How to Make Chicken Kharkiv

During my first month or two in Kharkov, I reported that I wasn't eating so well. Now the full story can be found in the latest issue of NOÖ.

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Moloko

It's not exactly writer's block -- I just can't get going.

Consequently, I've spent much of the last two days on Flickr, securing my photos for posterity. The end result of all this is my forming a new group on that photo-sharing site devoted entirely to pictures of Soviet-era milk stores.

I'm not sure what the laws are for committing someone against their own will in the State of California, but that may be something the judge would look at unfavorably. "Milk stores, you say? Photographs of?"

"Yes, your honor."

By all means, join and post away.

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Scamski City

People are fools if they want to find a wife on the internet.

It is not real. I correspond with a whole division of Westerners - and they are all idiots.

From an article in the Daily Mail.

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From the About Time Department

Green Card rules relaxed. Now those lengthy FBI clearances -- detailed in my recent investigative piece -- will be reduced.
See The New York Times for more.

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Democratic Party, Putin-Style

The more I learn about the American voting system -- and it takes several election cycles to cut through the murk -- the less "democratic" it seems.

Get this, forty-percent of the delegates currently at stake for Democratic presidential contenders are "super-delegates." The voters don't vote for these 842 people; they're high-ranking Democratic Party members: governors, leaders of the Democratic National Committee, former Presidents, like Bill Clinton. And they all go to the National Convention, just the delegates the voters send, and pledge their vote to a candidate during the nominating stage.

This came as a surprise this morning, when I went to go check the delegate count, and instead of seeing a field just now getting started, I saw Clinton way out ahead.

She has 159 "super-delegates," dwarfing the number she's received in Iowa and New Hampshire so far, and more than 100 more than the next candidate, Barack Obama.

Apparently, this isn't a centuries-old tradition in the Party either. As this MSNBC report states, it just a generation ago, when grass-roots movements, including those calling for women's rights, began to shake up the old Guard. The Democratic Party needed something to keep it stabilized through this volatile time, so the system was born.

“There was a belief that they would not want candidates who were dramatically out of sync with the rest of the party — particularly if these were people who were going to have to run on the same ticket with them,” says Northeastern University political scientist William Mayer, who has written extensively on the nomination process.

There were, Mayer says, two motives in giving elected officials a big voice in the nomination.

“One was not to get (ideologically) extreme candidates; the other was to avoid the Jimmy Carter phenomenon — where you had a guy who was not very experienced and not very well regarded by most of his fellow governors, but nevertheless managed to win the party’s nomination,” Mayer said.

Now, one of my favorite hobbies is questioning the American press' demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is not because I'm a Putin man. It's because I don't know why the American Press refuses to question anything in its own country, from the faulty intelligence and fear-mongering of the Bush Administration in the lead-up to the war in Iraq to the very things the press sees as problematic abroad. Such as President Putin's decision, in 2004, to directly name his country's regional governors, rather than leave this to the voting public.

Now, if it's undemocratic for him to do this -- something I constantly am told in the slicks and dailies -- isn't it also undemocratic for the Democratic party to give itself 4 out of every ten votes in the nominating process for its candidate for the President of the United States? The Republican Party doesn't do it. And the blessed Greens would sooner cut down a tree.

But I suppose Putin, Time Magazine's Man of the Year, would be proud.


A Tsar is Born indeed.

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Geography of the Heart (Consolidated)

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.

“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.“


Part Two



It is impossible to say how many U.S. citizens are separated from a foreign national spouse by current immigration law. Some spouses are deported, others are denied entrance visas, and still more create no paper trail whatsoever, like Hernandez, because they understand they hold no means of appeal and success.

But with life becoming increasingly globalized, and as many as 13 million people living in the United States illegally – up from the Census Bureau’s estimate of almost six million in 1996 – it is likely that immigration law has become more divisive rather than less.

Lisa Tompkins, 25, met her husband, Arturo Salazar, also 25, while salsa dancing at a nightclub in a mid-western city in early 2005 (both requested that their identities be altered to protect an ongoing case with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services). Salazar had been in the country illegally since 2002, but that didn’t stop him from acting like other young men with longer histories in the community.

“He just came up and we started talking,” said Tompkins. “Typical story: became friends, started dating. I think I knew pretty quickly we were going to get married.”

Because her husband cannot legally apply for entry to the U.S. for 10 years as result of his illegal stay, the couple left the United States in July 2006 and married in Mexico, where they are seeking a waiver to Salazar’s bar. Tompkins does not speak much Spanish, but she said she is able to earn “a pretty decent wage” in the Mexican State of Jalisco by working for a call center established by a U.S. credit card company.

“We have estimates that there might be a million to a million and a half people in this situation,” said Randall Emery, 35, of Philadelphia, one of the co-founders of American Families United, a group which seeks an immigration system that is fair, timely and transparent, and above all else more family-friendly.

Emery and other critics believe the nation’s current immigration debate is focused on the need to fix the problem of illegal immigration at the expense of acknowledging that the process of legal immigration needs significant repairs as well.

Many critics, like Carson, trace their difficulties back to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IRA-IRA ‘96), a package of laws promising to be “tough-on crime” that was introduced as part of the Republican-controlled Congress’ “Contract with America.”

More than ten years later, few people are talking about the consequences of IRA-IRA ‘96 or family reunification.

When President Bush visited the Yuma Border Patrol station April 9, he limited his remarks to the need for a guest worker program.

The previous month, Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) unveiled the Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy Act of 2007 (STRIVE ACT of 2007), a comprehensive immigration reform bill that would create a guest worker program to allow millions of undocumented residents to remain in the United States and eventually become citizens. The bill includes no path to citizenship for foreign nationals seeking to reunite with a spouse who is a US citizen or legal permanent resident.

With a similar bi-partisan proposal expected to emerge from the Senate in the coming weeks, former Congressman Bruce Morrison (D-CT), the one-time chair of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, is lobbying Congress to lower barriers to legal immigration for immediate family members of U.S. citizens and to allow spouses greater opportunities to appeal their inadmissibility to the United States.

“It is not progressive liberal Democrats who are likely to be an obstacle to this bill,” said Paul Donnelly, Morrison’s former press secretary and current lobbying partner. “It’s people who in other circumstances like to talk about the defense of marriage and their pro-family credentials. I think this is a pretty fair litmus test for them.”

Though Carson faces the bleakest future without legislative aid, he is not alone. A four-month investigation has revealed:

• An immigration system so complex that some U.S. citizens have chosen to emigrate from the United States rather than have their foreign spouse immigrate.

• Processing delays by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that are the sole reason for the denial of permanent residency status.

• A de facto “One Strike and You’re Out” Policy which allows an immigrant’s visa to be denied for misdemeanor crimes that merit no more than a $100 fine in the United States, even when the applicant has a U.S. citizen spouse and child and has seen his criminal conviction expunged from his record.

• FBI security clearances that drag on for two or three years, resulting in longer waits for visas, a delay of immigration benefits, and a possible security risk to the United States.

Part Three



When the First Congress passed an act to establish a uniform rule for naturalization, in 1790, the resulting legal statute ran one paragraph long and required no interpretation. It declared that any “free white person” could gain citizenship by living in the United States for at least two years, proving to a court that he was “a person of good character,” and swearing to support the U.S. Constitution.

If that person had children, they too immediately received citizenship, so long as they were no older than twenty-one and residing within the United States.

More than two-hundred years later, the simplicity of that single paragraph has been replaced by the United States Immigration and Nationality Act, a document that is perhaps rivaled in size and complexity by only the U.S. Tax Code.

The current immigration statute runs several hundred pages, while its regulations take up several thousand more. To enforce these laws, the USCIS, formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), employees 15,000 people in approximately 250 headquarters and field offices around the world.

This agency produces a litany of forms, so many that an intending immigrant’s paper trail to the United States can read like the directions needed to travel down a complex interchange of highways: the K-1 to the I-130, followed by immediate exits to the I-131 and the I-140, and then a long drive to the I-485, ending at the N-600, or the I-601 if there were any mistakes.

Dan Kowalski, an immigration attorney based in Austin, says the forms create both a lot of work for the 10,000 lawyers who specialize in immigration law and a lot of hardship for their clients.

“For many, if not most cases, there are enough twists and turns that if someone tried to do it on their own, they would likely run into problems,” said Kowalski. “That creates not only the need for immigration lawyers and accredited representatives, but (opportunities) for the unscrupulous … to prey on the vulnerable, supposedly for a lower price than an immigration attorney would cost.”

Mark Ludwig, 48, a holder of a PhD. in physics, did not obtain the services of an immigration attorney prior to marrying Francoise Roux, 50, a French woman he had met while living in Belize.

While still in Central America, Ludwig entered a U.S. Embassy and asked about the consequences of marrying in Belize versus the United States. After learning it would take between nine and twelve months for Roux to receive a K3 visa and follow her husband into the United States if they married in Belize, Ludwig and his fiancée chose to return to Arizona, where Ludwig maintains a publishing business.

By showing her French passport, Roux was able to enter the U.S. through the Visa Waiver Program, which allows citizens of twenty-seven countries, mostly those of Western Europe, to enter the U.S. for a stay of up to ninety days, so long as their purpose is business or tourism.

Ludwig and Roux married November 19, 2006, before Pastor Tom Brown at the New Hope Christian Fellowship in Show Low, Arizona. Following a three-day honeymoon in Tucson, the couple filed an I-130 form with the USCIS, which petitions the US government to allow an “alien relative” to immigrate to the United States.

As recently as the seventies, a US citizen could marry a foreign national in the morning and have a Green Card issued that same afternoon. But by the time Ludwig was completing his I-130, and sending away the $190 fee, the same process was routinely taking no less than two years.

Ludwig said he was shocked to discover it took so long. “The very definition of the word marriage comes from being joined together,” he said. “They turn it into a legal definition and throw the reality out the window.”

Because Roux’s French passport entitled her to a stay of no more than 90 days, she and Ludwig traveled to Nogales, Arizona, from which they intended to step into Mexico, turn around, and come back.

It’s not a novel idea. The STRIVE Act would require all illegal aliens to leave the country before being able to return as part of a guest worker program. But as soon as Roux attempted to return, she learned she had committed a deportable act: attempting to enter the United States through the Visa Waiver Program with the intention of immigrating, rather than business or tourism.

Ludwig was again shocked, and though he now acknowledges mistakes – Francoise should have entered the U.S. on a non-immigrant’s visa – he claims he also sought help along the way: first at the U.S. Embassy in Belize, then through the toll-free USCIS customer service number. Furthermore, Ludwig claims he and Roux made their intention to marry known to the Border Patrol officer who received them in Brownsville, where they entered the country by car, and then again before leaving Nogales, where one Border Patrol officer processed their exit and another received them upon their attempted re-entry.

“We kind of took the system to be straight forward,” he said. “But our experience has been quite the opposite.”

By leaving the country in Nogales, Roux automatically abandoned her I-130 petition. She was granted a 30 day parole to file another, along with additional supporting paperwork. But by that time Ludwig had learned he needed to show that he could support Roux at no less than 125-percent of the federal poverty line until his wife had either become a citizen or worked in the U.S. for 10 years. This requirement, established in 1996, refuses certain federal benefits to new arrivals, and empowers the government to seek financial retribution from the beneficiary’s sponsor if benefits have been received.

Ludwig would have liked to have simply checked a box refusing all federal benefits. “I’ve never taken one cent of government benefits,” he said. “I have no intention of doing that.”

But he was not able to do that. He was required to provide banking documents and tax records going back three years, all of which he’d left behind in Belize.

As a result, Roux returned to Central America, while Ludwig stayed behind in Arizona to put his house up for sale.

“If they don’t want us around, fine,” he said.

Part Four



In Wardensville, West Virginia, where 46-year-old Curtis Old married an English woman he met online, life is no less global.

Unlike Ludwig's spouse, Old’s wife, Glynnis, is now a US citizen. But her arrival was not without its complications. She came to the United States in July 2002 on a K1 visa, which allows its holder to remain in the country longer than 90 days only if he or she has married his or her visa’s petitioner.

Glynnis was accompanied by her two children, Sarah and Michael, who arrived on K2 visas. These visas are issued to children of those who hold a K1 visa, and are given so children may accompany their immigrating parent and wait in the United States for an immigrant’s visa of their own.

Upon their arrival, both Michael and Sarah automatically qualified for a Green Card due to their being younger than 21. Sarah, 14 upon arrival, received hers and is now a US citizen.

But during the ten months it took to process her brother’s paperwork, Michael turned 21 – at which point he no longer qualified for a Green Card.

“It’s absurd,” Old said. “They’re issuing K2s up until the day before they turn 21. They’re deportable the day they get here. That’s how they’re interpreting the law.”

Sharon Rummery, a spokesperson for USCIS, said her agency relies on U.S. law to guide its actions.

“We await action from Congress,” she said. “Until that happens, everything stays the same. The law is the expression of the will of the American people.”

Old has appealed his son-in-law’s case. If the appeal is lost, Michael will be unable to even apply for entry to the United States for a period of ten years, because, while awaiting the resolution of his case, he has remained in the country longer than one year without the proper documentation.

This potential exile from family is yet another consequence of IRA-IRA ‘96. That law also requires a 3 year ban on entry for those who leave the U.S. after remaining without proper documentation between six months and one year.

Unlike Hernandez’s lifetime ban, these penalties can be appealed. But success is not a formality. It hinges on whether or not the petitioner, a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, can show that he or she will suffer extreme hardship if the alien relative is not allowed to immigrate.

“From what I have heard, (the U.S. Consulate in) Ciudad Juarez reviews about 1,500 waivers a month, and that's just for Mexico,” said David Guard, 35, of El Cerrito, California. “So there are lots of people who go through this.”

Guard moved to Veracruz, Mexico to be with his wife, Karina, a 27-year-old Mexican national, because she had been barred from the United States for ten years due to a previous illegal entry. The two had met in San Jose in 1999, when Guard was working for a major internet hardware developer and Karina was hired to clean its office. (Guard, like Tompkins, asked that his employer not be named.)

More than two years after marrying, in November 2004, the cohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifuple was able to prove that Guard would suffer a financial hardship if his wife was unable to live with him in the United States.

Though successful in his bid to bring his wife to the United States, Guard admits that there are problems with the waiver system, in that there is great latitude for an interpretation of hardship.

This is something Brenda Friederich understands well, as her husband of thirteen years is unable to immigrate to the United States to live with her and their 17-year-old daughter.

Part Five



Friederich, 44, of Campbell, CA, married her husband, Ismail Sanfaz, in 1984, two years after the Libyan native arrived in America on an F-1 student visa. After having a daughter together and then divorcing, in 1996, the couple continued with an “off and on relationship,” Friederich claims.

This relationship changed dramatically in 2000, when Sanfaz returned to Libya following the death of his parents. There, he lost his Green Card, and stayed longer than one year, thereby losing his legal claim to permanent residency status in the United States. (Upon arrival to a U.S. border inspection point, Green Card holders who have remained out of the country for more than one year are sometimes given a warning rather than being refused entry to the United States.)

In April 2002, Sanfaz traveled to the nearest U.S. Embassy, in Cairo, Egypt, to request a transportation letter allowing him to return to his family in the United States. But that request was denied because of his extended absence.

Friederich says the couple had decided to get back together by this point, and so she tried to provide for his return by applying for a fiancé visa, in July 2002. This too was denied, in August 2003, because after learning he had lost his permanent residency status, in April 2002, “Mr. Sanfaz asked the consular officer if he remarried whether he could be petitioned for, demonstrating to the officer that the beneficiary’s interest in immigration alone led to his current marital status,” according to the denial of a waiver of excludability that Sanfaz received from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2006.

Sanfaz had sought this waiver through the USCIS office in Nicosia, Cyprus, where he remarried Friederich in Oct. 2004. Knowing an acceptance or denial is granted at the discretion of the interviewing consular officer, the couple opted to not return to Egypt, where they felt they were unfairly treated.

DHS defended its decision to deny Sanfaz entry to the U.S. by saying the couple had already lived apart for almost ten years, showing their separation was not grounds for a hardship. DHS further claimed Sanfaz had misrepresented his arrest record to a consular office by failing to mention two incidents for which he was arrested but later cleared in court.

Sanfaz did confess to his one conviction, which was handed down by a California court in 1990 for the possession of less than one ounce of marijuana – a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $100.

This conviction has since been expunged from Sanfaz’s criminal record. But expunged crimes are still considered for immigration purposes, according to the dictates of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, and a violation of any law pertaining to controlled substances is grounds enough to deny an intending immigrant his visa.

“That has given him a life sentence, for immigration purposes. That’s a life sentence,” Friederich said.

Especially troubling to her is that a federal employee could rule her previous 12-year marriage to Sanfaz a fraud, something only entered into for immigration benefits.

“The whole process is very subjective,” Friederich said. “Are you suffering enough? Have you as an American citizen been suffering enough? That to me is just galling.”

She began to cry at this point. “I have to prove how much I’m suffering to not have my husband with me,” she said. “It’s just, I don’t know, the whole process is insane. I don’t want any family to suffer like we have. It’s just really unbearable.”

In April 2006, Sanfaz appealed his denial (at the cost of $385) to the Administrative Appeals Unit in Washington, D.C.

“I still have no answer from them,” said Friederich, in May.

The couple remains married and waiting.

Part Six


While some critics believe IRA-IRA ‘96 went too far, either by breaking up nuclear families or creating a “one strike and you’re out” policy, others are quick to remark that residing in this country is a privilege, not a right, and that it should be paid for with honesty and good behavior.

“Making a false sworn statement to a federal official is a felony offense,” said John Keeley, Communications Director for the Center for Immigrations Studies (CIS), in reference to the permanent inadmissibility of those found making a false claim of U.S. citizenship. “It is not akin to jay-walking. For me the discussion really begins and ends there.”

For others, like Barbara Coe, founder and chair-person of the California Commission for Immigration Reform, a group she claims has more than 20,000 members, the debate on immigration reform is difficult to view outside of the context of Mexicans streaming across the southern border.

“Our goals are very, very simple,” she said, “the enforcement of our existing – and I underline existing – immigration laws, which of course will result in the protection of our loyal, law-abiding citizens and legal residents from the illegal alien invaders.”

Anyone coming across the border illegally deserves “no lee-way,” Coe said. Couples like Friederich and Sanfaz, she said, “Should move to Libya.”

Such sentiments are not uncommon. On the contrary, they are part of an upswing in anti-immigrant activism, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors the activity of hate groups.

CIS, a mainstream organization with 200,000 dues-paying members, holds what is by all accounts a far more nuanced agenda than the one advanced by Coe and the other groups tracked by the SPLC. In addition to eliminating the flow of illegal immigrants, CIS wants Congress to reduce the number of legal immigrants entering the United States, in part by limiting the practice of “chain immigration” that is done in the name of family reunification.

Currently, US citizens can sponsor the immigration of a spouse, child, sibling or parent, in some cases only if the sponsor is at least 21 years of age. A legal permanent resident, who after three to five years can apply for U.S. citizenship, holds fewer rights. He or she can sponsor a husband, wife or unmarried child.

Last year, 802,712 immigrants adjusted to permanent residency status in the United States through a family based visa. That number includes 120,441 parents and 63,255 siblings of adult U.S. citizens, according to the DHS 2006 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. These are categories of preference that CIS would like to see eliminated.

“No one else in the world does that,” said Keeley. “That seems to me (to be) where the real stresses on the infrastructure originate. Because the system is designed to metastasize until an unmanageable workload (has been created) for the bureaucrats.”

Overall, immigration has been on the rise since the passage of INS Act, in 1965. But in the last twenty years, it has accelerated and eclipsed even those levels set during the “Ellis Island Era” of immigration, which closed in the 1920s.

During the first ten years of the 20th century, 8.2 million people immigrated to the United States. That number was not exceeded until the 1990s, when the country received 9.7 million new arrivals. If last year’s immigrations numbers were carried out over a decade, the first decade of the 21st century would set a even higher standard: 13 million new arrivals.

CIS says the role of “chain migration” plays a huge part in this, as can be seen in the immigration record of a country such as The Philippines. In the 1950s, the last complete decade unaffected by the INS Act’s expanded definition of family reunification, the Philippines provided 17,245 new immigrants to the United States. During the 1990s, that number had increased to 534,338.

“If you have a car wash,” Keeley said, “and it can handle two or three cars at a time, you don’t try to cram twelve cars in there. But that’s what we’re doing with our immigration system.”

As a result, he said, the bureaucrats entrusted with processing an immigrant’s paperwork are overwhelmed. This system will be taxed even more if 13 million additional people – the size of America’s illegal alien population, according to CIS – are allowed to remain in the country and move toward citizenship, Keeley said.

Regardless of what happens in the future, few immigrants would contest Keeley’s points regarding the level of service delivered by USCIS, especially those who must endure lengthy waits for a visa or Green Card.

Part Seven

More than three years after her marriage to Randall Emery, who would later go on to form American Families United, Paola Andrea, 26, from Manizales, Columbia, still did not have a Green Card. Because she could not be guaranteed re-entry to the United States without one, Andrea did not leave the country.

While she waited, there were several weddings in her extended family in Columbia, an aunt was diagnosed with cancer, and three uncles were kidnapped.

In early 2006, Emery and Andrea sued Michael Chertoff, the director of Homeland Security, in federal court. A little more than a month later, Andrea had her Green Card.

“It’s the not the government’s role to tell me who I can and cannot marry,” said Emery. “As a citizen, I have a right to expect fair treatment from the government. That was my personal motivation for getting involved in this.”

In the Feb. 2007 issue of the Federal Register, the USCIS advertised a new rate structure that would raise fees between $65 and $2,350. In that advertisement, the USCIS stated that a newly arrived immigrant who files form I-485 can expect to wait 7.07 months before adjusting to permanent residency status and receiving a Green Card.

Like others who have waited much longer than this, Andrea saw her case bogged down by her background check.

William Livingstone, a Los Angeles immigration attorney who frequently helps American men apply for a visa on behalf of a Russian fiancée, explains how security screenings were handled prior to 9/11:

“The embassy would send a query to the F.B.I. ‘Olga Petrova, have you heard of her?’ And the F.B.I. would either respond or not respond, and no news being good news, fifteen days later, if you didn’t get anything, you went ahead and set the interview (to issue a visa).”

These days, Livingstone said, each file requires an affirmative or a negative response before action, leading to delays when certain names – often inexplicably and unexplainably – get stuck in the system or “fall in a hole.”

In Dec. 2003, Daniel Haynes, of South Florida, who asked that his name be changed to protect his wife’s pending immigration, filed form I-485 on behalf of his Russian fiancée, Liliya. More than two years and three Congressional inquiries later, Haynes was told by a consular officer that only the security clearance was holding up his wife’s application for a Green Card.

“The F.B.I. has been studying her fingerprints for three full years,” Haynes said. “My contention is: If my wife really was a bad person, don’t you think that is plenty enough time to do something bad and get the hell out? Shouldn’t they be a little more expedient about who they’re letting stay in the country, if in fact there is some sort of problem?”

The F.B.I. did not respond to phone calls seeking comment for this article.

Because Haynes’ wife entered the country on a fiancée visa, she has been allowed to remain in the U.S. while awaiting the resolution of her case. However, each year she must file new documents providing her with the right to work and travel internationally, at a cost of $170 and $195 each.

Furthermore, her son, Kolya, who has already been approved for a Green Card but cannot receive his before his mother receives hers, must be issued new work and travel documents each year, also at an additional cost.

“In order to deduct him from our income tax,” said Haynes, “he needs to have a Social Security number, and the Social Security Administration will not assign him a Social Security number unless they have working authorization for him.”

Kolya is seven years old.

Haynes and his wife hope their son will get his Green Card and become a U.S. citizen before he faces compulsory military service in Russia at the age of 18. However, before he can apply for citizenship, he must be a legal resident of the U.S. at least three years.

“The problem is,” said Haynes, “that clock doesn’t start until you receive your Green Card.”

He is, he said, “pretty well furious over the whole thing.”

Part Eight



If there is one thing that unites people across the spectrum of the immigration debate, it is that fury.

“All of the staffers in Congress know about this problem,” said Kowalski, the immigration attorney from Austin. “They’ve been briefed about it in detail by the advocacy groups and immigration attorneys.”

As for whether this understanding will translate into change and solutions, he’s less certain.

“Nobody’s confident of anything,” he said. “Everything is in play, everything is in flux.”

He said the solution he imagines is too radical for the politicians to stomach: an immigration law that more effectively mirrors how people live and work in the 21st century.

For Thomas Carson, the electrical engineer from Houston, this meant being sent to Reynosa, Mexico to repair the electrical wiring in a fire-damaged maquiladora, one of the factories that sprung up along the Mexican border as soon as it was possible to import goods from the United States for assembly or manufacturing, and then export the finished products back across the border without paying a tariff.

If NAFTA created the maquiladoras, the free trade treaty also created the relationships that go with them, Carson reasons. He wasn’t the only one in his group to marry a Mexican national. Two co-workers are now living in Missouri with their new wives. Like those men, Carson believed he met the right woman. But his Mrs. Right had broken the wrong law.

So he found himself in Las Milpas that night almost four years ago, engaged in the kind of clandestine rendezvous he hadn’t ever imagined for himself. “It’s amazing what you’ll do for love,” he said.

After midnight, he and Hernandez and their eleven month-old, Thomas Alexander, drove north toward the 2,100 square foot home Carson had purchased for them in Houston the previous year. Since Hernandez’s failed interview for an immigrant’s visa the past November, that home had sat mostly empty, and Carson and Hernandez had wondered if their relationship would last.

Routinely, Carson drove the six hours between them every other weekend. They spent holidays together and spoke on the phone. But there were nights like this when it wasn’t enough. His first wife had remarried and just relocated to Oregon with Carson’s two adolescent sons. Hernandez had spent the weekend with him at her home in Mexico, but when he left she was afraid he’d react to his new solitude with too much drink and grow depressed.

So she arranged her crossing, despite Carson’s arguments about their bad luck. She left her two children from a previous marriage with family, and said she’d be back after she’d helped Carson adjust to this new stage in his life.

“That’s all we were trying to do,” Carson said. “To just spend some time together.”

They were together no more than ninety minutes. They were stopped at the secondary inspection point at Falfurrias.

There, in an effort to protect her boyfriend, Hernandez insisted that Carson not confess to their relationship. So while the Border Patrol took Hernandez away and returned her to Mexico, Carson drove home with his son, crying because he had said Hernandez wasn’t the mother of his child, just a woman he had hoped to hire to baby-sit for him.


Photo found at Another Think: One Christian's view of post-modern life, where you'll find another series on immigration.

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