The Story
Local Latino Immigrants Share Stories
This past Wednesday, Catholic Campus Ministry sponsored an informational session called “Immigration in the U.S.: Policies and Personal Stories.” The session provided students with an overview of current federal, state and local immigration policies, but the highlight of the evening was hearing from three recent Latino immigrants who live in the Williamsburg area. Each showed great courage in sharing the stories of the hardships they faced coming to the United States, stories that touched everyone in the audience and gave a new perspective on the country’s undocumented people.
Jeffrey Caruso, executive director of the Virginia Catholic Conference, spoke first. The Virginia Catholic Conference represents the two Catholic dioceses of Virginia in matters of public policy before the Virginia General Assembly. Caruso began by describing current federal policies on immigration, policies which so far “are not a success story” and which make up an immigration system that is “broken,” he said.
Caruso gave some disheartening statistics, including the fact that legal immigrants in the U.S. wait up to 22 years for family members to join them in the states. He also stated that since 1990 the number of undocumented people in the U.S. has tripled to an estimated 12 million. Unfortunately, visas available for low-skilled workers and temporary agricultural workers number 5000 and 66,000 respectively.
Federal policies have focused increasingly on enforcement and focus solely on whether a person is legally in the U.S. or not. The Virginia Catholic Conference, however, advocates “reform in a humane way, so that people’s rights are protected,” said Caruso.
The Virginia Catholic Conference would like to see Congress doing everything they can to reunite families and making more visas available. They also propose setting up a mechanism for earned legalization so that undocumented individuals could earn the right of legal residency and citizenship.
Unfortunately, the federal government “isn’t getting the job done,” said Caruso, so state and local governments have taken it upon themselves to enact policies regarding immigration. In many cases these policies have denied rights to immigrants, such as work compensation benefits and access to certain services.
Aless Quintero, a member of the Network for Latino People who works with ESL programs in the area, spoke next of his experiences with helping undocumented Latino immigrants. He emphasized to the audience that “we are not trying to change your mind [about immigration], we just want you to understand what it’s like living under the radar.” He works to inform undocumented people of their rights in the U.S., helps them learn English and teaches them how they can become citizens.
The evening concluded with the stories of three recent immigrants, Abel, Elizabeth and Sandra, who spoke with Quintera as their translator. Abel broke down a few minutes into his story as he remembered a tough moment with his boss who asked him, “If you don’t speak English what are you doing here?” Abel told the audience, “We [undocumented people] are not doing the right thing right now.”
Both Elizabeth and Sandra spoke of the incredibly hard journey they took to reach the U.S. Elizabeth emigrated from El Salvador with her young daughter to join her husband who was already in the states. On her first attempt, Elizabeth was caught and spent four days in jail before being sent back to El Salvador. Three days later, she started the journey again, walking for days in the desert with only the clothes on her back and drinking the water intended for horses.
It has been seven months since Elizabeth left her home country. “For now, let’s see what God has for me and my child,” she said. In a touching moment, she asked the audience “not to reject us, because we are human beings. We know this country is not ours, but we are not delinquents. We are not here to harm anyone…We are here to work [because] in our country there are no opportunities, no future.”
Sandra, a single mother, left El Salvador Sept. 26, leaving behind her three children. She cried and struggled to speak as she told the audience “how hard it is to tell your child you don’t know if you’re coming back again.” Like Elizabeth, the journey to the U.S. was a difficult one, a “nightmare,” she said. “You are holding only your clothes, your soul and your dreams…you don’t know if you’ll make it. Some people die trying.”
The hardest part for Sandra, though, was knowing that every step she took was bringing her farther away from her children. Her goal in the U.S. is to make enough money to go back to El Salvador and give her family a better life. She said one day she will “go back home for my biggest treasures.”
Sandra poignantly summed up the night by saying, “I don’t know what you think [of my story], but this is a reality.” And as the evening proved, it is a reality that affects us all.