The Delaware County Times, PA
Dec 10 2004
Gil Spencer: In this instance, CIS is running the asylum
Garegin and Nadia Ambartsoumian have been in this country for eight
years, raising their three children and working hard. Nadia works
six, sometimes seven days a week, cleaning houses and offices.
Garegin, a house painter, works long hours, too. After three years on
his own, his business is starting to take off.
Their girls, Karina and Rimma, are honor students at Upper Darby High
School. Their son, George, goes to the Armenian Sisters Academy in
Radnor.
They live in row house in Drexel Hill — but not for long, if the
Office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has anything to
say about it. And it does.
The CIS wants the Ambartsoumian family to go back where it came from,
namely Georgia or Ukraine. One of those places in the former Soviet
Union. It doesn’t really matter which one. As the bartender says at
closing time, “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”
Well, George can. He’s a natural-born American citizen. So he can
stay on, but without his parents and sisters. He’s 8.
The Ambartsoumians applied for refugee status soon after they arrived
here in 1996. They fled the Soviet Union four years earlier after
years of what they claim was religious and ethnic persecution.
Nadia is a Baptist. Her father was a Baptist minister. Under the old
communist regime, religion was frowned upon.
“In communist country,” Nadia said in her still-thick Eastern
European accent, “they don’t let people to believe in God.”
For practicing his beliefs, Nadia’s father was sent to Siberia.
Overall, he spent 25 years of his life there. When she was old
enough, Nadia went to live with him.
“I was three years with my father in Siberia,” she said. But her
mother stayed in Ukraine with her sisters.
After returning home to Odessa, Nadia met Garegin. He’d come from
Georgia to work construction. She was working in a hotel. They
married and had two children.
But life was tough for the mixed couple. She is Ukrainian. He was
born in Georgia but is Armenian by ancestry. In the cauldron of
ethnic tribalism that passed for the former Soviet Union, Gari and
Nadia increasingly found themselves the targets of ethnic and
religious harassment.
When they decided it was time to get out, they headed first to Canada
and then to New York.
They arrived June 5, 1996, declaring themselves refugees and
requesting political asylum. Nadia gave birth to George five months
later.
They moved to the Overbrook section of Philadelphia and then to
Drexel Hill a couple of years later. They’ve been in Delco ever
since.
Though she speaks five languages, the only work Nadia could get was
cleaning houses.
“I just housekeeper,” she says.
But she’s a good one, according to the people she works for. More
than that, they say, she’s a special human being.
“She is just the most lovely person,” said Ginny Brookins, who lives
in Wayne.
In 1997, Brookins was battling cancer when Nadia came to work for
her. Today Nadia is more than an employee.
“She really has become a dear friend. She would do anything for you,”
Brookins said.
George Aman, an attorney who lives in Radnor, is another of Nadia’s
clients.
“She is a very nice woman, a fine woman, who works very hard,” he
said. “It would be a terrible shame to have her deported.”
Though she has her own lawyer, Aman has taken an interest in Nadia’s
case. He’s written letters on her behalf and called newspapers too.
“All of (her clients) want her to stay,” he said, “for economic as
well as personal reasons.”
But none more than Brookins, who Nadia helped through one of the
toughest times of her life.
“This is the type of family we need in the United States: Generous,
hard working, just the kind of people you want to know,” she said.
Unfortunately, when it comes to winning asylum, the U.S. government
isn’t swayed by such testimonials.
“We have people who have been illegally present for years who develop
equities in the community,” said Bill Strassberger, a CIS spokesman.
“But they have to have a basis to qualify for asylum.”
In 1999, an immigration judge decided that Garegin and Nadia had
failed to establish that they were sufficiently persecuted in their
home countries.
Though both of them described numerous incidents of their being
harassed, threatened and beaten, the judge found insufficient
evidence that they had a “well-founded fear of future persecution.”
Their second appeal was heard last month by a three-judge panel, and
the original decision was upheld. They were given 30 days to leave
the country, since extended until the end of the school year.
Unless someone intervenes on their behalf, this could be their last
Christmas in America.
Happy holidays.
(More about the Ambartsoumians and their situation Sunday.)
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress