Why do I want to tell these stories of green-card marriages?
I have never been in the United States with illegal status or been married, for all that matters. But this topic hits close to home. Now I am making it my beat for graduate school
I am a journalist from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I am a Capricorn with Virgo as rising sign, but before you hold it against me, know that my moon is in Cancer. I used to cry over every episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,” but New York has made me a little tougher. I am studying social journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
I am almost 33, born and raised in Rio. I am a weird feminist and not afraid of saying so. I struggle every day with the sexist me that hides in the dark. I guess there is one inhabiting the deepest basement of every women who grew up in Latino culture. Simone de Beauvoir said once that a “woman is not born, she is made.” As long as I am constantly evolving, I will be okay.
In my journey to figure out what it means to be a Latina in New York, I have met some outstanding human beings. Mostly women who, in addition to facing all those daily pressures (be beautiful, be kind, be smart, be successful, be in a relationship!) wake up every day knowing they are considered an enemy of the state they call home, either because they are here on an unlawful status or because they are in a sham marriage.
I did not have to come all the way to the U.S. to meet women like these. I have them in my family, too.
A quick story on that
When I was 16 I learned a relative was moving to the U.S. for “a year, maybe more.” “How does one simply move to the U.S.?” I remember thinking. I had never been to the U.S., but when you are a middle-class Brazilian you learn very soon it is hard even to be allowed to visit, let alone “move” here. At least in my hometown, Rio, you never knew, going into a consulate interview, if you would get a visa, but you surely knew you would get a lot of attitude. After the 2008 financial crisis, however, when Brazil’s economy was making it into the top five in the world, things started to look a little better.
But we were not there yet. This story happened in 2001.
“She has a green card. She got married to an American years ago,” someone told me.
Apparently this relative had not been the first in the family; the aunt with whom she had stayed in the States at that time had done the same.
I got to see her green card once. It was her photo, but with a different surname. How weird! A totally unknown chapter of her life which made me feel as if I were taking a peek at her past life or something.
Fast-forward to 2015, 13 years later. Brazil’s economic miracle had not lasted long after all. I hadn’t had a steady job for eight months. I came to New York with my mother to visit and decided to stay a little longer and see what was next in life. I met a cute Brazilian guy on the train once when I was asking for information, and he introduced me to his sister. We instantly became friends.
Both of us were nearing our 30s, had backgrounds in media, came from middle-class families, grew up in big coastal cities and had come to New York on tourist visas. However, she and her brother had arrived eight months before me. That meant they had already had their tourist stay extended by six months. You can apply for that only once per entry, which means you must leave the country when that time ends or change your status from here.
They were in the process of changing their status to students on the F1 visa. They submitted their paperwork together. However, while his letters from immigration were arriving, hers weren’t. Funny, because they lived together.
She set up two appointments at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) office to see what was going on. The officials had her address right on file and would confirm that letters regarding her process had already been sent, but they could not tell her what they said or why they had not arrived. She had to wait.
She walked out both times without any type of proof or receipt that she had made a claim in Immigration. So she waited.
When the first letter finally arrived, it was three months late. It had given her a deadline for submitting documents, and a month had passed since that date. She had lost her lawful status.
Most of us just say we are “illegal.”
Once you overstay your visa in the U.S., you have two options: either leave and don’t come back for at least three years, or stay and embrace the fact that you are now committing a federal crime punishable by deportation and a permanent bar from entering the country.
Why should we care about people that overstay their visas? There are many reasons, but I will focus on two.
1 — The numbers
According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Fiscal Year 2017 Entry/Exit Overstay Report, more than 600,000 foreigners who entered the United States legally in 2017 overstayed their visas. Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia together represent 22 percent of them. Brazil is third on the list, behind Canada and Mexico.
The number of Brazilians with expired legal status has been increasing since 2016, following the progression of unemployment rates in their country caused by the economic instability that set the stage for former president Dilma Roussef’s impeachment. That year, the number of tourist visa overstays increased by 20 percent over 2015, while unemployment reached 12%.
I had an interesting talk with Stephanie Mulcock, a Brazilian-American immigration lawyer working at Cidadão Global, a nonprofit that serves the low-income Brazilian community in New York. She told me President Trump’s zero-tolerance measures against immigrants in early 2017 discouraged people from coming to the United States. “With the new political tension in Brazil, I believe the number of people coming to the U.S. will escalate from next year on,” she said. “But this administration will not consider nationals for asylum.”
It was never my friend’s intention to lose her status and become a statistic. I remember the frustration she felt and her feeling of being blindsided by the government.
I have noticed one thing common to all the women I have met in that situation. It really takes a toll on you, whether it is always on your mind or buried somewhere deep inside. It changes you. I haven’t been through that myself, but I have seen it again and again.
2 — The vulnerability
Whenever a young foreign woman is in trouble with immigration, it does not take too long until someone suggests arranging a fake marriage. My friend and I would spend afternoons at the bar where she worked discussing it. How much should she pay and how? Was it safe? How could we find someone? We had heard of people doing it, but we hadn’t been in the country long enough to know those people directly.
Some of her customers would offer to look for someone interested in being a sham husband. Some would say they would think about it. They would also turn to me and ask, “What about you, Isadora?”
“Don’t you need to get married, too?”
“When are YOU going to get married?”
It didn’t take long until I faced the immigration grinder myself. After a year here, it becomes considerably harder for an average foreigner to stay in the country legally. So you have to leave and come back. After Trump took office, people were afraid they would be barred. The ones who did leave and re-entered knew there is only so many times you can do that in a short period of time.
By the time I was between visas, I had reached five unsolicited yet solid marriage proposals. Men who wanted to date me would even play the Trump card. (Yes! There is a Trump card! The “you won’t be able to come back, not with this administration” card.)
“I can marry you. But you have to give me a chance.”
I heard that from two different men.
They tried to make me feel vulnerable and afraid.
If you have read about sexual exploitation, it pretty much goes like slavery, forced labor and other types of abuse. People in power makes you believe you need them to be OK. So you submit. But it is usually the other way around: they need you, and they know that they can master you only once they break you.
What intrigued me the most was that men would just assume that, as a Latina, my only way to get a permanent residence in the U.S. was by marrying a citizen. I am equally impressed by their assumption that I would be willing to give them a chance for “papers.” I do not judge women who do it. But I can’t help question a man’s motives.
Still, according to Murlock, many Latinas end up marrying their boyfriends too soon or buying a marriage to adjust their immigration status. “Both situations put women at a great risk of domestic violence and other forms of abuse,” she said. “It can be a life-threatening situation, whether they choose to stay in the relationship or leave.” She told me the risk of being killed increases once the women breaks up with her partner.
For women who married for love or convenience and found out they were sleeping with the enemy, there is the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). If a woman can prove during an immigration interview that she has been a victim of abuse, she can get a green card.
In 2017, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services processed 10,221 VAWA petitions by spouses. As of March, 5,302 new petitions had already been filed this year.
If you know anything about violence against women, you know most of them won’t report it. Which takes me to the second group: the ones in green-card marriages.
Those can’t report, unless they are willing to risk being deported. This is why I want to investigate green-card marriage in the Latina community. Nobody is keeping an eye on them or on the toll the decision is taking on their lives.
If you or someone you know is a Latina who is or h.as been through a troublesome green-card marriage, please e-mail me at isadora.varejao@journalism.cuny.edu. As a social journalism student at CUNY, I want to understand what those women are going through, and who is to be held accountable.
Let’s talk on WhatsApp. Let’s figure out how we can help immigrant women make more informed decisions and protect themselves against violence and abuse — from their partners or this government.
