I miss Appleton. I miss Christmas snow. I was born in Houlton. I went to Camden-Rockport High and Colby College. These days, I sleep in Reynosa, Mexico, and commute to a job in McAllen, Texas.
Why? Because I’m a Mainer who married a Mexican.
There are more than 4 million Americans like me, U.S. citizens married to immigrants. In the messy family argument that is our immigration debate, we sometimes forget what legal immigration is for. It’s not about what is good for foreigners, but what is good for Americans. That’s why the highest priority for legal immigration — the only unlimited category — is the nuclear families of U.S. citizens.
People like me.
But of those 4 million fellow Americans, maybe half a million have had the misfortune to marry someone who has some problem with our highly technical immigration laws. Our families face the choice of being outlaws — or exiles.
That’s what happened to me.
The love of my life works with his hands. He was painting houses when I met him, a single dad working for cash because it was the best way to provide for his family. He’s funny and smart and as I got to know him, I realized that his values were my values: Maine values about hard work and faith and unity. We got married, pledging our lives to each other and to the family we are raising together. Two of our kids go to school in Maine, at Hebron Academy and Coastal Studies for Girls. The youngest lives in Texas because he’s too young to be so far away yet.
But we can’t come home.
He was born in Guerrero, Mexico, which is about as far on Mexican roads from the border town where he has to stay to be close to us as the Texas border is from Appleton: a three-day drive, if you don’t sleep much.
It’s a dangerous place, run by the most murderous gangs in the world. Smuggling humans and drugs, kidnapping and extortion are thriving local industries. I keep a pine-scented pillow that I got long ago in Camden in our bedroom, to remind me of a place where I never heard gunfire at night.
I want to come home. But we’re married — it’s not home without my husband.
American law won’t allow that. U.S. citizens are the neglected constituency for immigration legislation — as if our 4 million votes don’t count, as if every American married to an immigrant doesn’t look at cases like mine and think: there but for the grace of God and a glitch in the paperwork goes my family.
I belong to an organization made up of U.S. citizens who want our immigration laws fixed: AmericanFamiliesUnited.org. We have largely been left out of the discussion of “comprehensive” immigration reform. Most of our problems were completely ignored by the president’s executive action.
Here is an example: one standard for a waiver is “extreme hardship” to the U.S. citizen. Before 1996, Americans like me would routinely go in front of an immigration officer and state our case. The government would balance the nature of the immigration violation — which can be as trivial as missing a meeting — and weigh it against the harm to the American husband or wife.
My husband flashed a false ID and spent two years painting houses. So I am sentenced to exile: 10 to life.
But since I got a solid education in Maine, because my Maine values got me a good job in McAllen, my life in Texas crossing an international border to sleep in a lawless Mexican town with my husband, 2,400 miles from home — that doesn’t qualify as “extreme.” That’s not enough hardship for an American to get even a hearing for her marriage.
In a hapless attempt to stop illegal immigration nearly 20 years ago (it failed, in case you didn’t notice), Congress wrote flexibility out of immigration enforcement. So I want to be clear, as Mainers are: I am not asking for a guaranteed result. We’re not asking for “amnesty.”
We’re asking for the chance to make our case before the government.
My husband and I, our three kids: we’re exactly the kind of people Maine needs. We want to settle back home, get jobs, start a business, maybe hire some people, raise our kids the way I was raised in Appleton.
That’s going to take a change in the law. We have bipartisan legislation in the House — HR 3431, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas and Republican Rep. Steve Pearce of New Mexico.
We could use some Mainer support. Give my family a chance.
The place to stop illegal immigration is at the border and the worksite. It’s not at the altar.
Elizabeth Sommo is a social worker from Appleton who is currently living in exile in Tamaulipas, Mexico, because of her husband’s immigration status. The organization that works with mixed-status families like hers can be reached at AmericanFamiliesUnited.org.