So she thought: Injured and illegal: Is a ticket home the answer?
By Diane Sayre
The headline of the article on the New York Times News Service said it all: "U.S. Hospitals deport seriously ill immigrants." Illegal immigrants, that is. Anytime I hear a story about illegal immigrants in trouble, my ears perk up, because I can actually say I lived and worked in a foreign country as an "undocumented worker" for a period of time, many years ago.
It's an interesting story, but first I'll tell you about the subject of the article, Alberto Jimenez, the 35-year-old Guatemalan native who was living illegally in the U.S. when he ended up in a devastating car accident caused by a drunken-driving Florida resident. The accident required Jimenez be resuscitated, twice, and left him permanently disabled and in need of continuing in-patient medical care and medication.
After being unable to find a nursing facility that would take Jimenez for long-term care, Martin Memorial Hospital of Florida ended up keeping him on one of their wards -- for several years -- at an estimated cost of $1.5 million. He was eventually "forcibly returned" to his home country of Guatemala, not by the agents of the INS, but by the hospital itself, who took their case regarding case against caring for Jimenez to state court and won. The verdict has since been overturned, and the legal battle regarding Jimenez' right to return to the U.S. to receive medical care continues, as he languishes in his mother's home in Guatemala, able to afford no health care there and receiving only Alka-Seltzer and prayer from his mother as his condition deteriorates.
In sending Jimenez home, Martin Memorial did what was the only sensible thing they could do, which was stabilize their patient and send him to his legal home. It's a risk you face when deciding to live anywhere illegally, but it's only here in the U.S. that there would be a debate about it.
Now my story: When I was in my 20s, I chose to spend several months on the island of Crete, the largest of the Greek Islands, originally as a vacationer and eventually working in a variety of menial jobs, including a stint as an au pair as well as a maid/janitor at a beachfront hotel.
I'm not sure exactly how long I overstayed my visa, by several months, at least, but there is a veritable cottage industry of people doing so on the big Mediterranean island. Just like here in the U.S., jobs which regular citizens are wont to take are readily available to the foreigner.
During my time there, I lived on the roof of a cheap youth hostel with guys like Larry from Chicago (first names and towns of origin only in the illegal alien biz, please), who had arrived on Crete three years before and decided to stay and work in the booming construction trade, and couples like George and Mandy from Ontario, Canada, who had been there for one and a half years, with George working in the olive groves as a laborer and Mandy changing sheets and mopping floors at the Hotel Mykonos.
Of course I must point out the obvious differences between us ex-patriot North Americans and the illegal immigrants who live and work here in the U.S: Most of the young men and women who lived and worked illegally in the Greek Islands were leaving neither poverty nor political oppression in search of a better life. It was just an adventure.
And yet, there are still some similarities. For instance, I would never have thought of staying on Crete, giving birth to children there while still on "illegal" status, and then demanding they be educated in English until they were taught Greek at the expense of the Greek taxpayer. I would never have expected to be given the right to apply for a Greek driver's license while still in the country illegally. I would never have expected access to medical care I could not pay cash for, and had I been seriously injured, I could easily have seen myself put on a plane back home the minute I was out of the intensive care unit -- or perhaps thrown in one of their prisons for being in their country without a valid visa.
And why? Because in other countries, when you're there illegally, you have no rights. Period. While you may be doing jobs that none of its legal residents want to do themselves, you only live there only as long as the authorities are willing to look the other way for the sake of the local economy.
One fine Cretan morning I woke up and snapped out of my "island madness" and came away from my Greek adventure unscathed. I often wonder if people like Larry from Chicago or George and Mandy from Canada fared as well. Because living illegally in a foreign country is a crapshoot, and it's risky -- unless it's the U.S., in which case people will bend over backwards defending your right to set up house and claim all the rights of a regular citizen.
Unfortunately, you still need a fair share of good luck to make it work. Jimenez' case proves, if nothing else, that once you're either too broke or too sick to stay under the radar of the authorities, it's a safe bet that you're probably going home. Whatever country you're in.
And to expect anything else is its own form of madness.
Diane Sayre is a freelance writer living in Hanford. Her column appears weekly in the Sentinel. Readers can write to her at The Hanford Sentinel, P.O. Box 9, Hanford, CA 93232.
(Aug. 11, 2008)
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Mag wrote on Aug 11, 2008 1:25 PM: