You spend years wooing a beautiful Filipina. You visit her provincial barangay to meet her and her family. Finally, committed and in love, you petition US immigration for a fiancé visa. Seven months later, boom, it’s approved and your sweetheart is enroute! You get married, excited by the prospect of a new life together.
Then she returns to the Philippines for another year or more of uncertain delay.
Save for the last bit, that was the process my wife and I navigated more than 18 years ago. But instead of returning to the Philippines, Ivy applied for her green card from the home we shared in California. And, just like that, obtained an Adjustment of Status to become a permanent resident and, eventually, a US citizen.
If we were to do it today, according to a new policy announced by the Trump administration, she’d be back on a jet to Manila before the wedding bells stopped ringing. Which, pardon my French, is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t another rant repeating the usual liberal mantra that “Trump did it, so it’s bad.” In fact, I’ve long supported many of the President’s policies, including his loudly heralded insistence on enforcing America’s immigration laws. And while there have certainly been some unfortunate excesses, that policy has mostly succeeded.
This latest wrinkle, however—requiring green card applicants, including the spouses of US citizens, to apply from their home countries—is way over the top. Not just by yards, but by miles.
It’s “anti-family” and will “force apart husbands from wives and children from their parents,” howled a spokesman for World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization advising immigrants in the US. “There’s simply no compelling reason for this cruel, anti-family policy change…”
I hate to say it, but I completely agree.
The administration has justified the change by calling status adjustment a privilege, not a right. The new policy, a spokesperson said, “allows our immigration service to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes. When aliens apply from their home country, it reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows and remain in the US illegally after being denied residency.”
On the surface, that may sound fine and good. But very few green card applicants, in fact, end up slipping into the shadows. Which, for my money, makes this nothing less than an expansion of the battle against illegal immigration to include those who aren’t illegal at all.
“Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways,” President Trump said in his 2019 State of the Union address. “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever. But they have to come in legally.”
It was that and similar statements that prompted me and millions of others to vote for him in 2024. But now, the President is changing his tune. We got a staggering preview of what that could mean in San Diego, California, last year when several married couples, appearing at the city’s federal building for what they thought were routine green card interviews, ended up leaving separately with the foreign spouses in handcuffs.
“I had to take our baby from my crying wife’s arms,” Stephen Paul, 33, told the New York Times. “It’s insane to have them rip our family apart. Whoever is directing this has completely lost touch with their mission to the country.”
Declared the family’s immigration lawyer: “In 25 years of practice, I have never seen anything like this.”
The new policy could impact 100,000 to 200,000 Filipinos now living in the United States, according to the Philippine Ambassador there, Jose Manuel ‘Babe’ Romualdez.
I sincerely hope none of them are my friends or relatives. More to the point, I sincerely urge President Trump to rethink this deplorable drift away from the promises that got him elected.
Pretty please. With sugar on top.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
