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 News from Around the Americas | April 2007 
Immigrants See Florida as a Path to American Dream
 Victor Manuel Ramos - Orlando Sentinel
| | Click on the video links above to learn the stories of five immigrants. (Orlando Sentinel) |
The numbers tell the story: The immigrant population has nearly quadrupled in Metro Orlando, from about 77,000 in 1990 to at least 302,000 in 2005. More than 3.2 million foreigners of different immigration statuses and national origins lived in Florida in 2005, the last year for which updated figures are available. An estimated 850,000 were in the state illegally, but most have some sort of temporary or legal status.
Tens of thousands enter under visas for specialty workers or under student visas for higher education, and thousands of others seek asylum from political oppression or refuge from war. Why are they coming here? The answers vary as much as the faces and customs those immigrants bring, but they have one common thread: They see Orlando as a place where they can live peacefully - and where they can find work to get ahead.
THE REFUGEE: John Ndorbor He is one of more than 4,700 refugee applicants who were admitted to Florida in 2005.
'We are lucky to be alive.'
Ndorbor, 36, came to Florida after fleeing ethnic fighting in Liberia. He is a restaurant worker and is pictured with his daughter, Jenneh, 5. He also has a wife, Esther, and three other children: Jimmy, 9, Gambo, 3, and Emmanuel, 3.
THE PROFESSIONAL: Ramon Ojeda He arrived with an H-1B visa for specialty workers. More than 43,000 immigrants entered Florida in 2005 with employment-based visas for 'specialty occupations.'
'I came to this wonderful country seeking quality of life.'
Ojeda, 40, is president of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metro Orlando. He moved here from Venezuela with his wife and his children Roberto, 11, and Lorena, 8.
THE PERMANENT RESIDENT: Wismand Joseph More than 122,000 immigrants became permanent residents in Florida in 2005. Orlando's number of new residents ranged from 4,000 to 6,000 per year between 2002 and 2004. More than 10,000 became permanent residents in 2005.
'I like Orlando. . . . It's the place I first knew after my life was saved.'
The U.S. Coast Guard rescued Joseph and 400 others as they attempted to sail from Haiti to Florida in 1991. He now works as an office manager. Joseph, 34, has two children: an 11-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl.
THE STUDENT: Laurent Domaingue He is here on a student visa. More than 37,000 immigrants entered Florida in 2005 with visas for 'students and exchange visitors.'
'You never see something like that in my country.'
Domaingue, 22, is a surfing enthusiast who marvels at the turnout for Florida surfing events. From the island of Mauritius, Domaingue is studying industrial engineering at the University of Central Florida and has no family here.
THE ASYLUM APPLICANT: Maria Vivas She is appealing her removal proceedings. There is a backlog of about 9,600 such cases in Orlando.
'I have worked very hard for myself.'
Vivas, 18, fled Venezuela and the regime of Hugo Chavez. She attended high school in Poinciana and won a scholarship to Barry University, but now her education is on hold. She is here with her mother, Maritza Romero and her younger sister, Gabriela.
THE 'SAFE HAVEN' APPLICANT: Odalis Alba Alba, 35, is a parolee under the 'Cuban Adjustment Act.' More than 30,000 Cubans became residents, mostly under act provisions, in 2005. The bakery worker is here with her daughters Sarai, 12, and Claudia, 6.
Odalis Alba had sold some of the few farm animals her family possessed in Santiago to buy her passage out of Cuba. She sought help to smuggle her older daughter out of the country after government officials refused to let her leave. She left her parents behind, not knowing if she would see them again.
She flew from Cuba to Mexico City, then rode by bus from Hermosillo, Mexico, with her two daughters. Finally, she walked to a U.S. border checkpoint in Nogales, Ariz., on the Fourth of July. She claimed the protection afforded to her under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 - a federal act for Cuban immigrants who are paroled into the country, becoming permanent-residency candidates as soon as they step onto U.S. land.
It's the form of relief that has led to the so-called 'wet-foot, dry-foot' policy because many Cubans who come to the United States on rafts rush onto South Florida's beaches to claim the benefit. If they are caught on the water, they can be deported back to the island under communist rule. Those who receive the benefit can become permanent residents after a year living as law-abiding immigrant parolees in the U.S.
Alba, who had been a librarian for a government agency in Cuba, spent years trying to get her older daughter out of Cuba. After she made it through the checkpoint and waited hours to be released with her daughters, she and her daughters boarded a bus going east - to Florida.
Alba is waiting for the 'green card' that would allow her to stay as a permanent resident, and someday would allow her to apply for citizenship. She hopes to become a citizen on some other Fourth of July.
'It's a blessing to be able to raise my daughters in a country that is truly free, where they'll have the opportunities that millions of other Cubans don't have.'
John Ndorbor John Ndorbor walks anywhere from three to five miles a day, going up and down Alafaya Trail to one of two restaurant jobs, where he puts in more than 60 hours of work every week.
On rainy days, he takes off his shoes and socks and puts them in a shopping bag before heading to work. To stay dry, he wears flip-flops and a large plastic poncho that he bought at Wal-Mart, also a four-mile walk from the apartment he shares with his wife and four children.
For grocery shopping, he bought a wheeled cart. Anything that requires a car, such as taking his wife or children to a doctor's appointment, becomes a complication for Ndorbor. He came to Orlando from a western African village without roads, electricity, running water and, certainly, without any use for cars.
His daily trek is little compared with the seven days of walking and hiding in the bush that he endured to flee Liberia to get to refugee camps in Guinea - where he reunited with the wife and child who had escaped before him. He was fleeing a guerrilla group that had shaved his head, forcing him to join their militia.
Ndorbor applied for political asylum through the United Nations. He ended up in Florida, sponsored by Catholic Charities' Immigration and Refugee Services, as he escaped from the ethnic fighting and government crackdown that ravaged Liberia between 2000 and 2003. Ndorbor lost both parents to starvation, an uncle to gunfire, and other relatives and friends to the armed squads seeking control.
The conflict ended, but Ndorbor does not have a home to return to. He has a renewable work permit that allows him to live and work in the U.S. while his petition for permanent residence is reviewed.
He says he gets homesick, but then remembers what he left behind. 'There was no food, no clothes, no medication, no education, for that matter,' Ndorbor said. 'We are lucky to be alive.'
Ramon Ojeda When he decided to leave Venezuela, amid growing discontent with the country's socialist policies, Ramon Ojeda could have picked another metropolitan area in the United States or some other country in Latin America.
He had been in the U.S. before, first in the late 1980s as an exchange student in Bantam, Conn., and later in the mid-1990s with a student visa to study at Pennsylvania State University.
It was a 2002 visit to Walt Disney World that worked its magic on Ojeda and his family. The fact that the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metro Orlando was seeking new leadership in a region with a growing community of Latino entrepreneurs didn't hurt.
Ojeda applied for the position, banking on his years of experience as a marketing executive for Cargill, a Minnesota-based multinational.
He got the job and flew in from Caracas, Venezuela, with one of the coveted H-1B visas that the U.S. doles out every year to temporary workers with 'specialty occupations.' They are people who bring talents and job skills that are either in short supply or could benefit a growing sector of the economy.
'I came to this wonderful country seeking quality of life,' said Ojeda, whose organization hosts a business exposition that attracted about 25,000 Hispanic consumers last year.
'It was one of the most difficult decisions of my life,' Ojeda said of his move to Orlando. 'But we were facing a political, economic and social situation of a lot of uncertainty in our country and took the risk for our children's sake.'
After one recent day of work in February, Ojeda found a small envelope waiting for him at home. It brought him the 'permanent resident card' - popularly known as a 'green card'- authorizing him to live and work here permanently. His wife and children also received theirs.
Laurent Domaingue The course offerings, campus life and potential for employment were important to Laurent Domaingue when he looked for American colleges where he could apply as an international student. So was surf and warm weather.
'Location,' Domaingue said is why he enrolled at the University of Central Florida - a large university near a city, and still close enough to the beach, but less expensive than Miami. Among the items Domaingue made sure he brought for his trip, all the way from the African island of Mauritius to east Orlando, was a surfboard he would use here to ride over the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.
He is seeking an industrial-engineering degree at UCF, hoping to land a job after graduation with a military or aerospace contractor in Central Florida.
In the meantime, Domaingue has joined the UCF surf club and is getting to know the Florida coastline, hanging out at Cocoa Beach and Satellite Beach and attending competitions and shows at other state beaches. He has proudly told friends back home about attending, as a spectator, a professional surf competition at Sebastian Inlet, where he got to see surfing idols like 'The Hobgood Brothers,' whose careers he had followed from abroad.
'The event was really big,' Domaingue said. 'There were thousands of people on the beach, very good surfers, Jet Skis in the water. It was great. You never see something like that in my country.'
Domaingue, who is also active with the International Student Association at UCF, likes Central Florida enough that he would consider staying here for good. He has a visa that allows him to study in the U.S. until 2010. After that, he would have to persuade an employer to sponsor him into the country.
Maria Vivas Maria Vivas did not have any problems adjusting to life in Orlando after her family's hasty departure from Venezuela, as they fled what they say was political persecution over her mother's opposition to socialist Hugo Chavez.
She liked it here. This was the vacation wonderland where her mother had brought her 'to meet Mickey Mouse' when she was a child. It was the place where her mother was buying a new house in Poinciana.
But most of all, she looked forward to going to college and studying international politics, perhaps journalism, or any other career that would allow her to defend human rights.
Vivas became an honor student at Poinciana High School. She got involved at Saint Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Kissimmee, eventually directing the parish's youth group. She also joined a dance group that advocated sexual abstinence for teens.
And because she graduated with honors, Vivas was told that she would become the recipient of a $58,000 scholarship to Barry University in Miami.
Everything was ready, Vivas said, 'but at the end of the conversation, the guidance counselor said to mail a copy of my work-permit authorization' to complete the application.
Her work permit had expired. So had her visa. And an Orlando immigration judge had denied her family's application for political asylum.
Vivas had to walk away from the scholarship and resign to wait until her status question is resolved. The case is currently being appealed.
'I have worked very hard for myself,' she said, 'and I can't move forward. But I still hold on to my dreams.'
Wismand Joseph No place seemed safe in Haiti for Wismand Joseph, after he advocated for then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's stay in power. The country was in turmoil as a military coup removed Aristide from power in 1991.
Armed men went looking for Joseph at his Port-au-Prince home, but he was not there at the time. He fled to his native town in northwest Haiti and found out others had been looking for him there as well.
Joseph had to jump out a back window in the middle of the night when other pro-coup forces kicked in the door at his mother's house. He ran and walked about 30 miles to another town, where he hid at a friend's house for a few days.
Joseph feared he was running out of places to hide, so he crammed into an old sailboat with 400 other people. They were going illegally to Florida. The boat was tossed around as it crossed the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti. People got sick. Joseph thought they would all die. As the boat entered the open water of the Atlantic Ocean, though, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted it.
Joseph made his case for political asylum while detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. He was later flown in a military plane, along with other asylum applicants, to Miami. His godfather eventually picked him up and brought him to live with him in the Oak Ridge neighborhood of Orlando.
Joseph has settled here. He learned a trade, becoming a carpenter and working in construction projects throughout the state. He became a permanent U.S. resident, applying for his papers after he married a U.S. citizen. He moved on to other jobs and traveled to other parts of the country.
Now Joseph is an office manager at an immigration office that helps other Haitians process their paperwork to stay here.
He is proud of his achievements and says his chest swells with pride when he drives by Union Parkway and Interstate 4, where he built the wood framing for the interstate's ramp.
'I like Orlando,' Joseph said. 'I have a lot of friends here. It's the place I first knew after my life was saved. I have two kids who live here. I have reasons to love it.' |
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