Halfway to being an American family

[MountainLaurel]

If any of you doubted the utter capriciousness of the U.S. immigration system, this'll change your mind ... identical cases of refugees seeking citizenship, which turn out very differently.

:grr:

Two Afghan brothers arrived at the federal courthouse in Alexandria yesterday, and their identical paths in America suddenly diverged.

As Satar Reangber stood and raised his right hand to become a U.S. citizen, his younger brother, Salam, watched from the second-to-last row, using his own right hand to cradle his infant niece.

Neither brother could hear the oath of naturalization or read the certificates of citizenship and Pledge of Allegiance distributed to the immigrants and their families. But they understood clearly that one of them had been left behind after their tandem six-year struggle to become Americans.



In 1998, their sister helped them apply for citizenship and cited their disability in asking for an exemption to the interview and written test needed to qualify. In the next six years, Satar was called in for fingerprinting and then was told that his application had been lost, while Salam was interviewed, denied citizenship and told that deaf people don't qualify for disability waivers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53193-2004Jul15.html

[NewJeffCT]

1. I can sympathize

My wife is going through a hellish green card process.

We found out 1 week ago that they had lost her fingerprints and that her file had been sitting on somebody's desk since Dec 2002 waiting for my wife to get her fingerprints taken (she had them taken 3/28/02) However, prior to last week, all the calls to INS, all the trips into the local office (and, you have to take a day off to go into INS, as the lines are so long...) and all the appeals that were filed were met with either, "you have to wait" or form letters saying "your request has been referred to the appropriate department."

Meanwhile, friends that were almost in the exact same situation as us (same country of origin, same original reason for coming to the US, etc) that got married well after us already have their green cards.

[MountainLaurel]

2. Best of luck to you

And your wife -- I had a coworker go through the same shit in trying to get his wife's permanent resident card.

[NewJeffCT]

3. well, somebody suggested we write our Senators & Congressional Rep

And, John Larson's office (D-Hartford) has been extremely helpful. Dodd wrote to INS on our behalf as well. Nothing from Lieberman, but that could be because I wrote him an angry letter a few months earlier suggesting he just become a Republican and get it over with...