Posted on 01/19/2007 2:31:09 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Imagine you've just given a year and a half of your life to serving your country in Iraq and come home to find that your pregnant wife and your toddler daughter have been forced to leave the United States and now the government won't let them back in.
You sit at home waiting, but no one can give you answers when or if they will be allowed to return. You wait five months, long enough for your new baby to be born in a foreign country. But still, no one can give you answers.
That is what Aaron Thorsted of Salt Lake City, Utah, goes through every day. His story aired on KSL-TV there this week.
Why is the government preventing Johana Thorsted and their children from returning to the U.S.? Is she on some terror watch list? Does she have ties to radical organizations? Has she committed some heinous act that makes her a danger to our country?
No. Like thousands of others who have grown up here and know no other life but ours, Johana's parents forced her to come to the U.S. from Guatemala illegally when she was a child. Aaron Thorsted knew her status when he asked her to marry him. He told KSL that Johana worried that he would reject her when he found out. But love doesn't require a "green card," and so Aaron promised her they would fix her problem. When Aaron was sent to Iraq, however, the process slowed down, since immigration officials are wary of Americans who want to sponsor spouses who aren't actually living under the same roof.
Johana returned to Guatemala in what should have been the final step in adjusting her status. The couple expected she would have approval by the time Aaron came home from his tour in Iraq. But they are still waiting. And in December, their second child was born. This complicates matters because the child is not automatically an American citizen and now, too, must get permission to come to the U.S.
The Thorsteds' disrupted lives are the consequence of Congress' failure to resolve the dilemma of what to do with 12.5 million illegal aliens living here. But their personal drama is not the only consequence. Another story illustrates a different problem, one that has the potential to affect all of us.
In a front-page article, The Wall Street Journal reported this week on what happened after immigration officials raided a Georgia chicken processing plant last fall, hauling off 120 workers, with hundreds of other illegal aliens voluntarily leaving the area. The plant did what many anti-immigration groups say is the solution to becoming dependent on immigrant and illegal alien labor: It raised wages by more than a dollar an hour.
But the company still couldn't attract enough employees, so it also sent buses to pick up American workers from nearby towns and set up dormitories for those who wanted to stay on site. The company nonetheless could only hire a fraction of the workers it needed, and new workers were far from ideal.
The company says that the workforce has turned over three times since the raid. Worse, production has plummeted. The immigrant workers produced an average of 80 pallets of poultry a day per six-person assembly line; the new workers produced only 45 pallets with 15 persons on the line.
The company is still short-handed by 300 people, so it is recruiting Laotian Hmong immigrants from Minnesota and Wisconsin and busing in felons on parole. In any case, with more expensive, less productive workers, the company will have to pass on its costs to consumers -- or go out of business.
Magnify this problem by the thousands and you can see the impact on the U.S. economy.
Immigration restrictionists may think it is fine and dandy to keep Aaron Thorsted's wife and children out of the country because Johana's parents broke the law. And they say they're willing to pay more for food so long as it deprives illegal aliens of jobs. But are they willing to pay companies' actual costs, which in the Georgia case more than quadrupled? And would they rather these jobs simply disappear altogether, striking devastating blows to many local economies?
I doubt most Americans think this is a good bargain. But Congress has yet to wake up to the realities.
I tried to find his DEROS date, but couldn't....I stumbled across this, which shows he was in Iraq during Jul '05....(Gpa's obit, scroll to Thorston)
http://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/ut/weber/obits/se/2005/jul/se28jul2005.txt
OHHH SPARE ME!!!!!
Hey Linda, how about you are an American citizen, go to Iraq, come home on leave and on Thanksgiving get killed by an illegal drunk driver.
I have much more sympathy for him.
Cry me a river. Linda uses the code words "anti-immigration" to describe anyone that is sick and tired of the millions that just ignore our borders and come here illegally.
It's worse than tactics used by the left and she should be ashamed of herself.
Wait a minute...the MSM has been telling us it is only 6-8 million./s Congress has done nothing about the illegal immigration problem in the US.
bump
Wow good work! I read the Obit. Hard to believe he was in country (Iraq) without a home leave for a year and a half. I just played the scenario out as "MS Linda" presented to us. Rules are rules.
Agreed. He's a citizen in good standing and ought to be able to marry whoever he choses anywhere in the world and bring them to America based on his good name and service.
Gummint is out of line on this one.
Either that or the INS/ICE is trying to weasel out of its job by enforcing laws only in the most unpopular contexts. While I'd rather see us control the borders, abolishing the INS/ICE and officially declaring a free-for-all would probably be better than the status quo.
Exactly. BTW, the INS recently said 10 million got in just last year. There are probably 50 million here.
"This complicates matters because the child is not automatically an American citizen and now, too, must get permission to come to the U.S."
I call OBLshite. If Aaron is an American, so is his child. More sob storying that ignores the fact that the federal government has built a system that prides itself on ignoring illegals and driving away those who apply for legal residence. There is no doubt in my mind that if she'd simply never applied to legally emigrate, she'd still be here, squirting out 'unquestionably' American kids. The solution the author proposes, of course, is to open the door to everyone instead of temporarily closing it to new immigrants, completely closing it to illegals, and prioritizing spouse and child immigration apps so stories like this are things of the past. What the author here wants is to abolish the immigration policing system instead of fixing it, and make the problem worse by increasing its workload to simply catch the bad `uns after they're here (fat chance of that being successful).
Where've you been?
Tony Snow admitted earlier in the week that there were 20 million illegals!
ping
Imagine you've just given a year and a half of your life to serving your country in Iraq and come home to find that your pregnant wife and your toddler daughter have been forced to leave the United States and now the government won't let them back in.
Let me fix that first sentence. Imagine you've just given a year and a half of your life to serving your country in Iraq and come home to find that your pregnant wife and your toddler daughter have been forced to leave the United States and now the government won't let them back in caught trespassing in the U.S. and given a free ride back home without any additional penalties. Now, think of it this way:
Imagine you've just given a year and a half of your life to serving your country in Iraq and come home to find that
Apparently not listening to Tony Snow.
This is just what the media does to paint a false picture of illegal immigration in our country: they take a case so completely out of the ordinary as to be outrageous, and write about in a way that makes it seem horrible and cruel for us to enforce our laws, In fact, this case is an exception to the rule. We all know what the vast majority of illegal immigration amounts to, and we know why our laws need to be rigorously enforced. Why are so many reporters such liars and propagandists?
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