Coming to America After a 20-Year Wait

The Immigration and Naturalization Service checkpoint at Sea-Tac International Airport is one floor underground, a rectangular cavern of hard grays and whites filled with the faint hiss of escalator belts spinning and air moving through vents. Squarely on U.S. soil, it is nonetheless a bureaucratic limbo, a border.

At 10:10 a.m. on April 10, the quiet is jarred by an electric clang of bells, and the room fills with a herd of people: the 258 passengers of Northwest Airlines Flight 96 from Osaka, Japan.

An interpreter with a microphone directs all to their proper lines. Visitors to Areas 4 and 5. American citizens to Area 6. Immigrants to Area 1.

Only one passenger goes to Area 1. Her name is Filomena Estoesta. She is 52 years old and 5 feet tall. She wears a black business jacket, gray pants and a long necklace. Her eyes are puffy from sleeping poorly during 36 hours of travel from her home in the Philippines, but her red lipstick is fresh and bright.

She has waited 20 years for this day.

She filed an application to emigrate to the United States in 1980, sponsored by her sister, Dorie Hughes, who had married a U.S. citizen. But the way immigrants are selected, a brother or sister sponsorship is a low priority compared to husband-wife or parent-child sponsorships, and the Philippines has one of the biggest backlogs of applicants.

For 20 years, Estoesta reared her son, Michael, in the Philippines. Most of that time she was alone, working as a secretary in a law firm. Her estranged husband didn’t support the boy.

When she applied, Michael was a baby. Last December, before she received approval to come, her son turned 22 and became ineligible to accompany her under her immigrant visa.

So she came alone.

“I gave up all hope. I started thinking it was all talk,” she says. “Then it happened. I’m very happy.”

She hopes to work in a law firm here, for higher wages than she got in the Philippines. She wants to buy a house, become a U.S. citizen and travel across the country she has dreamed of for two decades.

First, though, she must escape this limbo, the culmination of a journey that started in Tubao, a small town six hours by bus from Manila. Her flight from Manila to Osaka took four hours; the transpacific flight to Seattle took nine hours. She barely slept for two nights.

Now the INS inspector beckons her to the window.

“Who filed the petition for you?” the officer asks, flipping through papers, barely looking up.

“My sister,” she says.

“What’s her status here? How long has she lived here?”

“She’s been here since 1968.”

“Are you coming here by yourself? Do you have a husband?”

“I’m very sorry. We’ve been separated for 15 years. He’s living with another woman.”

“What do you do for work?”

“I’m a secretary. I work in a law firm.”

The inspector is satisfied. She stamps Estoesta’s passport with a temporary stamp that will allow her to live here until a permanent green card is mailed within six months.

The officer directs Estoesta to the fingerprinting counter nearby, then it’s on to Customs.

At the stainless-steel baggage carousel, Estoesta waits for her suitcase. She has just one, a big black fabric bag with her sister’s address written in huge letters. She loads it onto a cart and trudges through the crowd of travelers. She clings to a plastic bag containing her X-rays and other medical records.

An airport worker spots her plastic pouch, the mark of an immigrant, and he gives her a big smile.

“Brand new?” he says. She nods. He laughs.

“Welcome to America,” he says, and then she laughs too.

Passing through one last metal detector, she walks out of limbo and into the real America.

Dorie is waiting in the hallway, and Filomena Estoesta strides into her sister’s arms.