[Mb-civic] Families pay price of faulty policies - Jeff Jacoby - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Families pay price of faulty policies

By Jeff Jacoby  |  April 12, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

WHEN SUMATHI ATHLURI met the man she was destined to marry, it was love 
at first sight. She sensed at once that Jeevan Kumar, a young physician 
working on a World Health Organization project to eradicate polio in 
India, was someone special. And the more she learned about his lifestyle 
and values, she was telling me the other day by phone from Salem, where 
she now lives, ''the more I felt he was the man I was looking for."

Jeevan was equally taken with Sumathi, a software engineer from 
Hyderabad who had moved to the United States on an H-1B work visa in 
1999 and had become a legal permanent resident -- the holder of a green 
card -- in February 2002. The couple was married in India in August 
2002, and for the first three months of their marriage they were 
virtually inseparable.

But green-card holders are not permitted to remain abroad indefinitely, 
and when the time came for Sumathi to return to the United States, she 
was a wreck. ''It was so painful to leave him," she says. ''I was crying 
in the plane all the way to the US."

Hoping to be quickly reunited with her husband, Sumathi filed a Form 
I-130, an application for an immigrant visa that would allow Jeevan to 
enter the United States. That was when she ran headlong into what has 
been called the most anti-family, anti-marriage, anti-immigrant aspect 
of American law: the prolonged and pointless separation of legal 
permanent residents from their spouses and children.

Sumathi's I-130 application for Jeevan was submitted more than three 
years ago; unless the law changes, it is likely to take at least two 
more years before his immigrant visa is finally approved. In the 
meantime, he is barred from entering the United States to visit his 
wife, even briefly. Because Sumathi has a green card -- because she is 
here lawfully and will soon be eligible for US citizenship -- her 
husband cannot get even a tourist visa to come see her.

Crazy? Yes, and it gets worse: If Sumathi had first gotten married and 
then applied for her green card, her husband would have been able to 
move here right away. Same thing if she had been here on a student visa, 
or had simply made no change in her status as the holder of a work visa. 
But becoming a legal permanent resident meant that anyone she 
subsequently married (and any child she gave birth to) outside the 
United States would have to languish on a waiting list for five or more 
years before being allowed to enter the country.

No policy aim is advanced by separating legal immigrants from their 
spouses and children -- especially when the only immigrants affected are 
those who have proclaimed their commitment to this country by becoming 
permanent residents. Congress didn't set out deliberately to put Sumathi 
and Jeevan and others like them through emotional torment. But by 
holding down the annual number of immigrant visas available to the 
spouses and kids of green-card holders, it unwittingly created a giant 
backlog.

Happily, the problem can be solved: Congress has only to remove the 
annual quota on visas for immediate relatives of legal permanent 
residents, thereby clearing up the backlog and eliminating the long 
wait. Legislation introduced by Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska would 
make that change. An alternative solution, offered by Representative 
Robert Andrews of New Jersey, would allow the spouse and minor children 
of green-card holders to enter the United States on a special ''V visa," 
and to live here while waiting for their immigration petitions to be 
approved.

Unlike the illegal immigrants who have been raising such a ruckus across 
the country in recent days, green-card holders like Sumathi broke no 
laws to get here. Most of them are highly skilled professionals who 
eventually become US citizens, enriching their adopted country in the 
time-honored immigrant manner.

''I came here legally," says Sumathi, who develops speech recognition 
software for use in healthcare settings. ''I'm making a contribution. I 
pay my taxes. I've never been a burden to the government. My husband is 
a doctor whose work on polio is saving lives. Why must we be separated 
like this?" She observes tartly that the United States lectures other 
countries about the importance of marriage and family. Yet ''US 
immigration law is destroying my family life. I live alone, eat alone, 
sleep alone, cry alone, and suffer alone. . . . The only thing that 
keeps me going is my husband's photograph sitting next to me."

It is no virtue to split husbands from wives, or parents from young 
children. What is being done to immigrants like Sumathi Athluri is both 
unjust and unwise. Above all, it is unworthy of a nation built by 
immigrants.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/04/12/families_pay_price_of_faulty_policies/
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