BOISE, Idaho and QUERÉTARO, Mexico—Independent journalist Nathaniel Hoffman and writer-in-exile Nicole Salgado successfully raised enough funds—almost $12,000—to deliver copies of their new book, Amor and Exile: True Stories of Love Across America’s Borders, to every member of Congress. 228 individuals from a supporter base of over 500 people representing more than 28 states underwrote the “Send Amor and Exile to Washington” campaign. Hoffman and Salgado will travel to Washington, D.C. on June 12 and 13 to shed light on the plight of American citizens forced to live underground or in exile because of their relationships with undocumented immigrants.
“My memoir in Amor and Exile tells of my twelve-year experience being negatively affected by immigration law, and I’m excited that our elected representatives will finally have the opportunity to read about families like mine while they’re debating the biggest overhaul of our immigration laws in decades,” said Salgado, who lives in Querétaro, Mexico with her husband, Margarito, who is banned from returning to the United States for at least three more years. “It’s so gratifying to receive such overwhelming support from the broader community in sending our message—the stories of many—to Congress when it’s needed most.”
Hoffman and Salgado outside Salgado’s home in Querétaro, Mexico
Across the United States, American citizens are forced underground, exiled abroad and separated from their spouses for a surprising reason. Amor and Exile is the story of these Americans—including Veronica, Ben, J.W., and Nicole—who fall in love with undocumented immigrants only to find themselves trapped in a legal labyrinth, stymied by their country’s de facto exclusion of their partners.
Hoffman, who covered immigration at newspapers for a decade, found the frustration that American citizens face when they marry immigrants who are subject to bans—or who are not even eligible for family-based visas in the case of gay and lesbian couples—was one of the most misunderstood aspects of our immigration system.
“Every time I explain what the book is about, someone insists that Americans can marry whomever they want and get them a green card,” Hoffman said. “Well, it just doesn’t work that way and hundreds of thousands of Americans have learned this the hard way.”
Hoffman visited both sides of the border to document the lives of these couples caught in the crossfire of America’s high stakes political fight over immigration. In his disarming and precise style, Hoffman also traces the historical relationship between immigration, love and marriage. Lending an authentic voice to Amor and Exile, Salgado delivers a searing first-person account of life in the U.S. with her husband while he was undocumented, her tortured decision to leave the country with him, and their seven years of exile and starting over together in Mexico.
Amor and Exile tells of love that transcends borders—a story shared by hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens—cutting through the immigration debate rhetoric and providing a courageous perspective for one of the most vexing policy problems of our time.
About the Campaign and Launch of Amor and Exile
The “Send Amor and Exile to Washington” crowdfunding campaign ended June 1 on Indiegogo.com, with full funding, allowing Hoffman and Salgado to launch their book in D.C. at a critical moment in the Congressional debate over immigration reform. Notes from individual funders to their members of Congress about the need for immigration reform will be delivered along with copies of the book.
Amor and Exile will be released to the public on Monday, June 10th, published under Hoffman and Salgado’s new imprint, Cordillera West Books. Book readings—the only two readings scheduled with Hoffman and Salgado together in 2013—will be held on Thursday, June 13th in Washington, D.C., and 6 p.m., Saturday, June 15th at Ukazoo Books in Baltimore. Check our Calendar for details in a few days …
Help ensure that Congress hears about American families divided and exiled by U.S. immigration law. Send a copy of our new book, Amor and Exile, to Washington with our Indiegogo campaign: http://igg.me/at/amorandexile/x/3113579
Across the United States, American citizens are forced underground, exiled abroad and separated from their spouses for a surprising reason. Amor and Exile is the story of American citizens—including Veronica, Ben, J.W., and Nicole—who fall in love with undocumented immigrants only to find themselves trapped in a legal labyrinth, stymied by their country’s de facto exclusion of their partners. Journalist Nathaniel Hoffman visited both sides of the border to document the lives of these couples caught in the crossfire of America’s high stakes political fight over immigration. In his disarming and precise style, Hoffman also traces the historical relationship between immigration, love and marriage. Lending an authentic voice to Amor and Exile, coauthor Nicole Salgado delivers a searing first-person account of life in the U.S. with her husband while he was undocumented, her tortured decision to leave the country with him, and their seven years of exile and starting over together in Mexico. Amor and Exile tells of love that transcends borders—a story shared by hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens—cutting through the immigration debate rhetoric and providing a courageous perspective for one of the most vexing policy problems of our time.
Mitt Romney’s Jan. 23 Florida debate response that “the answer is self-deportation” is confusing on several fronts. What he really means is that he wants undocumented people to depart the country on their own. But anti-immigrant groups have adopted the term “self-deportation” in recent years to mean a sort of war of attrition on the “illegal immigrant” population.
Romney via DonkeyHotey @flickr
Others have already explained the concept: the idea, as Romney alludes to in the short clip below, is to make life so difficult for undocumented immigrants that they just up and leave the country. This explainer from Mother Jones and this parody from This American Life certainly help us understand what Romney thinks.
But immigration judges and immigration lawyers use the term self-deportation in another way. An immigration judge may permit an “alien” to “self-deport” within a certain timeframe after he or she has been ordered removed from the country. In that case, the person being deported could go home and arrange his or her affairs before leaving the country on their own recognizance, rather than being escorted to the border or flown home.
UPDATE: After discussing this again with a third, experienced immigration attorney, I need to clarify further. What I describe in the paragraph above is actually “voluntary departure.” Self deportation refers to people who leave the country on their own (without ICE officers removing them), while under a standing deportation order or order of removal or who leave after the time period for their voluntary departure has elapsed.
In Amor and Exile, I had been using the phrase “self-deport” to describe what many mixed-status couples end up doing: leaving the United States together, on their own terms, after failing to obtain a visa for the immigrant partner. This is what Nicole and Margo and many other couples have done.
In theory, I would like to take the definition a step further and say that the American citizen partner is also self-deporting. Even though it is technically a choice for them, the American spouses of immigrants for whom there is no path to legalization are also being excluded from the country. But I’ve found that coining new usages for technical terms can be a slippery slope, so I will have to come up with another term of art, I think—perhaps simply “departure” will suffice (though not Voluntary Departure, because that is something else altogether). *see UPDATE above
Presidential candidates should be more accurate as well when describing their policy positions. First off, Romney’s argument is naive and cruel—would he be willing to kick immigrant kids out of schools nationwide, shut off people’s utilities as occurred in Alabama and set up checkpoints on the roads to achieve his goal? But second of all, he is saying he does not want to deport 11 million people, but he wants them to self-deport, which as we’ve just seen, means they are really being deported.
I have a book that Romney and the other candidates ought to read if they want to better understand this stuff. We just have to finish it first.
Gavin Dahl with KYRS Thin Air Community Radio in Spokane interviews Nathaniel Hoffman of Amor and Exile on proposed changes to the immigrant hardship waiver program.
The Obama Administration announcement last week that it wants to allow some mixed immigration status families to remain together in the United States while they apply for hardship waivers was briefly turned into media debate fodder and then, apparently dropped because it is just too difficult to explain. But the few conservatives who cried foul, including Texas Republican Lamar Smith who wrote the 3- and 10-year bars into law in 1996, have very little ground to stand on here. As I reported last week, it has been in the works for a long time, it’s highly technical, it’s been suggested by multiple government and NGO reviews of the waiver process, it does not change any laws and it does not provide any new benefits for undocumented immigrants.
Houston immigration attorney Laurel Scott, who has written extensively about waivers, said the proposed rule actually improves compliance with the law. The waivers were originally intended to prevent the hardship of family separation, she said, and the proposed process would minimize the time that immigrant spouses and children of American citizens must spend abroad.
Still, the timing of the announcement and its provenance from the White House is clearly political and the pundits briefly made hay from this latest administrative decree. The moment in this news clip when CNN anchor Erin Burnett asserts to former American Immigration Lawyers Association president David Leopold that anyone who legitimately marries an American citizen can get a green card (then looks down, bites lip, blinks) highlights a huge problem for advocates of immigration reform.
Watch the clip at 2:12 for that moment:
Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State and crusading attorney who helped draft anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona and for state legislators across the country, skillfully puts the onus back on “illegal aliens, whether they decide to marry a U.S. citizen or not.” And Leopold is not quite able to counter what Moderator Burnett declares to be quite rational.
If the news that the Customs and Immigration Service will now process some “family unity” or family immigration waivers stateside accomplishes one thing, it should demonstrate to the American public once and for all that hundreds of thousands of American citizens have been living in the shadows with their undocumented spouses for the past decade.
Here’s the weird thing: Burnett is mostly right. Immigrants who marry U.S. citizens ARE generally eligible for a green card. Our national immigration system remains, technically, family friendly. BUT if they are in the United States illegally or face any of more than 60 different “inadmissibilities,” that green card may remain just out of reach.
There has been a lot of talkabout this “catch-22” in the past week. USCIS puts it this way in the rule notice:The action required to regularize the status of an alien, departure from the United States, therefore is the very action that triggers the section 212(a)(9)(B)(i) inadmissibility that bars that alien from obtaining the immigrant visa.
Here it is in plain English: In order for an immigrant who entered the country illegally and then married an American citizen to get a green card, he or she has to leave the United States. But leaving triggers, in most cases, a 10-year ban (that Congress approved in 1996). To salve this catch-22, Congress crafted a series of pardons, or waivers, available for many, but they are complicated and time consuming and a bit risky to get. Applicants must show that if they are not granted a visa, their American citizen spouse or parent will suffer “extreme hardship.” Three quarters of the immigrants seeking waivers to enter the United States are from Mexico and require a visit to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; I traveled there last January to see the process first hand.
Because these waivers are difficult to understand and a major financial and emotional and legal burden for many of the couples who need them the most, many, many couples choose to stay in the US, under the radar, rather than applying for green cards and facing the ban and subsequent waiver process.
Enter Candidate Obama. The USCIS is now proposing a tiny tweak in the process that could reassure many couples. They will be able to apply for the pardon BEFORE they leave the US to pick up their visa. This proposed rule (at this point it is still a notice of intent to publish a proposed rule) would provide provisional waivers to some couples so that when they return to the US Consulate or Embassy in their home country, they will be able to get the visa more quickly and efficiently and in fewer steps.
There are lots of waivers for lots of different violations. This rule change would apply to a VERY limited set: only people who “entered without inspection” and have a US citizen spouse or parent could get the provisional waiver. So if your fiancé is a citizen, you have to get married first and if your mom is a permanent resident, you won’t qualify for a provisional waiver.
Also, if you are like Nicole, whose husband has a permanent ban, and who is already living abroad, you won’t qualify. Bear in mind that the difference between a 3 year, 10 year and permanent ban is not that great. If you have been here illegally for 6-12 months, you get a 3-year-bar and if it’s more than a year you are barred for 10 years. In both cases you would be able to utilize the new provisional waiver before leaving the US to get an immigrant visa. But if you entered the US twice, say, after a trip home to see a sick grandparent or even to introduce your wife and kids to your family—even if not caught—you are banned permanently without an opportunity for a waiver. (In the case of this permanent bar, an immigrant may be able to reapply after waiting 10 years abroad, but only a few people have to tested this procedure to date.)
It is impossible to know how many couples in the US are currently eligible for a waiver of some type. Minneapolis immigration attorney Michael Davis said today that he’s gotten dozens of calls in the past week but many of the couples inquiring face a permanent ban and so the provisional waiver would not help them. Still, Davis thinks that processing the waivers in the US will encourage many couples to apply, once the new rule is finalized, which is supposed to be by the end of the year.
“I think it’s going to be an incentive for a lot of people to come out and do it,” he said.
In FY2011, USCIS received 23,262 I-601 waiver applications and approved 17,790, roughly a 76 percent approval rate. The approval rate in Ciudad Juarez was closer to 90 percent last year, according to a USCIS spokesman. More than 100,000 people have applied for waivers since 2006. But there are many more people out there who are unaware of the benefit or have been unwilling to take the risk and expense of applying.
One question that remains is what will happen to applicants who are denied a provisional waiver. They will still be in the United States without papers. On a USCIS stakeholders call yesterday, immigration officials did not answer this question, instead seeking suggestions from the public, but an FAQ on the USCIS site does adress the issue:
Q. What would happen to individuals who are denied waivers under the proposed process?
A.They would be subject to USCIS guidance and law enforcement priorities for issuing Notices to Appear (NTA). For example, convicted criminals, public safety threats, and those suspected of fraud will receive NTAs.
In other words, many of the people denied, if not priority cases for ICE, would just be back to square one—undocumented and married to Americans. But at least they would be with their families in the States rather than separated or forced to move under duress. Going into 10 months of political campaigning, I am glad that Obama is at least signaling a willingness to discuss the deep relationships that Americans have with the undocumented population. While families and family values are a fine starting point, I continue to hope that the candidates will examine their own relationships with migrants, with Mexico in particular and with our national stake in immigration reform.
Waiting room at the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez
After a year or more of quiet planning, the Obama Administration will announce today that it intends to process immigrant hardship waivers within the U.S., allowing many more undocumented immigrants with U.S. citizen spouses and parents to apply without risking the immigration bars that have plagued hundreds of thousands of families since 1997.
Julia Preston at the New York Times broke the story early Friday morning, quoting Alejandro Mayorkas, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles waiver requests: “The goal is to substantially reduce the time that the U.S. citizen is separated from the spouse or child when that separation would yield an extreme hardship.”
The changes are not immediate and will have to undergo a year-long rule making process, according to the Times. They may also be subject to significant political and Congressional push back during the coming year.
The waiver process has been a major element of my reporting for Amor and Exile, and I have been hearing hints of this change for about a year now, though the Administration kept it under tight wraps. In January 2011, I visited the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico where 75 percent of all of these waivers are processed and officials there hinted that USCIS was working on a plan to consolidate some of its international operations within the United States.
More recently I learned that things had been changing in Juarez since I visited a year ago. Much of the USCIS staff had left for posts in the U.S. and immigration attorneys in the U.S. were noticing the wait times growing and some degree of disorganization in processing hardship waivers. USCIS announced a conference call on October 14 to explain a new procedure for people wishing to file their I-601s, or hardship waivers, in which they would send the application to a service center in the United States rather than filing at a foreign consulate or embassy. But on the same afternoon that it was scheduled, the conference call was suddenly canceled, even as attorneys waited for the call to begin. It was never rescheduled.
The expected announcement Friday in the Federal Register signals the administration’s intention to allow immigrants to apply for the I-601 hardship waiver from within the United States, rather than forcing them to leave the country first, which triggers 3-year, 10-year and even permanent bars from re-entering, and presents a high risk for many families who may otherwise qualify. The new policy, once approved, would provide more assurance that an applicant qualified for the waiver before he or she left the country to pick up the visa. It could help out many mixed immigration status families who qualify for waivers but have been afraid to leave the U.S. in order to apply.
According to the New York Times:
The journey toward the green card to which they were entitled was so fraught with risks for the illegal immigrants that many families simply decided to live in hiding and not apply.
Now, Citizenship and Immigration Services proposes to allow the immigrants to obtain a provisional waiver in the United States, before they leave for their countries to pick up their visas. Having the waiver in hand will allow them to depart knowing that they will almost certainly be able to return, officials said. The agency is also seeking to sharply streamline the process to cut down the wait times for visas to a few weeks at most.
I have not seen the language of the Federal Register notice (it does not appear to be posted as of 3 am EST Friday) nor have I spoken to anyone since seeing the New York Times article on Twitter just now, but there are a few major questions about this policy that come to mind.
Will it further define “extreme hardship?” Up to now, the immigrant seeking a waiver has to show that their American citizen or permanent resident spouse (or fiancé/fiancée) would suffer extreme hardship if they were not granted a visa. But that hardship is not very well defined and is largely up to the discretion of the official reviewing the case. For example, having American children together or being forced to live apart from a spouse is not considered a hardship.
What about couples who do not currently qualify for a waiver? Common immigration violations like re-entering the country after a deportation or even just a quick trip home disqualify many people for the waiver. Many of the families who have avoided the waiver process and remained in the shadows may still not qualify for this new program.
What will happen to families who are denied the provisional waiver under the new process? Will they face immediate deportation?
I will try to get some answers to these questions soon. [UPDATED post here.]
In the meantime, the news gives new hope to many families. From the New York Times story:
“Yay!” said Nancy Kuznetsov, an American citizen and immigration advocate who was separated for more than four years from her husband, Vitali, from Belarus. Ms. Kuznetsov has battled for years for the waiver fix.
“This is a wonderful humane change that recognizes the importance of American citizens,” said Ms. Kuznetsov, vice president of American Families United, an organization of Americans facing struggles with the immigration system.
2011 brought a higher profile to the plight of mixed immigration status couples in the form of news articles and public campaigns, but there is still much work to be done to educate the public about the impact of immigration bars, detention and deportations on tens of thousands of American families.
U.S. Rep Luis Gutierrez, a Chicago Democrat, held tours throughout the spring touting family reunification and the Dream Act. Most of the coverage focused on his call for President Obama to use his administrative powers to halt deportations of people with strong family ties to the Unites States.
The events that Gutierrez held included hundreds mixed-status families, however the spin often focused on the U.S. citizen children, which some polling has shown to be the most sympathetic victims of deportations, rather than spouses. Also, media coverage tends to label, or dismiss these stories as “Hispanic issues.” However, American citizen spouses also gained some traction in the press in 2011.
In one of the most high profile cases of the year, Pedro Guzman and his U.S. citizen wife, Emily Nelson Guzman, won a reprieve and were reunited [with video] in May after Pedro spent 19 months in immigration detention.
Being the spouse of a U.S. citizen didn’t help much. Emily could petition for him to become a legal resident, but in that scenario, an attorney told her, Pedro would have to leave the country before being accepted for reentry. He would also have to obtain a special waiver because of his arrest record. She was advised that his chances would be slim.
Arredondo is part of a growing online demographic: American-born wives of deported immigrants who are using blogs, forums and Facebook to find support and sanity. Their spouses entered the country illegally and, when the immigration system caught up with them, their wives relocated to Mexico to keep the family together.
Bonding with each other online, the wives describe enduring months of separation or moving to their husband’s home country to face learning a new language or figuring out where to send their kids to school.
“I’m so happy because in Juarez of all places, I’m not afraid to go to the movies, we can go out and be about and be normal and not constantly be afraid,” Cruz said. “I feel more-free in Juarez, Mexico than I did in the suburbs of Phoenix.”
Another high profile couple was reunited in August—Tony and Janina Wasilewski were featured in the documentary Tony and Janina’s American Wedding. Janina was deported back to Poland and Tony, her naturalized Polish-American husband, fought a long battle to get her back.
2011 was also a fast paced year for same-sex bi-national couples. The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Obama administration’s decision to not defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court leant much momentum to the movement for equal immigration rights for same-sex couples. Still, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security has not moved as quickly as many would like to either delay decisions on spousal visas until DOMA is officially repealed or to begin to grant them administratively.
Anthony John Maak and Bradford Wells, a married, bi-national couple from San Francisco, were denied a visa in August, but appealed the decision and Maak has not been deported yet, as far as I can tell.
Same-sex couples have had some success in winning stays of deportation, based on new DHS guidelines that require adjudicators to take into account an immigrant’s ties to the country before deporting them.
And then there is this couple, which makes an excellent point:
In 2012, our book, Amor and Exile, will tell the stories of more mixed-status couples—both gay and straight—to demonstrate that a broken immigration system affects the rights of American citizens in very serious ways. We look forward to continuing this dialogue here, on our Facebook page and through my Twitter feed, where most of these links have appeared previously. May the new year be prosperous for the ever-winding American experiment with democracy!
Epigraph, via Prof. Leopoldo Santos Ramírez in Matrimonios de anglos y mexicanos en la frontera, which is now overdue at the Boise Public Library:
So he told her the story of his family
The trouble that brought the barbed wire
And of all the things he couldn’t change
And then he told her that he loved her
—”Señorita,” Words by DeVito and Flowers, sung by Don Williams
