11/24/06

Thoughts \ Developed Thoughts \ Rants \ Raves \ Writing

03/22/2005 20:55 -0500 GMT

Immigration Rant

Peace.

After over four years of struggle, we've finally gotten out daughter here from Zambia. Estelle Mumbi Chisha, 15 years old and as sweet and beautiful as her mother, arrived on Saturday March 12th at Birmingham International Airport. It's the first time the airport has really held a tinge of its middle name - international. I've dreamed of seeing Estelle walking down the terminal toward me, and it was a great pleasure to watch that dream unravel in real life.

I felt a peace and calm upon her arrival, and since. By definition, it hasn't been a spastic feeling, but simple, calm and purely wonderful. At long last...

The trials we've endured to get her here would make a small novel, so I won't go into the details too much.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, Maggie applied for and got a visitor visa to join me in the United States. In our naïveté, we thought that was how things worked. Maggie spent three months testing the waters of being with me in the US, and it was palatable. She left for home, and we were miserable without one another. As soon as the sugar bowl was filled with enough duckets for her to return, she did. We married about 6 months after that.

Not too long after that, we were back in Zambia, and we thought that we could simply demonstrate that we were married, that Estelle was Maggie's child, that we had a house and the means to support Estelle, that we had a school ready and able to enroll Estelle, and that would be that. We were denied a visa for her.

Wow, that was an eye opening experience.

Maybe it was the fact that we brought four of the Mumbis with us to the embassy. It was such a disappointing experience. It was made worse by the fact that we visited the embassy immediately after arriving in Zambia, so we were left with a few weeks of knowing that we would have to part ways with Estelle again.

Thank God for telephone and email, which kept our link to Estelle as strong as possible from 8,500 miles away. We bided our time, hired our attorney that was handling Maggie's change of status (to permanent resident), and hoped for less than a year before Estelle would come. One year turned into two, then three, and then four.

We were able to get back to Zambia once or twice in the interim, and each time either one or both of us had to explain to young Estelle why we couldn't let her join us. The US government wouldn't allow it. What a shame on the American immigration system - and worse, it is a shameful characteristic that the American immigration system is perfectly content to leave unchanged.

About halfway through, this immigration process turned into a battle. Maggie's parents went to the US embassy to apply for visitor visas to come to Birmingham. They had Estelle and Emma with them. Without an interview, the US consular officer Ms. Leslie Livingood denied all of their visitor visa applications, and said to 68 year old Boniface Mumbi, "All you people want to do is bring children to the United States to sell them." That is our government in action. I wrote a scathing letter to my state senators, and to the assistant secretary of state in charge of African Affairs. Among my points was this: in all of this attention to fighting terrorism, our own consular officer, the first and sometimes only representative that Zambians see, insulted elder Zambians, and treated them with utter disrespect and disregard for human dignity. If our government truly wanted to combat terrorism, an assertion I call into doubt, then they should look at US government employees like Leslie LIvingood to see why resentment and hatred of America exists. This was before the atrocious abuses of our troops in Iraq, but it bears the same scarlet badge of dishonor.

The Assistant Secretary wrote back to say that Estelle's case was proceeding appropriately, and that was that.

What bullshit.

Continually when we checked on the status of Estelle's application, the time that was anticipated before her case would be considered was 999 days. That was because the data field couldn't accommodate 4 digits. Think about that. Three years to wait for one's daughter to be able to come to be with her nuclear family. Isn't that ridiculous? The kicker was this: we checked and the wait would be 999 days. We waited a year, checking periodically, and the wait was still listed as 999 days. How do you explain this to a child? How do you suffer through? How do you accelerate a government process that is so mired in bureaucracy that it is nearly at a standstill? Ugh - it just about makes me sick to think about it, and it makes me ashamed of America - the land of the Free...

At the same time that we were struggling through, living our lives without our daughter, we were also enduring the worst kinds of bureaucratic nonsense with regard to Maggie's permanent residency status. Shortly after we were married, she applied for permanent residency. There are some requirements of an individual who want to have some freedoms in the US. For example, each year until permanent residency is granted, one must reapply for an employment permit and a renewed "advance parole" document, which permits Maggie in this case to come and go as she pleases between the US and Zambia.

Each year we were told that permanent residency would be granted, and each year we were disappointed, and forced to reapply using considerable resources for new work permits and travel documents. We had the green card interview, and were told it should be a matter of weeks. Two years later, we still didn't have a "green card," which denotes permanent residency. Maggie's file was lost on more than one occasion. Telephone calls to the officer in charge of Maggie's case were not returned for months. Five letters over the course of the last year demanded action on the case, to no avail. Here is an example of the string of disappointments we endured at the hands of US immigration.

Our demands for a judgment on Maggie's permanent residency were finally coming to a head. There is some law or rule that says that if you've gone too long waiting, you can show up in person, and they must make a judgment then and there, that day. So we planned to do that. We called and our attorney personally visited to ensure our file was there, in Atlanta. Birmingham is 150 miles from Atlanta. Maggie and I took time off from work, leaving at 3 in the morning to arrive before 6 am. We stood in the rain waiting, and gained entrance to the federal building. We stood on line again, once inside, for over an hour, to justify our visit, and to get a number. We sat in a room with others hopeful to immigrate or change their status. We did not dare leave to urinate or eat, for fear of missing our name being called. After 5 hours, we were called, and told that we were called 4 hours earlier, but that we didn't answer...unbelievable, unconscionable, and just damn dead wrong. Add to that this: They couldn't find the file, and so we would have to call or come back tomorrow. You can imagine the depth of despair that this sort of thing can visit on a soul. Even our hardened attorney, immune to the slowest machinations of our government, was beside herself with their ineptitude.

The worst of all this is that there is no recourse. You can complain to the highest levels, and no corrective action takes place. Essentially, you have to bend over and take it, for lack of a better analogy, and get abused by the government that is meant to serve us, that we pay for to help us in areas of need. 

Now, when all is settled, and Maggie finally has her green card, which isn't green, by the way, and Estelle is sleeping upstairs peacefully, it is easy to forget the injustices of the US immigration system. I had not meant for this particular writing to be such a rant against immigration, but I think it is important to remember the struggle. It is also important to remember that our government is inefficient and untimely with regard to legitimate immigration. We had opportunities to purchase a black market visa for Estelle and a black market green card for Maggie, but we chose to go about it the right way. My point is that I do not want to the US immigration procedures to win. I do not want their transgressions and inadequacies to be forgotten. I want people to know how wrong our government is in cases like ours, so that these errors can be corrected for future immigrants.

Today, it is easy to live in the peace of being together, whole and legally unchallenged, but the prices that we had to pay for that peace should not be forgotten.