By Angie O’Gorman
Roan just called. She’s panicky, and I’m losing patience. I have asked her to only call once a week. It’s Tuesday, and we’re on our third conversation. There is nothing I can do.
I understand that she’s losing SSI—Supplemental Security Income—because she is not yet a citizen. I understand that the only things between her and naturalization are the 39—or is it 42?—background checks for the Department of Homeland Security. And I know that the two years she has been waiting are not really about homeland security. They are about disorganization and politics.
But how much of this do I reveal to Roan? She still trusts us.
Historically a town of immigrants, St. Louis is now one of the nation’s refugee-resettlement centers—and in providing legal services to them and their citizen family members for the last 16 years, I couldn’t help but notice a few things.
I’ve been in immigration court when the judge ordered an undocumented mother deported—away from her husband and toddler. The waiting list for family reunification is seven years long. So much for family values. I’d have taken the undocumented route myself. I’ve sat with a middle-aged wife and mother as her immigrant husband was handcuffed by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement—yes, the acronym is ICE—for permanent removal from the United States because of possession of marijuana. True, he shouldn’t have had the drugs—but aren’t some consequences counterproductive?
And then there is Roan, a torture survivor, and her husband and dozens of similar cases in which SSI is the firewall between life and death—and it’s smoldering.
Elderly refugees who fled persecution in their homelands are welcomed into the safety of American freedom and civil rights but charged for the airfare. SSI is terminated after seven years unless the recipient can learn English and become a citizen. That’s hard to do when you’re old and traumatized—even harder if your immigration file is catching dust in a file room.
I am not particularly in favor of the high numbers of immigrants coming into the United States. Generally people are better off in their own countries, with their own languages and cultures and their kids close by (unless war has taken all that away). But we are living in a global economy in which everything else can legally cross the border: capital, resources, management—everything but labor.
The 1996 law that limited elderly refugees’ time on SSI also mandated income requirements for sponsoring a family member. Part of the sound-bite war in the mid-’90s was about immigrants’ use of public benefits versus their social contributions in taxes and labor. The compromise barred immigrants from receiving public benefits for their first five years here, so the sponsoring family member must show the required level of income—on our middle-class terms—for the household plus the immigrant.
Homa, an unassuming refugee wife and mother from Afghanistan—her husband taken from the home long ago and presumed dead—is given refugee status with her four children. In 1999, she begins work at a well-known St. Louis company that the law prevents me from naming. Several years later, she gains her permanent residency, but the only raise at work has been an increase in overtime hours. In 2005, after immense effort, she becomes a U.S. citizen. Still no raise at work. In the meantime, her husband is found by the Red Cross. She petitions for him to join her and the children, but wait—there is a problem: She doesn’t earn enough money. She works 65 hours a week—has for years because on 40 hours the children would have starved—and makes $21,000 a year. For a family the size of hers, the feds say, her income is insufficient for family reunification.
So what, right? Life is tough. True, but why make it more so? And what’s tough for others has a way of affecting the rest of us. Missouri, especially rural Missouri, is pockmarked with single-parent families because the immigrant parent, usually the dad, has gone back to the home country for paper processing. Things stall at the American embassy there because the mom, though employed, doesn’t make enough to meet the income requirement. Now we have yet another broken family in need of our dwindling Medicaid.
Whose fault is this? Mom’s, for not earning enough? Dad’s, for wanting to join the family? Do we blame the employer for claiming that competitiveness with Shanghai or Juarez trumps all? Or the federal family-reunification requirements themselves?
We are on the cusp of yet another full-blown immigration debate. This happens whenever Washington needs a distraction—which is not to say that the debate isn’t needed. A serious debate, weighing realities rather than sound bites, would go far toward making for healthier policies—and would give us a good dose of national self-knowledge.
A society’s health depends, in large part, on the way it treats the stranger.
