Michele sits up startled in her full-size bed. Her heart is thumping. Her mind races with fear as she peers at the glow of the digital clock in the dark. It’s near midnight. Who could be knocking at her door at this hour?
She crawls from her bed and tips slowly across the carpeted floor of her efficiency apartment, horrified at the prospect of who could be awaiting her. She holds her breath as she nears the door. Peering through the peek hole, she sighs with relief. It’s only a fireman.
The 37-year-old laughs heartily as she recounts the incident. Michele (not her real name) is an illegal immigrant from Trinidad, having overstayed an Immigration and Naturalization Service Visa that expired nearly 10 years ago. She has no driver’s license, Green Card or passport.
“Sometimes you’re getting up with night sweats and you’re thinking, ‘This is them’. You know they’re coming…You feel as though you’re confined,” she nearly whispers in her rich Trinidadian accent. “I can’t go anywhere that requires an I. D. I can’t tell anybody. I pick and choose the ones who I can trust. And I know who I can trust bv having a conversation with them. It’s hard, it’s hard even to travel. So, in cases like mine, it’s in the back of your head all the time, all the time.”
And so is stress.
“If you ask me whether I ever relax 100 percent, I would say, ‘No.’ On a scale of one to 10, I would say I sometimes I get to an eight…You hear a knock on the door and you think it’s the INS, but it’s just a firefighter. When you see police officers outside your building, you think they might be escorting the INS. When you see somebody new on your job, you think it’s someone to put you in shackles.”
Because of her immigration status, Michele agreed to tell her story to the NNPA News Service only under conditions of anonymity.
She came to the U. S. with a friend on a visitation Visa, planning to stay only six months. During those six months, she found a job and an apartment on the East Coast.
She has held the same job ever since, sharing her secret with only a few of her co-workers and her employer. She says her boss has chosen to risk keeping her because she is a faithful worker and they know it would be extremely difficult for her to obtain other employment.
Her life away from the job revolves around window-shopping, reading in the park, going to movies, going to church and relaxing in her home. At times, she has to guard her language, like when she’s on the bus.
She heard one passenger say, “I would have a seat if these illegal immigrants would just get off the bus.” Michele says, “It hurts. It hurts. It breaks my heart. And we can’t even say anything back.”
Shanta Ramson, a Washington lawyer who specializes in immigration, explains: “There is no law in place right now. Right now, there is no law on the books that can help her.”
Recent immigration reforms have failed to pass Congress, including a reform proposed by President Bush that would allow the 11 to 12 million undocumented workers in the U. S. to gain temporary legal status.
Michele’s biggest dream is to go to college in the U. S. and earn a business degree. But, being illegal, she couldn’t even qualify for student aid.
“We want better jobs, we want to go to college, we want opportunity, we want a piece of the pie too, ” she says. And that’s not Michele wants. She wants freedom to visit home to visit relatives, including a 15-month old nephew.
“I wish I could see him in his young tender age, where you can hug him and kiss him and bite up his cheeks,” she says, smiling.
She regularly speaks to her mother by phone.
Once, she came to visit and Michele delighted in her mother’s company for weeks, but the airport departure was unbearable. “We cried so hard. I cried long,” she recalls.
Experts say that not all immigrants are treated equally. Those from Haiti, for example, encounter more difficulty obtaining legal status in the U. S. than others, such as Cuba.
Donald J. Hernandez, professor of sociology at the University of Albany and an expert on immigration and diversity, says the difference in treatment is more about the United States’ relationship with that particular nation than it is about race.
“It really is very country-specific. Cuba has been a favored country because of the cold war,” Hernandez says. “People from Trinidad and Tobago have not had that favor, per se because they have not had that geo-political importance.”
Ramson, the immigration lawyer, says marriage to an American could open the door to begin application for legal status. But Ramson emphasizes, that is only in cases of “good faith marriages; not for fraudulent purposes or to circumvent the immigration law.”
Americans view Trinidad and Tobago as a vacation or retirement destination with palm trees, coconut milk, mangos, and beaches with blue water. Though Trinidad and Tobago is one of the wealthiest countries in the Caribbean, largely because of its oil and gas reserves, its per capita income is only $10,440 a year. The prospect of a better standard of living for immigrants – legal and illegal – is one of the attractions of the U.S. The worse case scenario, if Michele ever gets deported, must wait as many as 10 years before being eligible to apply for a Visa.
“I want hope. I want hope. If God would just open up the windows of heaven and say that there’s a new start, I want to be free so I can come out and sore like an eagle,” she says. “You try your best to kind of like blank it out. But you can’t blank it out because you never know what is going to happen when enforcement comes.”
