A Good Citizen Who Isn’t One

Inside her tiny condominium near downtown Glendale, there is ample evidence of the Americanization of Maria.

A Nordic Trac occupies the center of the room, positioned so that this 42-year-old X-ray technician can watch TV as she sweats. At this moment the tube is tuned to Sally Jessy Raphael, the sound off. Displayed atop the TV is a 12-volume set of “Personal Power” audio cassettes by motivational guru Anthony Robbins.

“Oh, I love Tony,” Maria Caranfil says cheerfully. In these last two months, she says, Tony has helped her speak out, to try to take control of her own destiny. Speaking out, understand, was not encouraged when Maria was growing up in Romania under the notorious authoritarian regime of Nicolai Ceausescu.

On an end table is a statuette of a couple in embrace. Maria is a romantic. Her aunt, the woman who managed to leave Romania by marrying a Romanian American businessman, has offered to help her find a nice American husband. But Maria insists that when she marries, it will be for love, not to avoid deportation.

“Why is everybody in the INS blind and can’t see I am a good person?” she pleads in her heavily accented English. “I am not a bad guy.”

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Things are tough all over and they’re getting much tougher for immigrants. Good, most Americans say. Proposition 187 may be hung up in the courts, but recent reforms have tightened the screws on immigrants. The matrix of laws now forms a tighter net. But long before these reforms were adopted, the system was pushing Maria Caranfil toward the door.

Many thousands of immigrants have comparable tales. Many, like Maria, consider themselves political refugees, but from 1991 through 1996, only 22% were granted political asylum--and only 16.6% from Romania.

Wednesday was to have been the day that Maria would return to her homeland. Her petition for political asylum having been denied in four hearings and appeals, Maria had agreed to a voluntary departure. Then she hired a new attorney who has filed another appeal, buying her a little more time.

She arrived here six years ago, about a year after the bloody revolt that toppled Ceausescu and ended with the tyrant’s execution on Christmas Day 1989. Maria had been a physician in her homeland yet says she always felt like a political prisoner. Her family, she says, was shadowed by official suspicion since before her birth; her grandfather had died a half-century ago defending the king against Communist takeover. Only after Ceausescu’s downfall and the installation of a new government was Maria able to get a tourist visa to visit her aunt in Los Angeles. Soon after she arrived in America, she applied for asylum.

Yes, this was deceptive, but anti-immigrant zeal has been inspired less by the Maria Caranfils out there than by those who commit crime or are blamed for burdening the welfare system and social services. The Rev. John F. Hodde of Zion Lutheran Church in Glendale points out that this parishioner has never accepted public assistance, has worked hard, paid taxes, bought a condo, established good credit. She is, Hodde says, just about everything a good citizen should be. Too bad she isn’t a citizen.

A radiologist by education, Maria has for five years handled X-ray chores in the medical unit of the L.A. County Men’s Central Jail. “The irony of her situation,” Hodde wrote in a letter to elected officials, “is that she works to provide medical help to jailed felons, some of whom are in the United States with green cards. The rights, under the law, of those . . . whose unlawful conduct costs our community, are readily protected, while obstacles to remain in the United States are placed in the way of Ms. Caranfil.”

Unable to win asylum, unwilling to marry for the wrong reasons--and any marriage would face INS scrutiny--Maria now is hopeful that her employer will help her obtain a labor certificate that would enable her to stay. This won’t be easy. As INS Western District Director Richard Rogers explains, a job opening would have to be advertised through the federal Department of Labor. For her to prevail, auditors would have to conclude that no qualified Americans or legal residents had sought the job. A candidate with minimal qualifications would be selected even if Maria was judged vastly superior.

Maria says that if granted permanent residency, her goal would be to resume her career as a physician. But her chances of avoiding deportation seem to be fading. Until recently, had she been in the United States for a full seven years, not just six, she probably would have the kind of character credentials to have qualified for a “suspension of deportation.” (The new law requires a 10-year stay and is stricter in other ways as well.)

So part of Maria Caranfil’s problem is bad timing, a Catch-22. If only Ceausescu had been overthrown the previous Christmas . . .