Briton Snared by Immigration Laws

For Gerard Curran, it was “my own dirty little secret.”

For a dozen years, the British citizen has been an illegal immigrant, even as he went about his life and found few impediments to a normal existence.

Although many view the undocumented exclusively as border-jumpers, the reality is more complex: Almost half the nation’s more than 5 million illegal immigrants arrived lawfully and then violated the terms of their entry visas, typically by overstaying.

But now, a dozen years after Curran’s arrival on a tourist visa, after he married a U.S. citizen, fathered two U.S.-citizen children and built up a clientele for his successful plumbing business, the nation’s tough new immigration laws have caught up with him.

Curran must go back to England by Thursday or face a 10-year ban on returning to the United States.

“This just doesn’t seem to make any sense,” Curran, 36, said Saturday in the Redondo Beach flat he shares with his wife, Suzanne. “I feel like I’ve been an upstanding citizen. I’ve paid my taxes. I haven’t had any trouble with the police. It’s just hard to believe that this is happening.”

But happening it is. Curran has purchased a one-way ticket to Heathrow Airport for Wednesday. Holding off for months, last week he finally informed his two children from an earlier marriage, Jack, 8, and Hannah, 5, of his impending departure.

Once away, Curran says he will probably lose his business and fall behind on child-support payments. Legal fees have cost him $15,000 and are mounting. He has no prospect for work in England, where he plans to stay with his parents. His wife and children will remain in California.

Curran’s case is by no means the most drastic to come to light under the terms of tough immigration laws passed by Congress in 1996. Tens of thousands have already been deported or denied entry. Though he was indisputably a lawbreaker for years--and many would say he has wrought his own downfall--his predicament does provide some glimpse of the law’s human toll.

Even though Curran’s wife, a U.S. citizen, has petitioned for Curran to stay, an immigration judge ruled in March that Curran must go back. Under previous law, Curran probably would have been able to wait here for his papers to be ready, a process that would normally take no more than a few months. But under the stiff new laws, he faces a 10-year ban if he remains beyond Thursday, said his attorney, Carl Shusterman of Los Angeles.

“At this point, we’re just hoping for a miracle,” said Suzanne Curran, who married Curran in November, as soon as his divorce from an earlier marriage was final.

In March, immigration Judge Kendall B. Warren, sitting in Seattle, rejected Curran’s request for a stay. The judge ruled that Curran had to leave by May 7 because no immigrant visa was “immediately available” for him, despite his wife’s pending petition. Curran is appealing the decision, but the case could drag on for a year while Curran is in England, said Shusterman.

Rick Kenney, a spokesman for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration courts, said Curran would seem to have little alternative but to go to England and wait for his wife’s petition to be approved.

Suzanne Curran filed on behalf of her husband almost five months ago, usually enough time for a visa of a citizen’s spouse to be ready. But Curran says he ran into more bad luck: The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service lost the application, not an unusual turn of events.

Today, the jarring reality of Curran’s impending departure is just setting in for his family.

“This is my husband and they’re going to pry him away--from me and from his children,” said Suzanne Curran, an electronics saleswoman who has spent recent days frantically contacting congressional offices and others searching for help. “It’s going to tear us apart.”

For years, Curran has lived a relatively normal life, as do many illegal immigrants. Fair-haired and hazel-eyed, few suspected that Curran was undocumented. He launched his business and coaches children’s soccer in his spare time.

“People just assumed I was legal,” said Curran, dressed in shorts and sandals as he sat at his dining room table in his family’s modest apartment by the coast.

Like so many immigrants, the working-class young man from the gritty English city of Birmingham was attracted by the promise of the United States, especially California, destination of dream-seekers from virtually every corner of the globe.

Fatefully, Curran put off doing anything about his immigration status, hoping it would somehow “sort itself out.”