{"id":8235,"date":"2018-02-07T08:33:03","date_gmt":"2018-02-07T14:33:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=8235"},"modified":"2018-02-07T08:33:03","modified_gmt":"2018-02-07T14:33:03","slug":"two-incomplete-immigration-anecdotes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/02\/two-incomplete-immigration-anecdotes.html","title":{"rendered":"Two (incomplete) immigration anecdotes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

The first<\/strong>, from an article in the Chicago Tribune, \u201cA Kansas chemistry professor got his kids ready for school \u2014 then ICE arrested him on his front lawn<\/a>,\u201d goes like this:<\/p>\n

a 55-year-old father of three,\u00a0 Syed Ahmed Jamal, an immigrant from Bangladesh who\u2019s been in the U.S. for 30 years, with\u00a0graduate degrees in molecular biosciences and pharmaceutical engineering, whose 5 siblings are American citizens, who regularly volunteers at his children\u2019s school, who had had an H1-B and student visa in the past and now had a work permit, was inexplicably detained by ICE agents for no particular reason.<\/p>\n

No particular reason, that is, that the reporter, or the family, cares to share with the readers, except by reading between the lines and making some guesses.<\/p>\n

Jamal reportedly had an H1-B visa at some point, then a student visa as a Ph.D. student, but that program \u201cdid not work out.\u201d\u00a0 Then he \u201ckind of went out of status\u201d according to his brother \u2014 a very passive statement that presumably means that, leaving the Ph.D. program, no longer had a valid visa but nonetheless stayed in the country.\u00a0 There is no mention of his wife sponsoring him, and his children are specifically referred to as American citizens, but not his wife; if she were a legal permanent resident, she should still have been able to sponsor him, unless he had done something that had triggered a 3 or 10 year bar.\u00a0 Or was she also an illegal immigrant, but not subject to the deportation order?\u00a0 And did he quit the job for the doctoral program, or did he lose that job?\u00a0 Strictly speaking, H1-B visas offer no guarantee of permanence.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the story continues:<\/p>\n

In 2011, after Jamal\u2019s visa status became invalid, he was given a \u201cvoluntary departure\u201d order. The following year, an immigration judge ruled that Jamal was allowed to remain in the country, as long as he checked in with ICE regularly to maintain his work permit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article implies that this means that Jamal was given the equivalent of a suspended sentence, clearance to live in the United States indefinitely.\u00a0 But that\u2019s not what a \u201cvoluntary departure order\u201d is; according to the magic of the internet<\/a>, this is an order that means that one is given an indeterminate length of time to get one\u2019s affairs in order and leave in a dignified manner.\u00a0 The work permit is not meant to be a promise of long-term residence but simply a matter of permission to support oneself while one does so.\u00a0 To be sure, this system has morphed into a perception of a promise of indefinite residence, but, strictly speaking, that\u2019s not what it is.\u00a0 Someone living her under those conditions has no legal right to be here.<\/p>\n

We also don\u2019t know under what conditions the 2011 \u201cvoluntary departure\u201d order was issued; given how infrequently the government actually takes action against illegal immigrants, what was it that triggered this in the first place?<\/p>\n

In general, I\u2019m sure that the family is sympathetic, but I can\u2019t help but think we\u2019re not being told the whole story.<\/p>\n

The second<\/strong>, from \u201cThere are 750 Canadian \u2018Dreamers\u2019 facing possible deportation from U.S. after Trump decision,<\/a>\u201d in the Canadian National Post, <\/em>highlights an insufferably whiny 27 year-old woman who is one of 750 illegal immigrants from Canada currently with DACA work authorization.\u00a0 \u201cThey spell their words funny there,\u201d she says, which is labelled as \u201cjoking about the situation\u201d but the joke, to me, falls flat.<\/p>\n

The woman,\u00a0Leezia Dhalla, attended Northwestern University, and now works for Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s political action group Fwd.us.<\/p>\n

The Post reports,<\/p>\n

Jason Finkelman, an Austin, Tex.-based immigration lawyer who has a handful of Canadian Dreamer clients, says most entered the U.S. on their parents\u2019 work or study visas, then overstayed with their families and become undocumented.<\/p>\n

Abandoning the country they consider home for Canada would be a \u201chuge\u201d dislocation, especially since many left when they were small children and have no close family or friends here, he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Dhalla\u2019s case,<\/p>\n

Dhalla\u2019s story began with a flat housing market in Edmonton, which convinced her realtor father to buy a business in Texas in the mid-1990s, then obtain a visa that allowed the family to follow him south.<\/p>\n

Her childhood was marked by regular visits to the immigration lawyer, but attempts to get permanent residency floundered, partly because of red-tape errors: an employer who filed papers late, and another who sold his business before the Canadians\u2019 application could be processed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But something doesn\u2019t hang together here.\u00a0 Are her parents still illegal residents?\u00a0 Were they somehow able to get residency for themselves but not for their children?\u00a0 Or did they manage to stay legal with a string of temporary visas?\u00a0 Why, if he bought a business in Texas, was he looking to get residency through employers?\u00a0 And once these attempts fell apart \u2014 and the article doesn\u2019t provide any timing \u2014 why wouldn\u2019t the family simply have moved back to Canada, especially since the oil boom has brought greater prosperity to their hometown?\u00a0 Or were Dhalla\u2019s parents not citizens of Canada, and therefore gave up their permanent residency in Canada upon moving<\/a>, and living long-term in the United States, so that the cause she\u2019s fighting for is not just her own ability to stay here, but her parents\u2019, as well?<\/p>\n

(And, separately, how did she afford Northwestern without being eligible for financial aid?)<\/p>\n

Quite honestly, making the claim that these young adults are just as in need of legalization as someone whose native country is poor, violence-wracked, or uses a language in which the person cannot read and write fluently, really just makes the whole thing ludicrous.\u00a0 Yes, of course, no one wants to move when they don\u2019t have to.\u00a0 But a move to Canada would be little different than a move to elsewhere in the United States, say, for family or work reasons, in all the essentials.\u00a0 Yes, she\u2019d have to get used to the metric system, and, with her degree in journalism, she\u2019d have an editor correcting her spelling of color and honor and theater until she changed her auto-correct to British English.\u00a0 She laments that it would imperil her dream of becoming a lawyer, \u201cafter an education founded in U.S. politics and law\u201d (is this a real problem?) and that she\u2019d be \u201cseparated from friends in the States\u201d (life lesson:\u00a0 your friends at age 27 are not necessarily going to be lifelong friends, and plenty of them will move out-of-town anyway).\u00a0 But if her primary concern is with Mom & Dad\u2019s status, and the fact that, if she returned to Canada, they wouldn\u2019t be able to follow her, or even visit her, well, it\u2019s misleading not to say so.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, a link in this story takes one to a list of countries of birth of DACA recipients, and most of these are Third-World-type countries.\u00a0 But there are 500 individuals born in the UK, and 360 born in Israel, and even 220 born in Germany \u2014 but in these cases, too, it may be that, regardless of their country of birth, they or their parents lacked citizenship there.<\/p>\n

So look, in both cases, I know what I\u2019m writing comes off as heartless, but I\u2019m really getting tired of journalists and policy advocates and politicians who consider illegal immigration and long term illegal residence (including the under-the-table or forged-ID work that comes along with it) as something absolutely ordinary and routine and, if technically illegal, only in the same way as a rolling stop at a stop sign or driving 30 in a 25 mph zone, of no real moral significance at all, and just another action that one can take to improve one\u2019s lot in life, especially if you\u2019ve made good-faith efforts to become a legal resident and are \u201cthe kind of person we want in this country\u201d as opposed to the shiftless layabout native-born poor.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image:\u00a0https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/ret0dd\/5708625905<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first, from an article in the Chicago Tribune, \u201cA Kansas chemistry professor got his kids ready for school \u2014 then ICE arrested him on his front lawn,\u201d goes like this: a 55-year-old father of three,\u00a0 Syed Ahmed Jamal, an immigrant from Bangladesh who\u2019s been in the U.S. for 30 years, with\u00a0graduate degrees in molecular […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[742,741,463],"class_list":["post-8235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-daca","tag-dream-act","tag-illegal-immigration"],"yoast_head":"\nTwo (incomplete) immigration anecdotes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The first, from an article in the Chicago Tribune, "A Kansas chemistry professor got his kids ready for school \u2014 then ICE arrested him on his front 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