Those who came to U.S. legally disagree about reform
Not everybody came to the United States on the sly by swimming the Rio Grande, hiking through the Arizona desert or running through the hills outside of Tijuana, human smugglers leading the way in the dead of night.
While 60 percent of those in the country illegally come from Mexico, according to statistics with the Department of Homeland Security, quite a few Las Vegas immigrants are legal residents and never broke federal immigration laws to become so.
Some married into it, the most sure-fire route.
Some won residency through the State Department lottery system.
Some immigrants, their countries in upheaval, applied for political asylum.
And there’s a long list of those who became “legal” in a roundabout way: They obtained student visas or tourist visas, got a job, then kept renewing their visas until unprecedented opportunities opened up, such as the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 that managed to legalize 12 million immigrants.
Now comes the latest immigration reform bill pending in Congress. It would grant immediate legal residency to an estimated 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants, provided they pay their back taxes and fines and that they haven’t committed any felonies or three misdemeanors.
That these immigrants would be able to achieve legal residency so easily irks some who did it the “right way.”
But overall, the opinions of immigrants who came here legally — from East Africa to Eastern Europe and Western Europe and to the Pacific Islands — are somewhat of a mixed bag.
While some voice outrage, others show compassion. It depends on who you talk to in Las Vegas, where an estimated 147 languages are spoken and 157 countries are represented.
IMMIGRANT THOUGHTS
Osama Haikal, 60, a physician who came to Las Vegas on a work visa more than two decades ago after passing the Foreign Physicians Exam with flying colors, thinks the United States should be more selective in its choice of specialized labor.
“To work in the United States, you can’t be on shaky ground,” said Haikal, a former political prisoner in Egypt and these days a U.S. citizen. “I don’t think everybody should be just allowed in. There has to be some discretion, and frankly the United States needs more discretion.”
Meaza Ghebrecristos begs to differ. She is a convenience store cashier. Even though she immigrated here legally from Milan, Italy, she can’t help but sympathize for her immigrant brothers and sisters who are here illegally.
Born to parents from East Africa, who themselves struck out for Italy for more opportunities, Ghebrecristos took it one step further and crossed the Atlantic. She landed odd jobs in San Francisco, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen in the mid-1980s before moving to Las Vegas.
“I think the Earth is for everyone,” she said from behind the counter at the 7-Eleven in the shadows of the Stratosphere, where she logs 40-hour work weeks. “I have no problem with any of it. I think everybody deserves a shot.
“Isn’t that what America is all about?”
Emma Chen, a Filipino immigrant whose parents were rice farmers, has no beef with that statement. There is no question that America is the land of opportunity. She is proof incarnate. She married a U.S. citizen in the early 1980s, then moved from Manila to Las Vegas. At the age of 53, she now is a U.S. citizen who has held countless jobs, from real estate to legal firms.
And yet she can’t help but feel slighted by the reform that would perform what amounts to miracles for those who are in the United States illegally.
More than two decades ago, with her U.S. citizenship long under her belt, Chen filed a petition for some of her family members to join her in Las Vegas. Two of her older sisters died while waiting.
BACKLOG AND RED TAPE
When people talk about broken immigration systems, they neglect to mention the severe backlog for those who did everything legally. They also fail to mention the loads of red tape, which in itself could serve as incentive to not obey the law, unfortunate as it may sound, Chen said.
“I don’t think it’s fair to people who’ve tried to sponsor family members and are still waiting all these years,” she said. “Does that seem right to you? If I had known it was going to be this much trouble, I would have flown my family to Mexico, and they could have jumped the fence over there.”
She was being sarcastic, but the reality is if there were one group that harbors ill will toward amnesty, it would be the Filipinos, whose connections to the United States cannot be understated and dates back to World War II, when U.S. military bases were strategically located throughout their Pacific island nation.
Mexico has similar ties that date back even longer, however. Ever since World War I, its people have crossed the border at the behest of the federal government so America’s crops could be picked in California at a time when many of the American men were at war.
Mexico is among the few countries that do not qualify for the State Department lottery system — India and China being the others — because so many have made a beeline for the United States. The vast majority of Mexican immigrants have come here between 1994 and 2004, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, which keeps tabs on unauthorized immigrants.
But since 2004, the migration has slowed to a trickle because of a lousy economy and a lack of jobs. And so the millions of immigrants in the United States illegally have been here for quite some time.
“They’re in limbo,” said Otto Merida, a U.S. citizen who is a political refugee from Cuba and now president of the Latin Chamber of Commerce in Las Vegas. “And it’s time to bring them out of the shadows. This is not a freebee, even though people think it’s a freebee.
“There are going to be a percentage of people who are going to oppose it; but they have to remember that once these people file, they’re going to have to wait in line and it’s going to take them at least 13 years to become a U.S. citizen. It’s not amnesty. We already have amnesty. It’s a de facto amnesty. Look around. People are here illegally, and they are working and they are being allowed to work. It’s time that they pay taxes.
“Need I say more?”
IMMIGRANT FROM TURKEY HAD IT ROUGH
John Aydin, a Turkish immigrant and resident of the Las Vegas community of Summerlin, knows a thing or two about paying taxes. He has managed to make a somewhat lucrative living writing the names and dates on tiny grains of rice on Fremont Street from his kiosk.
He came to the United States on a student visa, studied hotel management, landed a job on a cruise ship based out of Miami, then eventually fell in love with a woman who was a U.S. citizen.
But it didn’t come easy for Aydin, now a U.S. citizen. He put in 14-hour days at the kiosk for seven days straight, not even budging to empty his bladder, he said.
He looks at the illegal dilemma now sweeping the country and says this much:
“I would prefer them to be here legally than illegally. The ones who are already here, they’re already using the system, the schools, the hospitals. No matter what you do, they are still here. Now imagine them here and legal. It’s to my benefit that they pay their taxes.”
It’s been said that the people who immigrate to the United States, whether legal or not, are the most ambitious, the strongest of the bunch in their home countries, or else they wouldn’t have struck out for some place new, with few things in tow except a willingness to work.
And yet it’s not for everybody. Aydin told the story of how he tried to get his younger brother to come to the United States on a tourist visa and see how it panned out.
“I just told him, ‘Come here and give it a try.’ He took a six-month leave of absence and he came here. I gave him a car. He had everything here, ready. His children started school right away, and he brought it to my attention that his kid was way ahead in math than the rest of the class. You don’t need English to do math.”
But Aydin said he couldn’t hold his brother here for more than two months.
“He didn’t like life here. In Turkey, he gets one month off vacation and he has universal health care. Sometimes, you just can’t compete with that.”
Contact reporter Tom Ragan at tragan@reviewjournal.com or 702-224-5512.
