U.S. Immigrant Protests Did Not Lead to Sympathy
(Angus Reid Global Scan) – 04/21/2006 – Many Americans are upset at the public
demonstrations organized by immigrants, according to a poll by Opinion
Dynamics released by Fox News. 71 per cent of respondents think it is
inappropriate for illegal immigrants to protest for changes in U.S. law.
Last
month, the Pew Hispanic Center calculated the number of undocumented
immigrants in the United States at somewhere between 11.5 million to 12
million. While California is home to most workers, Arizona, Georgia and
North Carolina have the greatest rates of increase.
On Apr.
10, protests against proposed immigration laws took place in 102
American cities. An estimated 500,000 people gathered in Dallas. Also,
an event called a “Day Without Immigrants”—meant to showcase the
importance of both legal and illegal immigrants—has been scheduled for
May 1. 47 per cent of respondents say the protests have made them less
likely to support easing immigration laws in the U.S.
In
December 2005, the House of Representatives passed a bill that seeks to
make it a felony to be in the U.S. illegally or to help an undocumented
person stay in the country. The proposal also calls for the
construction of a new 1,100 kilometre fence on the U.S.-Mexico border.
On
Apr. 6, several senators announced a compromise package that would
place illegal immigrants in three different groups depending on the
amount of time they have spent in the U.S. The plan, called the “roots
concept” by Republican lawmakers, would favour persons who have lived
in the U.S. for more than five years. The proposal was not ratified
before a two-week congressional break.
Polling Data
Do you think it is appropriate for immigrants who are in the United States illegally to protest for changes to U.S. law?
|
Yes |
26% |
|
No |
71% |
|
Don’t know |
3% |
Have
the immigration protests and demonstrations made you more or less
likely to support easing immigration laws in the United States?
|
More likely |
20% |
|
Less likely |
47% |
|
No difference |
25% |
|
Don’t know |
8% |
Source: Opinion Dynamics / Fox News
Methodology:
Telephone interviews with 900 registered American voters, conducted on
Apr. 18 and Apr. 19, 2006. Margin of error is 3 per cent.
Immigration or recession?
By Susan Strother Clarke
Via The Orlando Sentinel
As the great immigration debate continues, I’ve wondered about a couple of things.
What would happen to the U.S. economy if immigration — legal and illegal — stopped tomorrow?
Taking it a step further, what would happen if the 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants here now simply went away?
For answers, I turned to number-cruncher Mark Zandi, chief economist at
Moody’s Economy.com. He based his data not on emotion, but on the
things that economists look at, such as employment, income and buying
power.
Granted, my scenarios are extreme. When Congress
continues its discussion next week about illegal workers, it’s highly
unlikely that enough lawmakers would support either case.
Still, given the anti-immigrant rhetoric in some quarters, it’s interesting to play out the extremes.
Zandi tells me that if the United States could seal its borders and
stop all immigration, the country would be looking at a half-point
decline in growth of the gross domestic product.
Given that GDP
is projected to expand by 3.5 percent this year, a half-point slip
isn’t earth-shattering. But it’s not great, either.
For a
little perspective, Hurricane Katrina, with the unemployment and high
fuel costs it caused, shaved as much from the GDP as would an end to
all immigration.
But the real economic woes would start if the illegal immigrants already in the country flat-out went away.
Instead of expanding, the economy would shrink by 2.5 percent. What
does that feel like? Well, a decline even approaching that level hasn’t
happened since 1982, when the economy shrunk by 2 percent.
As
for an idea of what 1982 felt like, unemployment then averaged almost
10 percent and inflation was about double what it is now.
“If
the illegals left, relatively quickly, it would mean a fairly
measurable recession. We would have a year of negative numbers,” Zandi
said.
One year, maybe more. That’s because there wouldn’t be
enough people to fill certain jobs. About 6.5 million of the illegal
immigrants in this country are employed. That’s 4 percent of the work
force — and that’s a chunk of people who can’t be replaced overnight.
In Florida, the workers play big roles in citrus, tourism and
construction. Eventually, employers would be forced to pay more money,
and new people would move into some of the jobs.
But that would
take time. And prices would go up. The economy is like that old song
about the knee bone being connected to the leg bone. Everything is
entwined.
If I pay more for my food and house, I can’t afford
to buy a car. That means that someone loses a sale at the local
dealership, his family has less money to spend and so forth.
It’s also true that illegal immigrants suppress wages. That’s something that hurts the poorer native-born people.
But the low wages that are paid to illegal immigrants help the rest of the economy.
Said Zandi: “Adding up the winners and losers, with immigration, the economy overall benefits.”
That’s something all members of Congress should keep in mind.
A lesson in immigration
Guest worker experiments transformed Europe
BERLIN — Germany needed workers. Turks needed work.
So starting in 1961, the country invited Turkish ”guest workers” to come do the dirty jobs that Germans didn’t want.
Only
7,000 ”gastarbeiter,” as they were called, arrived that first year, a
curiosity in a country where non-European faces were rare. Press
flashbulbs popped. Politicians made speeches of welcome. Ordinary
Germans watched, bemused.
Nobody grasped that the country — and
the continent, because neighboring nations soon undertook similar
experiments — was on the brink of a transformation whose effects are
still reverberating across Europe.
In Berlin, which today ranks
as the largest ”Turkish” city outside Turkey, falafel stands and kebab
joints far outnumber eateries offering schnitzel. In the Dutch city of
Rotterdam, Islamic calls to prayer are as common as church chimes. In
the raw-knuckled housing projects ringing Paris, graffiti are more
likely to be scrawled in Arabic than in the language of Voltaire.
”The
idea, originally, was that the foreign workers would stay for as long
as economically necessary, then go home,” said Michael Bommes, director
of the Institute for Migration Research at Germany’s Osnabrueck
University. ”It didn’t quite go like that.”
As the US Congress
wrestles with comprehensive immigration reform, one idea under
discussion is a new program that would allow guest workers to enter the
country, but not necessarily to stay on and become citizens.
In
Germany, guest workers — mostly poorly educated young men who were
issued special visas allowing them entry for one or two years to take
unskilled jobs — helped the nation to become the third-richest in the
world. The fabulous post-war prosperity of France, the Netherlands,
Denmark, Sweden, and other West European countries was also boosted by
immigrant labor, mainly from Turkey and North Africa.
But more
recently, as economic growth has slowed, swelling numbers of Muslim
immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa — many of them
arriving without any visas, or overstaying their visas and melting into
the ethnic suburbs — are being blamed for social stresses from urban
blight to chaotic schools.
In the words of the late Swiss writer Max Frisch: ”We wanted workers, we got people.”
Here Illegally, but Choosing to Pay Taxes
Via LATimes.com
Some undocumented workers hope that by establishing a record of their
time in the United States, it will be easier to gain citizenship later.
They may be here illegally, but tens of thousands of undocumented
immigrants are expected to abide by Uncle Sam’s rules by filing tax
returns — with the hope of someday becoming U.S. citizens.
Though there is no way of knowing how many people are filing taxes in
response to the national debate on immigration, Southern California tax
preparers are seeing a steady stream of clients eager to be on record
as taxpayers.
“There has definitely been an increase,” said Noemi Munoz, a senior tax
advisor at H&R Block in Los Angeles. “After whatever they’ve heard
on TV, I guess that’s why they want to file taxes.”
Some illegal immigrants have long paid taxes through special
identification numbers issued by the Internal Revenue Service for
people who are not eligible for Social Security numbers — whether out
of a sense of duty or hope for eventual citizenship.
But now that the U.S. Senate is considering a broad proposal that
could lead to citizenship for migrants who have lived here for at least
two years, there is a greater incentive to file a tax return. Some are
pulling out their W-2s and heading to the nearest tax office — not just
to pay this year’s bill but to catch up on back taxes. In interviews,
many said they wanted to prove how long they had lived in the United
States and that they would be good citizens.
“It’s important for all of us to pay our taxes, to have proof
that we are working in this country,” said Efrain Santa Cruz, 44, an
illegal immigrant from Mexico who recently filed his return, “so
someday maybe they will give us papers.”
Tax Treaty Benefits For Students And Business Apprentices From India
Via ILW.com
The United States has
income tax treaties with over 60 countries, all of which provide exemption
from tax for residents of the treaty country who come to the United States
for the primary purpose of their education or training. U.S. treaty policy
as embodied in Article 20 of the U.S. Model Treaty is to provide tax
exemption for payments for full-time education and training that arise
outside the United States. Over one-half of the U.S. treaties provide for
such a limited benefit for students and trainees including Article 21(1)
of the treaty with India. However, the treaty with India provides an
additional benefit for students and business apprentices.
Response to a comment about the Detroit firing of 15 women- By Ashwin Sharma, Esq.
I received the following comment in response to my post
about the 15 women who were fired recently from a Detroit meatpacking plant for
attending an immigrant rights protest.
My response is below Jennifer’s * comment.
——————
They were fired “for standing up for their
rights,” Herrada said.
If they are citizens, they had no need to stand up for thier rights.
If they are illegal ( undocumented) or whatever PCs call them these days, then
.. They have no rights to stand up for…. except the right to go back where
they came from and try to enter legally.
Many people , legal, or otherwise have lost jobs for playing hooky. This is not
new. And if these people didn’t show up where they were needed, when they were
supposed to be there… well then… what can I say. They had a choice.
— Jennifer
——————-
Dismissing this situation by referring to it as ‘playing
hooky’ is like calling football a game of catch. These women were most likely fired for exercising a political opinion about the new undocumented
alien guest-worker proposal, with
which the owner of the plant obviously did not agree.
These 15 women, along with the other protesters, are exercising certain ‘unalienable rights’ (remember that
term?) contained within the Constitution, which also, by the way, does extend a
degree of protection to undocumented aliens. A peaceful protest is a type
of ‘release valve’, the value of which is recognized by most people and all political scientists. These gatherings are obviously
much preferable to violent outbursts and certainly more effective at
publicizing and changing unjust laws.
In reference to the undocumented alien question: laws need to be re-examined
often. Just because a law is ‘on the books’ does not necessarily make it
just or unchangeable. Laws which become outdated must be either amended
or eliminated. For example, your right to vote as a woman, which you probably
take for granted, did not exist until someone ‘played hooky’ and entered into
peaceful protests in the Women’s Suffrage movement. Others who were not directly affected by the law, and who didn’t ‘need’ to join did so regardless, because it was the right thing to do.
I am sure you would
refer to that movement and the 15th and 19th Constitutional Amendments which it
helped create as positive developments in our history. However, at the
time, many detractors disgustedly referred to Suffragists as ‘troublemakers who
needed to get back in the kitchen’. One senator predicted
that “disaster and ruin would overtake the nation.” Another
Representative argued that approving such a measure would “cause
irreparable damage at great expense to the state.”
We have insufficient, ineffective and unjust laws regulating the lives of 11-12 million people in America. However, we have been given an opportunity to raise our voices to defend those who have no voice of their own. They must be extended rights and allowed to contribute to this country through a reasonable fine ($2000 has
been proposed) and their share of income taxes. We can use the tens of billions of
dollars they will happily provide the Government each year to strongly
supplement financing for border security, health care programs and education. We also need them to strengthen our economy by performing jobs Americans don’t want, expanding our industrial infrastructure and combating the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to China. The only other alternative is to allow the unchecked exploitation of these
people’s labor while pretending that we have the physical ability and funds to find/hold/process/remove all of these people.
An ideal democracy is a system of Government in which the weakest minority has the
same voice as the strongest majority. A great many people have received assistance in crossing the bridge to the American Dream
but are now frantically burning and cutting away at it to prevent
others from crossing. I urge all of you reading to spend several hours
investigating the facts and history surrounding the undocumented alien question.
There is no doubt in my mind that the guest-worker program endorsed by the
President and the ‘earned legalization’ proposal are the best solutions to this
problem for both sides.
— Ashwin Sharma
* Commenter’s name has been changed.
Why the Immigration Deal Flopped – Via Time.com
Politics wins out, as a compromise plan falls apart. But don’t count out immigration reform just yet.
Talk about cold feet. Less than 24 hours after the leaders of the
Senate’s Democratic and Republican families had announced a marriage of
convenience on immigration reform, Minority Leader Harry Reid ditched
his Republican counterpart Bill Frist at the altar Friday, blocking the
bi-partisan bill he had backed the day before. Stunned Senators headed
to their home states for a two-week Easter recess, furious over the
break-up. “It’s a war,” said Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter.
Even members of Reid’s own party, most notably Senator Ted Kennedy, who
had worked for five years on an effective amnesty for the country’s
millions of illegal immigrants, was said to be furious.
Disappointed
members of both parties say it was Reid’s election-year ambitions that
ultimately doomed the immigration bill. The Democrats have a legitimate
chance to take back control of the Senate in November, and for a
life-long politician like Reid, few things are more important than the
opportunity to lead the world’s greatest deliberative body, his critics
say. A victory for Bill Frist on an issue as nationally charged as
immigration would not help the Democrats come election day. “It’s not
gone forward because there’s a political advantage for the Democrats not
to have an immigration bill,” Specter said.
But it’s not that
simple. After all, Reid had been ready to walk down the aisle Thursday
night, largely because the compromise he, Frist and 63 other Senators
had embraced was as close to perfect as any bill the Democrats could
hope for. It followed Ted Kennedy’s plan to put most of the country’s 12
million illegal immigrants (except for the estimated one million or so
who have been in the U.S. for less than two years) on an eventual path
to citizenship and open up a massive new legal immigration system for
low-wage workers; at the same time, it would have removed many of the
draconian penalties that were in a bill passed by the House last
December.
In retrospect, however, it may have been too perfect.
After initially signing on, Reid decided he might be walking into a
trap. Some Republicans wanted to vote on amendments that Reid believed
would have essentially picked apart the compromise plan; under one of
them, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security would have had
to certify that the border was secure before any illegal immigrants
could be made legal.
What’s more, even if he could defeat the
amendments, any bill the Senate passed would have to go into a
conference committee with the House — which wants to build a wall
along much of the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalize all illegal immigrants
in the U.S., and dramatically increase the penalties against those who
help them, from businesses to churches. Looking several moves ahead in a
game of legislative chess, Reid feared that the conference would produce
something that looked more like the House bill, which currently has no
amnesty provisions for making current illegals citizens, than the Senate
version.
Granted, when such a watered down bill came back to the
Senate, Reid could still block it by filibustering. But in a election
year, Reid knew that could be political suicide, forcing fellow
Democrats to vote against a bill Republicans would portray as securing
America’s broken borders. Those Democrats who were around in the last
mid-term election are still smarting from the votes they cast against
the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, an issue
Republicans cashed in handily at the polls. Giving Frist another
National Security vote to beat the Democrats with, they feared, was a
sure fire way to let Republicans maintain control of the Senate this
fall.
Reid had tried to get some kind of guarantee from Frist that
Republican Senators would support only the Senate version in conference,
and over the last 24 hours, Sen. John McCain worked to sign colleagues
on for just such an assurance. Frist’s chief of staff, Eric Ueland,
tried to be reassuring. “The Senate will defend the Senate position,” he
said. But Reid wanted more than that. “We have no safety net here,” says
a top Reid aide, “The Republicans have the President, the Senate and the
House.” In negotiations that lasted all night, Reid’s staff insisted on
a say in the make-up of the conference committee, but Frist wouldn’t
budge. “No majority leader is going to sign away the power of the office
or turn a weaker majority leader’s gavel over to his successors,” Ueland
said Friday.
In the end, Reid chose the only other way to avoid the
potential trap, which was to walk away from the deal.Yet that deal is
not completely dead. Specter vowed Friday that he would take the
compromise up in committee first thing on his return to Washington and
would send it to the Senate floor a week later.
Frist has not said
whether he will bring it back to the floor for a vote, but two things
could affect that decision. Serious pressure from the White House to get
a deal — pressure that so far, despite the President’s occasional
public statements, has been virtually non-existent — could move
Republicans forward. Or a backlash against the massive protests planned
by pro-immigration groups in coming days could make them dig in their
heels. The Senate’s dealmakers —John McCain, Ted Kennedy, Chuck
Hagel, Mel Martinez, Barack Obama and others — say they will continue
their weekly meetings in search of a compromise. For now though, as
Kennedy put it in what amounted to a major understatement, “politics got
in front of policy.”
Immigrant Issues Are Personal for Bush
Associates say he has long had a comfort level with Mexicans and their
culture. In a 2004 campaign video, he waved a Mexican flag.
MIDLAND, Texas — Cecilia Ochoa Levine was a Mexican trying to make it
in America. But when she hit upon a promising business opportunity, to
make knapsacks south of the border to sell in the United States, she
could not get the trade permits she needed.
And so Levine asked for help from a longtime friend in Texas, where she had been a legal resident for many years.
The friend was George W. Bush.
Within a week, Levine was on a plane to Washington for a meeting with
trade officials. And soon after, she had the papers to expand her
business, creating dozens of jobs at plants in El Paso and Ciudad
Juarez, Mexico.
Not everyone would have been willing to use his influence to help a
Mexican citizen start a company, particularly one creating jobs in
Mexico as well as in the U.S. But Bush’s actions of 21 years ago help
explain why today, as president, he is striking an unusually nuanced
tone on the emotional question of immigration policy — a stance that
has placed him at odds with the conservative Republicans who have long
formed the base of his political support.
“Here was this single mother, Mexican, no money, starting a tiny little
business,” recalled Levine. She phoned Bush because his father was then
vice president and “he was willing to use his connections in Washington
to help me out. He understood it would mean jobs for poor people.”
Long before the immigration fight that is rattling the nation, Bush
developed a picture of immigration from his life in Midland, where he
knew Levine and other Mexican immigrants personally and came to see
both sides of the border as part of the same universe.
A three-hour drive from Mexico, Midland did not have the feel of such
border cities as El Paso, but it saw a wave of Mexican immigration long
before many other communities across the South and the West. It is
where Bush spent many of his childhood years and where he later
returned to start an oil exploration business.
What Bush learned in Midland shaped his ability to appeal to Latino
voters and foreshadowed what could be one of his most important
legacies: helping the Republican Party compete for the nation’s
fast-growing political constituency.
In pursuit of the American dream
Via http://www.TowardFreedom.com
Written by Laura Carlsen
Wednesday, 29 March 2006
Bad Blood on the Border
Guillermo Martinez was only 20 years old when he was
shot in the back at close range by an agent of the U.S. Border Patrol
in the state of California on December 30, 2005. Scores of migrants
have been shot by U.S. immigration enforcement officers. Most fail to
make the headlines. But Martinez’s death comes at the same time as a
series of measures to further criminalize migrants—measures that are
likely to increase the chances that more young men and women lose their
lives on what has become the world’s most contradictory border.
House Bill 4437,
also known as the Sensenbrenner bill after its sponsor, was passed in
the lower house last December. The bill calls for making illegal entry
into the United States a felony, building approximately 700 miles of
fence to staunch the flow of immigrants, and beefing up border
security.
Both the title—”The Border
Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Control Act”—and the logic of
the law locate immigration squarely within the purview of the war
against terrorism. But using an anti-terrorism lens on immigration
issues obscures a much different reality.
Seeking Survival
The
immigration phenomenon is really a question of labor flows. When the
United States, Canada, and Mexico entered into the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) they created an instrument to facilitate the
crossborder movement of money and goods but ignored the third
ingredient of production: human beings. Many of the transformations of
the Mexican economy wrought by NAFTA — including a reduction in
subsistence “non-competitive” farming to the tune of two million
displaced farmers, the loss of small and medium-sized national
industry, and greater inequality in income distribution — have fed the
boom in out-migration. High unemployment, or in the case of Mexico, underemployment since
the lack of unemployment benefits means everyone does something even if
it’s only washing windshields at stoplights, leads increasing numbers
to seek gainful employment in the relatively high-wage north.
Their
employment in the U.S. economy is a form of outsourcing within national
boundaries. They work as a sub-layer of the labor force that earns
less, has fewer benefits, and enjoys almost no legal protection under
laws that refuse to recognize their very existence.
For
better or for worse, the U.S. economy depends on immigrant labor. Just
weeks after Martinez was shot, Arizona’s governor announced a proposal
to import 25,000 legal day-workers from the neighboring state of Sonora
to harvest the state’s winter crops. In addition to agriculture, the
services sector throughout the country also harbors a growing
dependence on immigrant labor.
Senate panel breathes sanity into immigration debate
Via MercuryNews.com
03/29/2006
JUDICIARY COMMITTEE WISELY TONES DOWN NOXIOUS ENFORCEMENT PROVISIONS
Mercury News Editorial
With the support of President Bush and the voices of hundreds of
thousands of protesters ringing in their ears, the Senate Judiciary
Committee this week restored balance to the debate over immigration.
Its bill, which now goes to the full Senate, has all the elements of
a solution that has eluded Congress and divided the nation: tougher
border protections, a guest-worker program for new immigrants,
sanctions against companies that don’t comply and an opportunity — not
a guarantee — for immigrants already here illegally to seek permanent
residency. Close to what Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Edward
Kennedy, D-Mass., have proposed, the bill is not the inverse of the
provocative and punitive legislation passed by House Republicans last
year: It is a reasoned alternative to it.
Whether reason prevails during the next two weeks of debate in the
Senate is another matter. The bill is a long way from becoming law.
Though the Democrats on the committee, including Sen. Dianne
Feinstein, united behind it, the bill had the support of only four of
10 Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, putting his
presidential ambitions above the wishes of the president, is
threatening to pull rank and put his own enforcement-only bill at the
top of the pile.
Even if the Senate does pass a comprehensive immigration bill, it
must be reconciled with the House bill. Republican conservatives so far
remain obstinate that they will consider only border security this year.
Sen. Arlen Specter bill would provide for more H-1B visa numbers
A bill being drafted by Sen.
Arlen Specter, who chairs the Senate judiciary committee overseeing immigration issues, is proposing to increase the number of
H-1B visas issued annually from 65,000 to 115,000, with an option to
increase the cap yearly by 20%. A spokeswoman for Specter says details
of the proposal are still being worked out. However, the committee is
slated to discuss immigration legislation on March. 27.
The U.S. Immigration Law Blog by Ashwin Sharma 
Struggle on two fronts
Via TimesDispatch.com
Soldier fights in Iraq, wife battles deportation efforts
Sgt. Elhadji Mansour Ba has too much on his mind for a man in a combat zone.
He’s fighting for his country, while his country is trying to deport his wife.
Ba is working in one of Iraq’s most dangerous provinces, al-Anbar,
near the Syrian border. It’s his second tour in Iraq for the U.S. Army,
this time backing up Marines who are fighting the insurgency.
“I cannot protect my family when I am far away trying to protect our country,” he said.
So, Ba, 32, is leaving his post there temporarily to defend his
wife, Nana Diallo, at a hearing tomorrow in U.S. Immigration Court in
Arlington County. He is a member of the 506th Quartermaster Company,
based at Fort Lee.
He reported to the unit on Aug. 20, three days after the government ordered his wife into removal proceedings.
A native of Senegal, Diallo, 33, faces deportation to her country of
citizenship, France, for staying here long after her temporary visa
waiver expired nine years ago. The Department of Homeland Security also
has accused her of fraud because of the mistakes her husband said he
made on the application to allow her to remain here legally.
“I was confused,” Ba said in a phone interview from Iraq last week.
Diallo is a military wife in a waiting game, living in a neat home
in Colonial Heights with the couple’s son, Ibrahim, who will turn 5
next week. The child is a U.S. citizen, as is his father, who was born
in Senegal but naturalized in 2000.
“I don’t know what I am going to do,” she said.
Anita R. Schneider, her immigration lawyer, is a little perplexed,
too. Diallo’s plight won’t be easy to solve because she went to Paris
with her husband last summer to obtain a visa from the U.S. Consulate
there. She got the visa, but she technically hasn’t been allowed back
into the country.
If Diallo had stayed in the United States, she could have gotten
legal permanent residence as the wife of a U.S. citizen. Now, the
government regards her as an “arriving alien,” not someone who has
lived here since 1997.
The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not comment
on Diallo’s case. The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection said her
case doesn’t meet the criteria for a humanitarian parole.
Diallo and her husband traveled to Paris in late June, a few days
after Ba re-enlisted in the Army. They had married in 2003, while he
was home on leave from his first tour of duty in Iraq. After he
returned in early 2004, he started the process of making his wife’s
presence in the country legal.
The problem was, he thought his wife and son would join him in
Germany, where he was stationed with the 147th Ordinance Unit. He put
Germany as her home address, which the government later would cite as
one instance of alleged fraud. The National Visa Center instructed them
to travel to Paris for the visa because Diallo is a French citizen.
Diallo went to the consulate in France and received the visa in late
July. When she returned home she was stopped at Dulles International
Airport, where border and customs officials questioned her. They didn’t
detain her but gave her deferred inspection status to sort out the
problems they found with her papers.
They wanted to know why she had put Germany as her home address.
They also wanted to know why she had answered “no” instead of “yes” to
a question that asked whether she had been unlawfully present in the
United States for more than a year. It was part of a larger question
about whether she had ever committed an aggravated felony and been
ordered to be removed from the country.
“I did not think that this described the wife of a U.S. soldier who
had never been in trouble,” Ba explained in an affidavit last month.
Ba also mistakenly said in another part of the application that
Diallo had overstayed her visa waiver from 1997 through 2003, instead
of 2005. Her lawyer, Schneider, said the error was immaterial because
they had not tried to conceal her illegal status. “There was no fraud,”
she said in exasperation.
This was the type of problem the couple had tried to avoid when Ba
completed the papers for his wife. “He was telling me he was going to
do everything because he didn’t want me to make any mistakes,” Diallo
said.
The biggest mistake of all was leaving the country to process her
visa. Not only did Diallo become inadmissible, but she also faced a
10-year bar from returning because she had lived here illegally for so
long. They didn’t know that because they didn’t have a lawyer.
“We would have said, ‘Don’t leave the country, no, no, no!'” Schneider said.
Tomorrow, Schneider will ask an immigration judge to grant Diallo a
waiver of the 10-year bar so that she can formally enter the country
and adjust her status.
Ba is traveling from Iraq to attend the hearing. He’s an
automated-logistics specialist, but his duties there range from setting
up portable showers to manning a gun truck.
He moves constantly in dangerous territory. He worries about his wife and son.
“I keep saying to myself, what’s going to happen to them if something happens to me?”