New Jersey
The Indignation and Naturalization Disservice
by Debra Galant
November 22, 1998
I SET my alarm for 4:15 A.M. I had to be at the Peter Rodino Federal Building in Newark well before dawn.
Ron drove. He promised it would be worth it. Ron is like most everybody in our lush little town. He holds a prestigious job, wears nice suits, carries a cell phone, pays taxes and attends his daughter's soccer games. But there is one detail in which he differs from the rest of us. He speaks in the rolling cadence of his native Ireland.
Ron is not an American citizen. And this is the only detail that matters to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which is where we headed at 5 A.M. one recent day.
In August, Ron started working on getting the agency's permission to visit Ireland in September. He was astounded by how hard this permission -- called "advance parole" -- was to obtain. And he was outraged by his treatment by the immigration officials.
Ron has been living in the United States since 1980. He's married to an American and they have a daughter who was born here. He's smart and organized and knows the ropes. Still, it took him three visits to Newark and numerous phone calls to Vermont to complete all the paperwork. After his first visit, he learned it was necessary to arrive well before the doors open at 7:30 A.M.
You know that if you have to visit the Division of Motor Vehicles, it will kill most of a day. That the clerks will be surly and unhelpful. That you will need a drink when you get home. But you have a reasonable expectation of leaving the building with whatever you started out trying to get.
Not so, if you are an immigrant. According to the telephone message at the immigration service in Newark, you can get your business done there most days if you arrive by 2 P.M. On busy days, it advises, you should be there by 11 A.M.
I arrived before sunrise. It was still chilly -- under 40 degrees. I found at least 50 people already in line, several in sleeping bags. An 81-year-old woman from Colombia had been waiting since 1:30 A.M. A 24-year-old graduate student from Southeast Asia had arrived around midnight. When she spoke of the horrors of dealing with the bureaucracy, she began to cry. She begged me not to reveal her name or her country.
Everybody was there early because of previous experience. Like Ron, they had all learned that if they arrived by 7:30 A.M., it was much too late.
Kiril Gotzkov, a Bulgarian-born truck driver who lives in South River, had spent the night outside the building in a sleeping bag, as had his American-born wife, Justine. He said it was his fourth visit in two months and that each time, the officials gave him a different reason for not granting a work authorization. "They say, 'Next!' like you don't exist anymore," he complained.
The saddest case was that of Christiane Silva Sonza, a 7-year-old girl from Brazil, whose face is so ravaged by burns that it was covered by a plastic mask. She has been accepted into Operation Smile, a program that provides free reconstructive surgery. Christiane had arrived at 5 A.M., but, I discovered later, even the two medical students with her could not persuade the agency to give Christiane's mother the change in visa status necessary to begin the long series of operations she needs.
The last person I met that morning was a man who gets paid by immigration lawyers to stand in line and hand papers to clerks. He charges $435 to obtain an advance parole, the permission Ron needed to go to Ireland. This man confirmed that the lines begin early. He himself arrives by 2 A.M. "It doesn't matter what the weather is or anything," he said. "It's merciless."
He also confirmed the immigrants' collective story about the clerks: that they reject applications for the "slightest" error, callous to the fact that they have doomed someone to another long night in line. He also made me swear I would not print his name, for fear of bureaucratic reprisal. "They can be very nasty, those people," he said. "They can be very arbitrary and capricious."
An agency spokeswoman, Lynn Durko, said she was unaware that lines form outside her building by midnight. She said she was unfamiliar with the recorded message about hours. She said she suspects that delays are caused by the large volume of immigrants who are processed in Newark.
I got home about 8:45 A.M. -- my notebook full -- and felt relief that my grandparents had dealt with this 80 years ago.
I also recalled that just this year, New Jersey won a Supreme Court battle with New York for jurisdiction over Ellis Island. How peculiar that states will battle over the symbol of immigration, while the masses still huddle over on Broad Street.
