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Archive for January, 2009

Love conquers all, even language barrier, borders

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

ST. LOUIS, Mich. – Nothing can keep apart two people in love.

Not even government red tape, more than 6,500 miles and not being able to have a spoken conversation.

David Eldridge, 61, is ready to get married. But his bride-to-be, 51-year-old LiYing Fan, still is in Beijing, teaching martial arts and waiting to complete the process of acquiring a visa to move to the United States.

Eldridge — a resident of St. Louis, Mich., and a Gratiot County commissioner — says he met his beloved on an Internet dating site in November 2007.

The two have communicated through an online text translator, but there was one problem when they began speaking on the phone: He speaks no Chinese, and she speaks no English.

Doesn’t matter, Eldridge says.

“Voice can be a relationship killer but hers was sweet and pleasant,” he told the Morning Sun of Mount Pleasant for a story published Monday.

The couple finally met when Fan visited the United States last year as part of a cultural exchange. Her sister, who lives in Milwaukee, traveled to Pasadena, Calif., to meet her. Eldridge went, too.

When they met, Eldridge said, “everything I felt and thought was put into concrete. … It’s funny how you can communicate when you don’t speak the same language.”

Eldridge then began putting together the paperwork for a fiancee visa and learned on New Year’s Day that it was approved. Fan now must undergo a physical exam and interview at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing before she can come to the United States, possibly in April or May.

Eldridge has two daughters from a previous marriage and 10 grandchildren. Fan’s son died at a young age. Both have been married twice before.

They plan a small ceremony in Michigan, he says, partly to avoid the additional red tape that would come with a wedding in China.

[ AP/ Chicago Tribune ]

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Posted in Family Immigration | Comments Off

Rules could infringe on basic civil rights in Tennessee

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

Immigrants, whether they are in the United States legally or illegally, cannot rest easily in Tennessee.

For that matter, people who are natives of the U.S. and whose skin happens to be brown also have reason to be nervous.

That is because the trend of resentment over the steadily growing immigrant population here has gone beyond the intolerance of individuals and threatens to become ingrained in our state and local legal codes.

Government-sponsored racism is an ugly thing.

The signs of this alarming trend, of course, include the well-publicized effort to limit all Metro Nashville communications and publications to English. But other instances have emerged, as well. As reported in The Tennessean earlier this month, a legal permanent U.S. resident who lives in Franklin saw his state ID and green card confiscated at a driver’s license office on unfounded suspicion that the documents were fake. The state Safety Department’s explanation that it is agency policy to investigate “suspicious” documents was sorely lacking.

In Davidson County, a U.S. citizen from Puerto Rico and her immigrant fiance were denied a marriage license simply because the fiance could not produce a Social Security card. Even though state policy was for county clerks to accept a valid passport or visa in the absence of a Social Security card, and the fiance had a valid passport, the couple was denied.

The Franklin man eventually got back his documents, but in the interim had to fear leaving his house without documents and was unable to visit family in Mexico. The couple had to sue the state of Tennessee, and eventually the state attorney general agreed that the marriage-license policy was unfair.

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Posted in Family Immigration, General Immigration | Comments Off

Archive for January, 2009

Love conquers all, even language barrier, borders

Rules could infringe on basic civil rights in Tennessee

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