants are concerned about two policies as the House and Senate try to reach a compromise on health care reform. But even advocates for immigrants acknowledge that any attempt to ease restrictions could spark emotional opposition.

One concern focuses on whether illegal immigrants would be allowed to buy health insurance on private markets, called exchanges, which are envisioned in the legislation. The House bill would let them, the Senate bill would not.

The other concern is that both versions of the legislation maintain a five-year waiting period for legal permanent residents to participate in Medicaid for the poor. Advocates contend that these greencard holders should be allowed in Medicaid immediately, as Congress agreed last year for a program for pregnant women and children.

Read this entire story in the Monday, January 18, 2010 print edition of The Baxter Bulletin.

Congress passes greencard bill for spouses of deceased U.S. citizens

admin — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:58:30 +0000

Congress passed a bill Tuesday that would make widows and widowers of U.S. citizens eligible for greencard even if their spouses died before their applications were approved.

The measure, part of the more than $40-billion Homeland Security appropriations bill, ends the “widow penalty,” which required couples to be married for two years before the surviving spouse would be eligible to apply for residency. Now, surviving spouses can apply for a greencard for themselves and their children regardless of when the U.S. citizen died or how long they were married.

There are believed to be a few hundred cases affected nationwide, including that of Dahianna Heard, whose husband was fatally shot while working for a private security contractor in Iraq; Raquel Williams, whose husband died of sleep apnea and heart problems; and Ana Maria Moncayo-Gigax, whose husband was killed in a car crash while on duty with the U.S. Border Patrol. Many are fighting deportation, and others have already been deported.

“It was just something crying out to be fixed,” said Brent Renison, who has been fighting to get the law changed since 2004. “These cases should have been approved.”

Renison had fought the case in courts around the nation, including in Los Angeles, where a judge this year ordered the Department of Homeland Security to reopen the immigration cases of nearly two dozen people who were denied green cards because of the deaths of their spouses.

In June, the federal government announced that it would suspend deportation proceedings for two years so applicants could stay in the U.S. while resolving their legal status. But Renison said that didn’t go far enough and continued to push Congress to change the law.

The bill now goes to President Obama.

[Source: LA Times]