Couple found road to legal residency long, expensive and risky (The Record)

Couple found road to legal residency long, expensive and risky
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
LAST UPDATED: WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 3, 2010, 6:41 PM
BY ELIZABETH LLORENTE
THE RECORD
STAFF WRITER

HAWTHORNE – As debates raged across the country about reforming immigration laws to deal with the millions of undocumented immigrants, Simon and Maria Santamaria and eventually their daughter, Jessika, struggled for 16 years to legalize within the present system. Like many immigrants, they found that coming out of the shadows and pursuing permanent legal residency, or a “green card,” was expensive, risky, and more often disheartening than hopeful.

“Theirs is in many ways a typical experience,” said immigration attorney Jerard Gonzalez of Hackensack, who helped the Santamarias finally get their green cards in January. “The many different, bad things people experience when they try to get a green card, they experienced.”

Like more than 100,000 of their compatriots have done, the Santamarias came to New Jersey from Mexico with little more than dreams and a hunger to give their daughter a decent life.

Mexico is by far the leading country of origin for U.S. immigrants, accounting for a third of all foreign-born residents, according to the Pew Hispanic Research Center in Washington D.C.

Simon Santamaria, 48, came here on a tourist visa; Maria, 38, could not get one, and crossed the U.S.-Mexican border through Arizona illegally with her then-toddler, Jessika.

Simon says the couple was desperate for a better life. He saw door after door slam in his face in Mexico when, after getting a degree in anthropology in the 1980s, he went job-hunting as the Mexican peso went through a devaluation. Even jobs that his college friends had turned to – driving taxis, stocking supermarket shelves – were hard to come by.

“I looked at my wife and our baby, and I had no way to support them,” he said.

After a long hard talk, Simon and Maria decided to take the well-worn path from Mexico to the United States in 1993.

Almost immediately, life got better for the Santamarias.

Maria worked a minimum of 16 hours a day – eight hours at a hotel, eight more hours at a bakery. Simon worked at various jobs – he assembled furniture, worked in restaurants, and for the last decade, has driven a delivery truck. They paid taxes every year, their lawyer said.

“We were like machines,” Santamaria said. “We worked all the time, all day, six days a week. We were happy to work.”

Shortly after arriving, the Santamarias were determined to legalize their status. They went to a Jersey City man, Manuel Gaitan, whom an acquaintance had recommended. But in 1996, Gaitan was arrested on charges of unauthorized practice of law. He pled guilty to theft by deception for masquerading as an immigration lawyer.

“It hit Maria and me like a ton of bricks,” Simon said. “He had all these diplomas and certificates in frames on his wall.”

Simon said Gaitan submitted a claim for political asylum, a decision Gaitan made after Simon mentioned that he’d once sought local political office in his hometown in Mexico. Simon said he told Gaitan he had not been persecuted – a condition for political asylum – but Gaitan dismissed his concern. Not surprisingly, officials in the asylum office rejected Simon’s application, but Gaitan submitted an appeal, Simon said.

Gaitan filed papers incorrectly and then essentially disappeared, Simon said, after authorities caught up with him.

Meanwhile, Maria’s employer sponsored her for U.S. residency, and that seemed to proceed smoothly. But when the Santamarias, who all were hoping to obtain green cards through Maria’s application, met with immigration authorities for an interview in connection with Maria’s employment-based petition, the couple learned that they had an old deportation order.

“They could have been arrested. They were very lucky,” Gonzalez said.

They turned to Gonzalez, who succeeded in getting Simon’s case reopened based on the “ineffective…counsel” by Gaitan.

“They had a fake lawyer who had filed things improperly,” said Gonzalez, a former assistant Bergen County prosecutor.

“Even when we were told that we were approved for the green card [last December], I didn’t feel it was completely real,” said Simon. “Until you have that green card in your hand, you’re terrified something else will get in the way and you won’t get it.”

Indeed, the Santamarias experienced difficulties that many undocumented immigrants, particularly Mexicans, face when trying to legalize their status because there’s no law that gives them protection or an immigration benefit.

“If he’d been from Cuba or Guatemala or Salvadoran,” Gonzalez said, “he would have been able to adjust his status [easier].”

Proposals to reform immigration laws have included providing a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants who meet a strict set of criteria.

The Santamarias’ green cards finally came in January.

“I opened my envelope first, and I called Simon,” Maria, 38, said. “I said ‘They’re here!’ He wanted me to open his, to tell him that his had arrived, too. I said ‘No, you open it. I want you to have the experience, the thrill, of opening that envelope yourself and seeing the green card in there.’ ”

Like other undocumented kids, Jessika, an 18-year-old freshman at William Paterson University, was charged out-of-state tuition of $13,320 for the 2009-2010 academic year. Her parents worked overtime to pay her college costs. Now, Jessika, who got A’s and one B in her first semester, will be able to apply for financial aid and pay in-state tuition, which is half -- $6,566 – the rate she had been charged.

“We just want to get our daughter on her way to a good life,” Simon said.

FAST FACTS
About three-quarters of the nation's undocumented immigrants are Hispanic.
The majority, nearly 60 percent, of illegal immigrants are from Mexico. They account for 7 million of the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
Eleven percent come from Asia, another 11 percent come from South America, 7 percent come from Central America, 4 percent come from the Caribbean, and less than 2 percent come from the Middle East.
Source: Pew Hispanic Center