Immigrants race to beat clock

The Baltimore Sun

The telephones in Sara Rivera's office at Centro de la Comunidad in Upper Fells Point rang incessantly last week. Hastily scribbled appointments filled the slots on her enormous July calendar, almost all for immigrants who need her help filling out residency and citizenship forms. August's squares are vacant.

With costs for many immigration applications - including permanent residency and citizenship - set to surge after July 30, the race is on for immigrants to get their paperwork done now.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced the rate changes May 30, giving immigrants eight weeks to raise hundreds of dollars, complete necessary medical exams and apply before the increase. Now, many are scrambling to find money and are flooding offices like Rivera's before time runs out.

"We are racing against time," said Maina Ngobu, who came to Baltimore in 2002 seeking asylum from Kenya's Central Province. He has rushed to find the more than $2,000 he needs to file permanent residency paperwork for his wife and five children before the deadline.

"I'm thinking, 'Where do I get all this money at once?' I had not planned for this," Ngobu said.

The paperwork dash is hitting immigrants from all backgrounds. They are from Cambodia, Belarus and Liberia. They work as janitors, professors and driving instructors, many under the table. Some, like Luisa Galicia, have been here since the 1980s. Others arrived just a year ago.

The cost of applying for citizenship - in addition to the other filing fees - is set to jump to $675 from $330. Obtaining permanent residency, commonly referred to as a green card, will soon cost $1,010 for those ages 14 and older, up from $395.

These costs do not include the price of the required medical exam by a designated doctor when applying for a green card. For Ngobu's family, that will be another $190 per person.

Ngobu had borrowed thousands from friends and other sources to bring his family to Baltimore. He received his green card in 2006.

When his family came a year ago, he was working two jobs - as a bus driver from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and as a parking attendant from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. - until his wife and kids coerced him to cut back because he was falling asleep at dinner.

He still works as an attendant, making about $580 a week after taxes, he said. After borrowing money from a friend to cover mortgage payments on his Rosedale townhouse and using paychecks from his wife and two of his daughters, he was able to pay for permanent residency applications. "We are living hand to mouth," he said.

Others haven't been as lucky. Without connections, most immigrants in Baltimore cannot obtain traditional loans, because they lack the proper credit and financial history. Many find that friends and family are already stretched thin trying to pay for their own papers. Churches have given some money to members, Rivera said, but nonmembers are out of luck.

"Loans?" asked Oti Nwosu, a lawyer for Baltimore's Immigration Outreach Service Center. "What loans are you going to get? The banks aren't going to give you loans here. If you don't have your papers, you're not getting anything."

There are almost 93,000 immigrants in the Baltimore metropolitan area, including those who are here legally and illegally, according to 2005 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Some immigration experts, however, say there are thousands more unaccounted-for immigrants in the area.

At Centro de la Comunidad's six-desk office, workers are staying after hours. Rivera said she plans to see more than 100 people in the final two-week paperwork blitz. The number of applications she has filled out in the past four months "has been more than what I would have done in a year," she said.

"They're borrowing money, they're doing part-times - anyway, anyhow they can save money," she said. "Some are cutting off on food. ... It's really, really hard."

The new fees will bring in badly needed revenue for Citizenship and Immigration Services, according to federal officials, and are based on the principle that immigrants, not Americans, should foot the bill for their own paths to citizenship. The agency is still largely paper-based, and the workload has only been increasing. The Pew Hispanic Center reported this year that more than half of the nation's legal immigrants had become citizens, the highest number in 25 years.

Backlogs have been a big problem for the agency, hitting a high point of 3.85 million backlogged cases in 2004, according to a December 2006 agency assessment. According to the report, that number has been reduced significantly.

But the backlogs have translated into painfully unpredictable waits for life-changing paperwork, said Ruben Chandrasekar, who works for the American Friends Service Committee.

Green cards have become the ticket to building a stable life in the United States. Permanent resident status allows individuals to live and seek employment in the U.S. and, particularly important for many immigrants, receive education, Social Security and health benefits. Without a green card, many cannot get jobs or raise money.

The intent of the fee increase is to reduce the average processing time for all applications by 20 percent, according to Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Nwosu, the lawyer, said that immigrants in Baltimore sometimes wait five to six months to receive green cards. Some, however, have waited more than a decade to receive permanent residency, Chandrasekar said.

Fees for all immigration forms, including work permits and petitions to bring family members to the U.S., will jump an average 66 percent. But interviews with more than a dozen people in the immigrant-heavy Upper Fells Point area last week revealed that many are still unaware of the agency's fee changes.

"They're confused," said Pedro Biaggi, a morning disc jockey for the Spanish-language radio station 99.1 El Zol, and a popular voice in the Baltimore-Washington Latino community. "They're freaked out."

Talk on 99.1's weekly on-air session with an immigration lawyer has turned to the fee increase. "Those that have the potential to become citizens are trying as fast as they can," Biaggi said. "But a lot of them won't be able to."

julie.turkewitz@baltsun.com

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