My Wife’s 30-Year Road to Citizenship
When coming to the U.S. legally as a child is not enough
[NOTE: This story was originally published on Medium.]
Today, President Biden announced a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented spouses and children of U.S. citizens. The announcement was made at a White House event marking the 12th anniversary of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), a policy my wife once benefited from.
The move called to mind my own experience with mixed-status families. Though I was born in the States, my parents and my sister were undocumented through my childhood, the pall of deportation always looming.
The path to citizenship, even for those who come to the U.S. legally, like my wife, is meandering and fraught with bureaucratic oddities, resulting in an inefficient, Kafkaesque immigration system that chews lives up without a second thought.
Fourteen years ago, I wrote an article for the Huffington Post, titled “Dream Come True,” which advocated for a DREAM Act that is yet to pass. The DREAM Act (the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) is proposed legislation that would bestow permanent protections on immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. DACA would later become a temporary measure for those childhood arrivals.
Shortly after the article was published, I received the following message on Facebook (truncated):
Please forgive me for using Facebook as a means of communication but are you the Pablo Andreu that wrote ‘DREAM Come True’ for the Huffington Post?
If you are in fact Pablo Andreu the writer, I just wanted to express how much I loved your article…Thank you for delivering an outstanding piece for a cause that is often misunderstood.
I didn’t know then that the author of this message would become my wife.
We kept in touch, sending each other the occasional Facebook message. I sent her links to articles I published. She shared her thoughts about immigration and told me a little about her life.
“See you later, pen pal,” we’d joke.
This went on for years.
Eventually, she moved to New York for a job opportunity. Not long after, we started dating.
It would be a while before she’d confide in me about being a DACA recipient, a resident status President Trump would later threaten.
In the summer of 2017, my wife (then-girlfriend) and I visited the wineries in Willamette Valley, Oregon. Wine tasting had become our thing (we got married in a vineyard), and she loved Pinot Noir, so off we went.
It was drier than I had expected, not the verdant lushness I envisioned for the Pacific Northwest. The undulating hills were the color of wheat. Blades of grass were desiccated husks.
The wineries were largely deserted, because, as we were told, everyone had visited a week earlier for the summer eclipse. The town we were staying in, McMinnville, served as a launchpad to the local wineries, with a handful of restaurants and tasting rooms peddling Pinot Noir and Riesling on a strip that spanned just a few blocks.
The first vineyard we visited was Youngberg Hill, which boasted a broad wraparound porch that offered unobstructed views of the rolling patchwork of vineyards, with grey-blue wisps of smoke clinging onto the hills until the gauzy horizon absorbed them.
There, we met an older couple on the last leg of a trip that spanned much of the West Coast. We conferred solemnly on the wine we were tasting, parroting the tasting notes provided by our college-age server.
“Can you taste the volcanic earth?”
“Definitely.”
They took pictures of us on the porch, and we took pictures of them.
The B&B we were staying in lay in the outskirts of McMinnville, adjacent to the local thoroughfare haunted by mean-looking pickup trucks driven by surly men. Across the street, unsavory characters leered and dawdled.
The historic Victorian home was impeccable but quiet. Too quiet. Our voices rampaged through the kitchen and the hallway, as if they might break the antique china.
Maybe my memory filled some of this in retrospectively, but I remember a cloud hanging over us toward the end of the trip. The news on our phones upon boarding the plane back to New York gave meaning to the unease: President Trump would end DACA. My wife’s protection was set to expire about a year after our trip to Oregon.
Tears accumulated in her eyes, but she didn’t cry. She turned her phone off and tucked it away. I asked her if she wanted to talk about it, but she shook her head and grew quiet.
For a while following Trump’s announcement, our life together felt like that old Victorian house— too quiet.
It ended up being moot. The Supreme Court overturned Trump’s decision to end DACA. Plus, we got married anyway, which gave her a path to citizenship, since she had arrived in the U.S. legally.
Even though my wife is now an American citizen, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the patent absurdity of her citizenship status ever being in question.
First of all, her family came to the United States legally when my wife was a toddler. They arrived on a tourist visa and shortly afterward secured a religious worker visa. My mother-in-law works at church to this day.
Right before college, my wife’s visa was revoked unbeknownst to her, as her parents had tried to shield her from the grim reality. She was left out in the cold for no other reason than we have a Byzantine immigration system that decrees and proscribes on the strength of technical eccentricities and bureaucratic whims.
DACA saved her. Without it, she would not have had legal protections — a person who arrived here legally as a toddler and did everything she could throughout her life to maintain legal status, filling out every unwelcoming form and jumping through every arbitrary hoop.
To maintain your DACA status, you couldn’t be convicted of a crime, and you had to be gainfully employed, serve in the military, or attend school full-time. Failing to comply with these conditions would compromise your status. She complied with every stipulation. Always.
She’s a stickler for rules. She doesn’t even like to jaywalk (seriously), which requires tremendous willpower in New York.
Yet, the system treated her like a criminal on parole, constantly having to check in and prove she was on the straight and narrow.
When I, as her husband, petitioned for her permanent residency, government officials regarded us as charlatans. An immigration functionary gave us the third degree as he reviewed our application, which was chock-full of proof that we were indeed husband and wife.
A copy of our mortgage with both our names on it. Happy pictures of our wedding, friends’ weddings and other life events were strewn about the mahogany desk. Receipts. Forms. All the while, the bureaucrat scrutinized “our story,” searching for holes. He even reprimanded me for holding her hand.
“I’m sure you’ll have plenty of opportunities to hold her hand later,” he warned, as if I was tapping Morse code on her palm. I was simply trying to comfort her during a distressing experience.
All this for a legal resident who grew up in Florida. She was a Gator, for crying out loud. She attended the University of Florida during the Tebow years. In every way but that rubber stamp, she was American.
Before my wife became a permanent resident, I asked her what country she’d most like to visit. She told me she always wanted to go to Italy. She wanted to see visit vineyards in the Tuscan countryside. I said we should go, lodging my foot firmly in my mouth.
“I can’t,” she said.
It hadn’t occurred to me that she couldn’t travel internationally (another condition of her DACA status). What an idiot I was.
But that’s the thing. When you’re not going through it, it’s easy to forget that DACA recipients aren’t American citizens. Culturally, they are. They grew up eating the same candy, watching the same TV shows, playing the same games, and wearing the same clothes. Technically, however, they aren’t.
When my wife became a citizen, she got the travel bug. She went back to Peru for the first time since coming to the U.S. as a three-year-old. She enrolled in a master’s program at Parsons, which was based in Paris. For the last couple of years, she’s traveled the world: France, Italy, South Korea, Denmark, Great Britain, and more.
We visited world-famous wineries in Bordeaux and Tuscany. We’d made it to the Tuscan countryside after all, but it was France, not Italy, she fell in love with — Paris in particular.
She loves the big, colorful, double doors, eating al fresco, the ubiquitous patisseries, the exacting standard for the finer things, the reverence for art and culture, and, most of all, the way of life — the joie de vivre that prioritizes a bottle of wine on the Seine on a weekday night over a 10:00 p.m. work email.
It’s easy to see why she loves it.
We’ve been toying with the idea of moving. We closed on our house two weeks before the Covid-induced New York lockdown. We chose our house — our town, really — because of its proximity to the city. It’s just a 35-minute riverside train to Grand Central Station. The lure of that proximity, however, was predicated on a commute, which neither of us do anymore.
We’ve been looking farther up the Hudson Valley into the Catskills and beyond. At one point, she floated the idea of moving to France. She asked me if I’d be open to it. I am, though I don’t yearn for life in France as she does.
It may seem counterintuitive to those observing from the outside. One might wonder why someone who’s been clawing and enduring for decades to become a citizen would now willingly move away? Can you really blame her? Why should she be loyal to a country that was never loyal to her?
In spite of it all, though, she does remain loyal, which is more than the U.S. deserves.
I love everything about this piece. Beautifully written.
What dedicated patriotism despite such mistreatment