Like millions of others, he
was going to overstay his visa and remain in the country illegally.
Months earlier, my sister had returned to Arizona from her studies
in Colombia with a boyfriend in tow. Though our parents were very
conservative, she was their only daughter, and they agreed to
sponsor his entry into the United States.
Joe (not his
real name) was a genuinely nice guy, with a workable if heavily
accented command of the English language. As the 19-year-old kid
brother, I got along great with him. The same could not be said for
my sister, and the two broke up after a couple of strained months.
Such is romance.
When the split came, Joe found himself
loose in the land of his dreams. He had once confided to me that he
wanted to make enough money here to open a restaurant in Colombia,
an admirable dream. To secure his visa, my folks had posted a
$2,000 bond, which was a lot to them, to ensure that he left the
country before his visa expired. Suddenly, no one in the family
knew where he had gone.
That’s when I became a
combination skip tracer and unauthorized immigration agent. I had
met some of Joe’s new friends, most of them Spanish-speaking
immigrants who peeked out from behind their curtains before
answering the door. I visited a succession of apartment blocks and
aging rental houses asking after him, and though treated with
suspicion at first, made progress with a simple story: I owed him
money and wanted to pay him back. In defiance of language barriers,
money talks in every country and culture.
With time
running out, I learned that he worked at a hospital in violation of
his visa. I worked at another hospital across town, cleaning and
hauling out trash from an industrial kitchen that grew to the size
of a football field every time I rolled out a sloshing mop bucket
topped with fresh soapy water. (Evidently my high school education
had included no injunction against doing “a job that Americans
won’t do.”)
Putting on my work clothes, a set of
baggy white pants and shirt sporting a plastic name tag, I posed as
staff at Joe’s hospital to continue the pursuit. Though my
cover was as thin as the shirt on my back, I quickly learned that
Joe was a second-shift janitor.
As I closed in on my
quarry, I realized that I had stupidly neglected to devise a method
to get him out of the country. Calling in the authorities seemed a
betrayal of a one-time friend and fellow minimum-wage slave. But I
could spin a yarn. I greeted Joe like a long-lost brother, and
before the surprise wore off, took him aside. In a conspiratorial
whisper, I warned that immigration officers were hot on his trail.
Embellishing further, I said he would never be allowed in the
country legally if he was caught and thrown out. He whispered his
thanks.
Just before the visa deadline, my folks got their
money back; Joe had left the country. My story has many lessons,
including the fact that teenagers can be good liars and $2,000
seems a fortune when you’re making minimum wage. Most of all,
it says something about this latest debate over immigration law.
As an unabashed Democrat who was fired from the hospital
for aiding a unionization drive, I should be reveling in the
discomfort of those bloodless politicians who advocate making
illegal immigration a felony. But it’s hard to find anything
good about the current situation. Current immigration enforcement
has become a cat-and-mouse game with a slap-on-the-wrist penalty.
We know that many people who get nabbed and deported simply turn
around and come back again. This turns immigration officers into
fishermen with badges who catch and release the same
border-crossers, time and time again.
I convinced Joe to
leave the country by telling him that he risked forfeiting the
privilege of ever re-entering legally. The House of Representatives
is now saying the same thing.
We could try something more
pragmatic: making it a misdemeanor with a loss of immigration
priority for a first offense; felony treatment for repeat
offenders. That way, the people caught and sent home have something
meaningful to lose. Either way, only serious penalties will give
meaning to our immigration laws.
Take it from a one-time,
self-appointed immigration officer.
John Walker
is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He is a farmer and
firefighter in Coaldale, Colorado.
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