The Green Card

Last week, it was announced by the Department of Homeland Security that refugees lawfully admitted to the United States could be arrested if they did not have a green card.The rule in place has been that upon admission, after a year of residence, an immigrant need apply for such a green card.However, the new requirements are so draconian that the application and renewal processes have become simply the means to justify denials, therefore leading to more arrests and deportations.

This brought to mind an experience from my childhood when I was about 12.It was the early 1950s.Our family had gone on a vacation to Niagara Falls, which is on the Canadian border.At one point, we crossed over the border into Canada, but on our return, our father was held back by the border patrol.After some crying by my mother and my father doing his best to explain that he did not have his green card with him, that he had inadvertently left it back home in Rochester, he was finally allowed to rejoin his family on the US side.What followed after that was a back and forth bit of letter writing and form filling for Immigration Services in Buffalo, New York, to verify that Dad, now going by Louis Ackerman, was in fact the same Leibisch Ackerman that was admitted legally to the United States at Ellis Island in 1922, and yes he did have a green card which he either lost or failed to renew.In any case, my dad, somewhat offended by the bureaucratic hassle, never became a legal US citizen.In my research for the book about my father, Leibisch’s Journey, I was able to obtain some of the paperwork related to his case in the National Archives, but I never found any evidence that a subsequent green card was issued by renewal in his name.So, he had never been a full and legal citizen of the US.Bottom line—if these new rules were in place in the 1950s, my father would have been sent to a detention center somewhere in upstate New York, and perhaps back to the shtetl in the Ukraine he had come from, by then part of the USSR, and now devoid of any of his extended family, all of whom had by murdered by the Nazis in 1941.