Illegal Immigrants

Before I left the United States, I didn’t have a lot of friends who weren’t US Citizens. There were the Mexicans who I knew from church, but I hadn’t really stopped to think about where they came from.

When I moved to Spain, I was amazed by how many cultures and countries fit into Madrid. There were people from everywhere, and since I attended an international school, there were even more in my classes.

I lived in Spain during the time of the boom. Everyone wanted to live in Spain because it was doing so well, and because there were so many opportunities. The immigration system was a little bit different than it is here. For many of them, if they could last several years without being caught as illegal, and if they could prove that they’d lived, and served as upright people in the country, they could obtain their residency. That was an opportunity that many couldn’t resist. It’s not to say that they didn’t come with any risks. The main form of transportation, the metro, was always considered a trap. There would be random checkpoints where everyone trying to get onto the train had to show their paperwork.

I’m not quite sure when I realized how many of my friends were illegal immigrants from different countries. For me, they were just my friends. But after a while, I started to notice that those of us with papers would go into the metro stations before others, and then we would call up if they weren’t doing checks.

There was one evening, when we had an activity that ran over, that two of my friends ran to the metro before they were late. One of the girls had her paperwork, and the other didn’t, and that was the night when they were doing checks in the metro. They caught my friend, and she was deported back to her country.

It was quite a sobering experience for me, since I’d never had to live with the fear of being deported. I’d never left my country hoping for a better life, or for an opportunity to live in a better place. The way my husband described Spain was: “It’s like the American dream, but in a country where we could speak the language.”

It’s amazing how fortunate we are to have the opportunity to live in a country where dreams are made possible. Where we don’t feel like we have to escape to be able to have a fulfilling life. I wish that this opportunity could be true for everyone.

Checkpoint Equality

I don’t think I really started paying attention to racial profiling until I met my husband. Maybe because I’m the kind of Asian that doesn’t stand out. Or maybe because I’m so used to being treated a certain way that I don’t even stop to think about it.

Right after we got married, hubby and I moved to a big city with a lot of different kinds of people. I grew up in a town where most everyone looked the same. Once I moved there, I really learned that not everyone is treated the same.

Hubby got pulled over a lot. Not for speeding, but just for acting suspiciously. Or just randomly. In the half mile between our apartment complex and my work, they would randomly have check points on major holidays and over weekends, just to check and make sure people weren’t driving while drunk or high. There was one night that hubby had to pick me up, and he was randomly stopped on the way to pick me up, and then again randomly stopped on the way back home once he had me. Fortunately, he hasn’t ever done anything illegal, so he’s let off without an issue.

But it does beg the question. People hear his accent and they see his skin color and they’re put on guard. Even when in his own neighborhood, he’s treated with more scrutiny than most everyone else. Even me.

He's not the only one.

Several years ago, I got stranded in the Newark airport. There had been a bad blizzard, and all flights had been canceled for 24 hours. Since I spent most of the two days in line, I got to know the few people who were trying to make the same flight as me. One was a very sweet woman from Scotland, and we ended up spending the day together. Ironically, every single time we went through a check point, she was randomly selected to be searched. Three times it happened, while I was never chosen. She had become very flustered by the end, feeling like she’d been singled out for a reason.

I never noticed it before, because I don’t think it happens as much to me. But when I’m with others, I realize that equality is still a dream, and we’ve still got a ways to go.

Country of Origin

When I was a brand new nurse in Saint Louis, I had one of the best jobs ever. The facility was definitely better than most of the other ones I’ve worked in, and the staff quickly became some of my closest friends. I worked the evening shift, and most of my CNAs were from Africa – mostly from the Kenya/Zambia regions.

I had two particular CNAs that I became very close with. We used to have a lot of fun pulling pranks on one another, and keeping the environment light.

I quickly learned that our points of view were very different on a lot of matters, but the biggest one was marriage and country of heritage. They were both devout Christians and took a literal approach on the man and the woman becoming one during marriage. Since my husband is Bolivian, they would ask me about Bolivia as though it was my country of origin.

Questions like:

In your country, do you eat…

I was reading about your country and it said…

At first, I was confused. My country is the USA. I was born here, and I was raised here. But these two CNAs kept asking me about my country of origin, Bolivia, because in marrying a Bolivian, they believed that I had become a Bolivian as well.

It soon became a running joke for us, mostly because they realized that they could get me aggravated pretty quickly when they asked those kind of questions.

“In your country, do you have salad like this?”

“I don’t know. In Colorado, where I grew up, we ate it. So what do you think?” 

Immigration Heritage

My name is Krista. My last name is Quintana. And I’m Asian. Most people assume Quintana is an Asian name, mostly because of how similar it sounds to katana. (The Qu is like quesadilla, or quiche. Has a hard K sound. Also, it’s Spanish, not Japanese.) No one even questions my last name.

My first name is a different story. I can’t count the number of times people are surprised by it. I had a patient’s husband come up to talk to me, and after we talked about the patient, he looked at my nametag and said, “Krista with a ‘k’. That’s different.”

I replied with, “Yup. It’s because of my Swedish heritage.”

He laughed. “Swedish, right.” After that, whenever he saw me, he would say, “There’s that Swedish nurse.”

He thought I was joking. But aside from my mother, who was adopted from Japan, the most recent immigrant in my family heritage is my Great Grandmother who came from Stockholm, Sweden. In fact, after Japanese, I’m probably the highest percent Swedish.

I’m proud of that heritage. I love my Great Grandmother, and I’ve learned about her life. I even wrote an essay about her when I was in sixth grade. She’s one of my role models, even if I don’t look like her.

We are all children of immigrants. They all came to the US for different reasons, but they all gave us a legacy. I’m grateful for the sacrifices they made for me.

Illegal Immigrants

It’s no secret that I’ve had to deal with immigration. When I moved to Spain, I had to get a student visa, which included going out to California to deal with the Embassy.

After I started dating my hubby, we dealt with immigration going the other way. After we’d been dating a few months, I really wanted him to meet my family. We arranged for him to come over Christmas, and he applied for a visitor’s visa.

Everything went well, and he went in for his interview. No more than a few minutes later, he got the response.

Denied.

We tried again over the summer, and same answer.

Denied

Finally, the next Christmas, we pulled out all the stops. My dad wrote a letter to the government, saying that my boyfriend was a personal guest, and that he would take responsibility for any of his actions.

Again, Denied.

Before he left the interview, my hubby asked the interviewer to please explain what he was doing wrong. Three times couldn’t be a mistake. He wasn’t on any lists, and he didn’t have a criminal record.

The interviewer was compassionate, and he let my hubby on a secret.

He wouldn’t ever get a visitor’s visa. He was poor, young, and a male from South America. Three strikes, which meant they couldn’t trust him to not stay illegally and work. Despite everything we’d done, to prove we were in a relationship, even though the plane tickets we’d bought were round trip. Those three little things kept him from meeting my family.

Is it any wonder why the immigration system seems broken? People who actually pay to enter are punished, and those who can’t afford it, or who don’t want to do it legally can find a way? Every time I hear about the illegal immigrants, I think about that experience. Maybe they were too frustrated, trying to do it legally, that they were forced into doing it illegally. Maybe, in trying to protect our borders, we’ve only made them weaker. If we could fix the gate, we might not need to monitor the wall so much.

How We Obtained the K1 Fiancee Visa: Part 2

For those of you who missed the party, here’s the link to Part 1

After several months of waiting, we finally got approval from the USCIS for my petition for my fiancée to apply for a K1 Fiancée Visa.

Next step was filing out the next bundle of paperwork.

Hubby had to fill out:

• Form DS-160
• Birth Certificate
• Police certificate from Bolivia and Spain
• Medical Examination (including up-to-date vaccinations)
• Affidavit for support (someone to help them out when they first arrive)
• Evidence of relationship with fiancée
• Fee (because, of course, you need to pay money)

It took a while to collect everything, especially since we were living in Madrid, and most of the documents we needed were in Bolivia. Trying to coordinate between Spain, Bolivia and United States was quite a headache.

Another issue we dealt with was the expectation of US vaccinations vs other countries. Hubby had to get revaccinated, and receive even more when he finally entered the US. 

With the evidence of a relationship, we had to prove we’d actually met each other and spent time together. We sent copies of confirmations of my plane tickets to Madrid, and we had to send copies of pictures of the two of us, time stamped, with different dates.

Once we sent all of that paperwork in, we had to wait several months before getting a response. To get the final approval, we both had to go into the embassy for interviews.

I know what you’re thinking. Forget everything you saw in The Proposal. The interviews were nothing like that. We had to go up to a window, in public, and talk through the glass. I had to again prove I’m from the US, and to prove our relationship was legitimate. We weren’t asked obscure questions. They basically asked the same information we’d already given in all the paperwork. They interviewed hubby in the same way.

Then we had to wait, again, for them to send the visa through the mail. This part seemed the longest because we were running against the clock. We finally got the visa two days before we flew to the US.

Before entering the US, before getting onto the plane, they went through the paperwork, in the airport. That was quite stressful, because we only had a half-hour layover in Ireland, and I was worried we wouldn’t make the flight. But they just wanted to make sure everything was in order and stamped and approved.

Once we arrived in the US, we had 90 days to get married. Since we weren’t even sure if we’d get the approval we wanted, it was a quick, crazy few months, planning everything out.

But it worked out in the end.

How We Obtained the K1 Fiancee Visa: Part 1

I met hubby when I was living in Spain. We dated for six months and a few months before I went home for the summer, we started talking about getting married. We decided to do it in Madrid because his family was already there, and it’s easier for my American family to travel to Spain than it is for his Bolivian family to get visas to enter the US.

The more we researched, the more we realized that a K1 Fiancee visa was a much better option than a K3, or nonimmigrant visa. Here’s the main differences:

K1 (Fiancee):

•     This is when an American citizen marries a non-American citizen in the United States, but the fiancée cannot already be living in the United States
•     All paperwork must be filed and approved before the marriage takes place
•     Wait time (this was back in 2008) 6-12 months
•     Work permit within 90 days, temporary green card within a year

K3 (Nonimigrant):

•      This is when an American citizen marries a non-American citizen outside of the United States
•      All of the paperwork must be filed after the marriage takes place
•      Wait time (back in 2008) was 12-18 months until the visa is obtained, the spouse cannot move to the US
•      It also takes longer to get a work visa/permit and a green card

Once we decided on the K1 Visa, the first step was for me to file a petition. This was the part that confused us the most. I thought we were filling paperwork for hubby’s visa. Before that could happen, I needed to prove that as his fiancée, I was an American citizen and petition the government for permission for my fiancée to apply for a visa.

Sounds pretty easy, right? I’ve been a citizen my entire life. But along with a 6 page form, called the I-129F, I also needed proof of citizenship. Notarized birth certificate, social security card, background check, all sorts of stuff. Along with all of that, I needed to give evidence that my hubby and I were planning to get married. We were told a receipt for the engagement ring is usually what most people use.

The problem?

He hadn’t proposed yet.

What I didn’t know was that he’d ordered my ring from Bolivia, and because of blocks on packages in and out of the country, even though he ordered it in July, it didn’t arrive in Madrid until December.

We started the paperwork in August because we wanted the visa by that spring. Fortunately, I had my wedding dress because I wanted to get it while I was in the US for the summer. So we used the receipt for my dress and the reservation for our wedding.

Once we collected all of that info (which was difficult, considering I wasn’t in the country), we sent it in. We finished it all in September.

After that, we waited for several months.

Part 2 coming next week!