Entries Tagged 'Immigration' ↓

This is a continuation of my family’s immigration story. If you have missed the first two posts they are here:
Fifteen Years in America — An Introduction
Fifteen Years in America - Chapter 1: The Struggle Before the Reunion by Jian (Part 1)
Enjoy!

The church is located just across the street from the University of Hawaii’s business school. Because of its proximity to the University, this church has many programs that aid international students, and thus they have a good relationship with the Internation Student Services. When they received Jennie’s call for help, they sent someone to bring Helen to the church.

Later, Helen told us that the first three nights she was in Hawaii she slept on the ping pong table of the church’s library. In those three nights there were no one present in the church, and it is hard to imagine how she survived those nights in the pitch darkness of the church surrounded by cockroaches and mosquitoes. In order to save money, she only ate one hamburger in those three days.

In America the grants given to students in humanities majors like theatre arts is much less than those given to science majors. Thus Helen did not get much money from her department. When she just arrived she only received a tuition waiver, and had to work for her living expenses. This is a very common occurence. Hawaii’s main economy is tourism and is also one of the highest cost of living areas in the United States. Because of these reasons, Helen desperately needed to save money.

God always opens a path for those who tries to find it. Three days later, the people at the church managed to use their connections and found a place for Helen to stay. They found a single mother named Lory. She is a hapa (half Japanese, half Caucasian) in her mid thirties and she is quite beautiful. She has a four year old boy named Dane, and she wanted to find a student who could babysit her son on Friday nights when she went out on dates. When she saw that Helen was about her age and has experience in raising a child she was very satisfied. She offered Helen a room in her house for $150 per month and asked for free babysitting on Friday nights. With this deal, Helen was able to have an affordable roof over her head.

After she settled down in Lory’s home, Helen really wanted me and Xin to come to America. However, she did not have enough economic capacity to bring us to America so she had to work. She found a job at the Kennedy Theatre at the University of Hawaii making sets and costumes. It is not easy to make costumes. When she just started she was not familiar with sewing and often stabbed herself with the needle. When she was making sets she often had to do heavy labor and lift things to high places. Even though it is hardwork, she silently endured it to realize her goal of reunion. In addition to working at school she also did some part time jobs on the side.

Helen worked hard at earning money in order to bring us to America, but she also had the difficult task of exceling at school. Getting a PhD in America is not a simple feat.  With each lecture there are tons of reading materials and research to go through and papers to write.  Everyday Helen worked 16 to 18 hours to finish work and school. After a few months Helen was able to save a bit of money and went to Jennie at the international student service  to obtain an I-20 form for us to come to America.  Because she did not have enough money she asked for the help of a few classmates.  She borrowed some money and put it into her account and then obtained a certificate from the bank stating that she has enough money.

At that time there was a student from Shanghai named Hu Leping who helped Helen greatly.  This man majored in library sciences and loved to help other students from China.  In UH, he had a great reputation of “Hu Leping, loves to help others”. He found two to three classmates who were willing to help and collected a bit over $8000 for Helen’s account.  With this help Helen’s assets qualified for an I-20.

Helen took her bank’s certificate to the international student service to Jennie for an I-20.  Jennie is a very experienced officer and is very sympathetic and understanding to the situation of international students.  She was very responsible and tried to talk Helen out of bringing us to America because the living expenses are high and it would be very hard for Helen to support us on her wage of $6.50 per hour.  She asked Helen to wait a while before making the decision, but Helen was adamant, and Jennie had no choice but to issue the I-20.  When Helen left the office Jennie told her that even if she had an I-20 there was no guarantee that the Consulate would give us a visa because Helen did not have enough money to support us.

Jennie turned out to be right.   I took Xin and the I-20 Helen sent us  and went to the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai for a visa. An officer looked at our documents and did not say much.  He wrote a date for six months later on my and my daughter’s passports, which meant that the visa is denied and we may reapply in six months.

To be continued…

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My dad started a blog on Yahoo China around the same time as I started The Baglady and wrote about our life in America for the past fifteen years. The series got extremely popular and he has gathered many readers in China. Recently he started a blog for our family on Yahoo China’s Global Channel. He keeps calling me and asking me to submit articles for him in Chinese and English and I tried to do a few, but I write Chinese very slowly. So I proposed that we trade articles and I can translate his articles for The Baglady and he can either post my articles in English or translate them as he pleases. So here is the first chapter in this real story written by my dad where a family came from Communist China with absolutely nothing, and chased the American Dream with hard work and determination. I am a witness to his words because I lived through it, too. He has written about ten or so chapters so far and it has been quite entertaining.

Fifteen Years in America by Jian — Introduction

The day after tomorrow is August 15th, and that is the 15th anniversary of my arrival in America. I have been through many storms and felt complex mixtures of emotions in these fifteen years, and only those who have walked my path can taste what I have experienced. My friends, including some of my American friends suggested that I should write down my story. However, I always thought that my life in America is very unremarkable and I have not accomplished anything truly great. I guess there really is a limit to how many extraordinary people there are and the world is really composed of countless common and plain people. In my early years I learned Marx’s theory of “historic materialism”, and I still remember Chairman Mao’s words, “People, only people are the power behind the creation of world history”. I still believe that real history is truly created by common people like you and me. The crux is that most people like us did not record the roads we have traveled.

Recently, a couple events that prompted me to write down my experience in America are the encouragement of my online friends and the request from an ex-coworker . My ex-coworker’s daughter Wenjing is current living in my home because she is interning in a San Francisco accounting firm. I spoke to Wenjing about my life here in America and she also thinks that I should write it all down so that young people like her can objectively and truly learn about American society.

I remember before I left China fifteen years ago I read an article in the newspaper entitled “Ten Situations Where You Should Not Go To America”. Even now I can remember the top three items in the article. They were:

1. If you’re old, don’t go to America. “America is the battleground of the young and the purgatory of the old”.
2. If your English is shabby, don’t go to America. If you go you will be deaf and mute.
3. If you studied humanities, don’t go to America. You will not find a job.

I qualified for all three of these conditions. First of all, if we talk about age, I was already 37 years old. I joined the workforce when I was fifteen and I have had more than ten years of work experience. I see a lot young undergraduate international students here and I was more than twice their age. Second, if we talk about English skills, my background was very poor. Because of the Cultural Revolution, I lost the ability to go to school at a young age. I started learning the ABCs in my twenties when I attended college. Later on because I was a professor in a university I was able to learn more English, but when I came to America I really felt deaf and mute. Third, when it comes to my college major, I graduated with a degree in agricultural management. I also had courses in history and legal studies, but they were all humanities. At that time I already had a good career in China. At the end of the 80s I was already promoted to be the university’s youngest department head and had a good track record at my job. Because of these reasons, my wife gave me repeated advice in her letters that if I want to independently go to America I would face many obstacles and I would need to prepare for the ordeals mentally. At that time I figured I have already experienced the Cultural Revolution and America cannot compare to that ordeal. During that time my father was imprisoned and humiliated on the streets and I was sent to a steel factory and hauled molten steel and made steel molds. I have experienced all kinds of psychological and physical torment, and I figured the worst that can happen is that I will “eat bitterness” a second time.

It’s easy for me to say “I will endure torment a second time” right now, but to actually go through it was not easy. At that time there was a saying within the international students community about the path to take in America: first go to school and earn a degree; after receiving the degree, find a job; after finding a job, get a green card; after getting a green card the cars and houses will come, and that would be the crowning achievement. In all honesty, I did follow this path, and along the way I faced many obstacles. These obstacles include the difficulty in getting a foreign degree, the hardship in working minimum wage jobs, the roundabout craziness of getting a greencard, and my later midlife crisis. As I conquered these obstacles and accepted these battles I learned many lessons.

One thing worth mentioning is that I have met many friends from China, America, and all around the world in these fifteen years. When I was in trouble, many of these friends helped me. So as a Chinese proverb says, one should repay a droplet of kindness with a flood of goodness. I love to help people and I derive enjoyment from it. So here I will also write about the people that have helped me. Life is like a book, and time is the best teacher. Hopefully my friends everywhere can get some benefit from the lessons I learned in the past fifteen years in America.

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This story about an unlucky Guatemalan made me so mad and sad that I had to write about it.

For 11 years, Pedro Zapeta, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, lived his version of the American dream in Stuart, Florida: washing dishes and living frugally to bring money back to his home country. Two years ago, Zapeta was ready to return to Guatemala, so he carried a duffel bag filled with $59,000 — all the cash he had scrimped and saved over the years — to the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

But when Zapeta tried to go through airport security, an officer spotted the money in the bag and called U.S. customs officials.

“They asked me how much money I had,” Zapeta recalled, speaking to CNN in Spanish.

He told the customs officials $59,000. At that point, U.S. customs seized his money, setting off a two-year struggle for Zapeta to get it back.

I am not a supporter of illegal immigration, but I think this hard working man was robbed in broad daylight. Currently he faces deportation and a Floridian judge has concluded his case and decided that the United States government is entitled to $49,000 of this man’s sweat equity. I personally didn’t know there was a law that says I can’t carry more than $10,000 of my own money out of the country without telling the government. If I did carry more than that amount, would the government also confiscate my money? Another thing I don’t understand is why didn’t they just inform him that he had to sign a form? He has not gone out of the airport and he should be able to obtain a form and fill it out. At first they detained him as a drug runner and held him on drug charges until he produced pay stubs proving he earned all the money through work. This means that even if Pedro declared his money the government probably would still have held him on bogus drug charges. How can any immigrant transport his/her own savings back to his country especially if it’s a country without a very secure banking system?

It makes me sad that Pedro is treated this way, and the fact is many immigrants in this country, whether legal or illegal, face many financial injustices. Here are a few of them that I am quite familiar with:

1. Taxes – In the CNN article it stated that Pedro never paid income taxes, but actually I think taxes were deducted from his pay because the Floridian Judge found that Pedro paid more taxes than he should. In the case file the judge states:

The Court rejects the United States’ argument regarding tax evasion or other law violations allegedly committed by Claimant. As noted above, Claimant has not been charged with any crimes, and the evidence indicates that some taxes were in fact paid, when perhaps they did not need to be paid.

Pedro’s income was very low and Florida does not have state income taxes, so he probably did not have to pay any federal income taxes if he did file. Like Pedro, a lot of immigrants pay more taxes to the United States coffers than they should. For example, if any immigrant is paying for social security and medicare taxes and intend to go back to their home countries then they will forfeit 100% of their money. A lot of immigrants are also not extremely knowledgeable about taxes and do not file their taxes either out of fear or ignorance. In fact, if they did file their taxes some of the lower income immigrants will get a return. I also think it’s an injustice that the Internal Revenue Service can classify you as an US person for tax purposes while the Immigration and Naturalizaion Service has not yet given you permanent residency or citizenship. Myself and others I know have been in this situation where we paid all the same taxes that a citizen pays without knowing whether or not we can actually stay in this country. I don’t think it’s fair that immigrants facing uncertainty about their ability to stay are paying for the social security benefits of the current American retirees.

2. Wages — Outsourcing and H1B visas are hotly debated topics in the United States. The immigrants and foreigners are almost always painted as the villains that steal jobs from hard working Americans. The fact is that corporations are always looking out for their own bottom line and wants to hire immigrants because they are more likely to accept a below average wage. No one denies that most of California’s agricultural workers are illegal immigrants and most of these immigrants are paid below minimum wage. Additionally, a lot of construction positions are filled by day workers who are illegal. In the Silicon Valley, an H1B visa is usually a way to keep a high tech worker working for a company for below average pay. It is pretty much legalized indentured servitude because the deal is that the foreign worker works for a company for six to seven years and hopefully earn the right to stay in the United States. When the internet bubble burst in the beginning of this decade many immigrant workers were laid off from their companies and had to go back to their own countries. California is an at-will state and that means a company can fire a worker at any time so an H1B worker isn’t always guaranteed their American dream. It is true that the law states when a company helps a worker obtain a green card they must pay the worker a certain wage, but there is a prevalent abuse of this law since the H1B worker can be fired at anytime and isn’t likely to complain about their wage. I have heard cases of companies that do not consider American workers because they know they can keep an H1B worker longer and pay them less. It is completely illegal, but it’s quite a common practice. In Pedro’s case, we do not see that his employers suffered any legal consequences for hiring an illegal immigrant. That seems like quite a double standard on the part of the United States government.

3. The Banking and Credit System — The banking and credit system in this country isn’t very friendly to immigrants who do not understand much English. From my experience, a lot of immigrants also have an inherent distrust of the banking system and end up keeping a lot of cash in their homes. Pedro actually kept all of his money in a sack around his home according to the judge’s case file. Usually you can’t open a bank account, investment account, or obtain loans without a valid social security number so illegal immigrants tend to keep simply cash. It’s very dangerous to do this but they have little other choice. The credit system is another odd beast. It seems that in the recent years it has been so lax that many immigrants were victimized by shady loan peddlers.

Immigration is an important source of people and income for this country and I do not understand why it is so hard for the United States to accept all the hard working honest immigrants. My personal experience with immigration is so bizarre and dramatic that it deserves another few blog posts. If you speak to me in person you’d think that I was just another young American born Chinese woman, but the truth is that for a long time I was so jealous of all my friends who were born here. I got my green card just two year ago after growing up in America for the last fifteen years. In many ways, I am more American than I am Chinese, but when I read stories like Pedro’s it just makes me sick how immigrants are treated in this country.

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