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The Catholic New World
Church battling to keep immigrant families united

By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

Carmen Estacio isn’t a statistic. Estacio, a native of the Philippines, is a Chicago resident, a naturalized U.S. citizen, a worker in a state government office. When it comes to immigration law, she did everything by the book, including applying for a visa for her 18-year-old son to join her in the United States.

She filed the application in 1991. Her son, now 33, arrived in June 2005.

“I waited and I waited and I waited,” said Estacio. “I requested help from congressmen. I thought about getting a lawyer, but I knew it was very expensive.”

Estacio’s story gives an example of the way U.S. immigration law is not working, keeping working people away from their loved ones for years, according to advocates for immigration reform.

Family division is one area the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops emphasized when they announced “Justice for Immigrants: A Journey of Hope,” a campaign for comprehensive reform that would respect the dignity of immigrants, in May.

In Chicago, Auxiliary Bishop John R. Manz addressed the issue directly when he said, “This broken system forces many immigrant families to be separated from loved ones for years, even decades. We, especially, need to change the laws that separate families.”

“Decades” is not an exaggeration, said Fred Tsao, policy director for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

The longest wait time, for siblings of legal residents from the Philippines, is 22 years, said Tsao, the son of a Chinese immigrant. Overall, the average wait time for family-preference visas—the most common way for new immigrants to enter the United States—is 12 years.

“The reason it takes so long is that there is a backlog of petitions,” Tsao said. “Most categories are numerically limited. … Only so many are allowed in each year, and because there are so many people, so many sponsoring brothers and sisters, there is a backlog.”

Specific wait times depend on what country immigrants are coming from, with each country generally limited to no more than 7 percent of the 226,000 family-preference visas available each year under a formula that gives some preference to immigrants from the Western hemisphere.

They also depend on the category the visa applicants fit into: unmarried adult children of citizens; spouses or children of permanent residents; unmarried adult children of permanent residents; married children of citizens; and brothers and sisters of citizens.

“The long and short of it is that the number of people applying is 10 to 20 times the numbers that can be accommodated under the law,” Tsao said. “When my father immigrated from China, it took only a few years. He was able to sponsor my uncle in 1973, so it took two years. If my father was doing it now, it would take 12 years.”

Parents, spouses and minor children of citizens do not have to wait, Tsao said, but that gets complicated. For example, if a citizen applied for a visa for her parents, they would be able to come to the United States. But if the citizen had any brothers and sisters at home, they couldn’t come with their parents, no matter how young they were.

That’s one area the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill would address, Tsao said.

The bill also would create a more workable guest-worker program, giving people with proof of a job in the United States the chance to get a three-year visa, renewable for another three years, with a chance to get permanent resident status.

Many of the estimated 8 to 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States also could get legal permission to stay, although they would have to pay a $2,000 fine and move to the back of the line for permanent status, under the proposed legislation.

While the bishops’ campaign stops short of endorsing the bill, which is sponsored in the House of Representatives by Chicago Democrat Luis Guttierez, the coalition—which has been funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and counts several Catholic organizations among its members—has form letters supporting the legislation on its Web site.

McCain-Kennedy would “reshuffle the categories to make more visas available, raise some of the caps, recapture unused visas from previous years.” Tsao said.

Also, the number of visas based on employment would be increased, and there would be more visas available for unskilled workers, he said. Nearly all the employment-based visas available now go to highly skilled workers. The guest-worker program would allow workers to bring spouses and minor children with them.

Allowing undocumented workers now in the United States to attain legal residency would create a “virtuous circle,” getting people off the waiting lists, he said.

“The goal is to clear up the family backlog within 6 years,” Tsao said.

Even if the bill is approved, it will come too late for Teresa Figueroa, a Melrose Park woman set to be deported later this summer. Figueroa entered the United States with a legal visa in 1999, but then purchased someone else’s Social Security number in order to get a job.

The person whose number she bought later complained to police, after the IRS contacted her about unreported income from the job Figueroa was working, and Figueroa was arrested.

A mother of four and grandmother of one, Figueroa said she never intended to hurt anyone, and if she knew how much trouble she could get into, she would not have done it.

While the ICIRR is advocating for special legislation to allow her to stay, Figueroa is leaning heavily on her faith to get her through the days, spending the hours she used to be at work volunteering at St. Charles Borromeo Parish and praying.

“I have a big faith,” Figueroa said. “Whatever God decides, it’s going to be the best for me. One thing I’m grateful about, I’m alive and I’m happy.”

Unlike Estacio, Figueroa did not do everything by the book, and now expects to be separated from her family. Her worries are more for her grandson, born in May, than for her children, who are grown or nearly so, she said.

“I raised them,” she said proudly. “They know how to live. I was never going to be here forever.”

Since she already has a deportation order, she has been speaking publicly about her situation.

“All the time I have left, I want to help all the people I can. To the people who have documents, I would say, support the ones who don’t. I would tell them to pray a lot and have faith, asking God for help. If God was here right now, he wouldn’t bring the immigrants to Caesar. He would fight with them and support them.”

Dominican Father Charles W. Dahm took up the bishops’ call to preach about justice for immigrants by inviting them to fight for themselves. Dahm, pastor of St. Pius V Parish in the Pilsen neighborhood, leads a congregation made up primarily of Mexican immigrants and their families. About 3,000 come to the parish’s six weekend Masses, he said, including about 2,200 adults. He estimates that about 40 percent of the adults have legal residency or citizenship. A larger proportion of the children are citizens because many were born in the United States, he said.

On the Feast of Corpus Christi, May 29, Dahm brought his cell phone to the pulpit. He preached his homily on the teaching that “we are one bread, one body. We are all one, and Jesus’ desire was that we could all gather around the table of brotherhood.”

“One of the divisions that affects our community is that a lot of immigrants are not documented,” he said. “We have an opportunity to help our sisters and brothers who are not full members of our society. We can all help them because we know that our two senators have not supported comprehensive immigration reform. “We’re saying we want them to support and sponsor the legislation,”

To demonstrate how to call and advocate, Dahm called Sen. Barack Obama’s office, where voice mail picked up. With his phone on speaker mode, Dahm proceeded—in Spanish—to ask the senator to support the bill.

“Then I said, ‘Who can make phone calls like this?’” Dahm said. “Nearly everyone raised their hand.”

The parish then distributed slips of paper with lawmakers’ phone numbers and asked members of the congregation to make a commitment to calling. Those who did were asked to return the slips of paper the following week.

The following weekend, Dahm said, some people brought the papers back, but many more who had not received them the first time around, brought them home.

At Figueroa’s parish, participants in one weekend Mass were invited to come to the parish hall afterwards to make similar calls.

Dahm said he expects some kind of immigration reform will pass, because no one on any side believes the existing system works,

“There are so many undocumented immigrants in the U.S., and the number increases every year by about 8 percent,” he said. “Some people want to resolve it by tightening the borders. But even those that want to tighten the borders, they aren’t proposing a massive deportation campaign. They don’t want to legalize them, but they’re not up to deporting them.”

Meanwhile, Estacio said she would support any effort to make the system more rational. In her own case, she said, her son’s petition was delayed because she decided to become a U.S. citizen in 2000—which immigration workers said meant she would have to refile his petition and start the whole process again.

“They said they could not process my petition because of my change in status,” she said. “It didn’t make sense. I felt so bad, but I had already taken my oath.”

Then she hired an attorney, who pressed the case under a provision of immigration law that says petitions filed by legal residents should continue to be processed if the residents become citizens.

“A mother always wants her children to be beside her, where she can see them and watch out for them,” Estacio said. “All the time, there was the suffering, the pressure.”

Now that her son is in Chicago, Estacio said, she is happy, and she doesn’t regret her decision to come to Chicago.

“Everybody was saying it was different here, that there were all these opportunities here,” she said. “I think it’s everybody’s dream, especially coming from a Third World country. Now that he is here, there are not words to express how happy I am.”


For more information, visit www.icirr.org; www.justiceforimmigrants.org; or archchicago.org.

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