“Seeking Advice About a Green Card Nightmare”

Photo by PoPville flickr user Victoria Pickering

“Dear PoPville,

This week the Department of Labor denied my application to get my Mexican nanny certified for a green card. I am infuriated and devastated, and my children are heartbroken. Does the DOL ever take American families/workers into account when they make these decisions?? I want to find a way to address this issue and I am reaching out to the DC community to see what help I can find.

1. This nanny has been with me since we lived outside the U.S. We applied for a green card after I realized I was staying in the U.S. and likely not moving abroad again. I have spent thousands of dollars annually keeping her legal, and have followed the letter of the law in the green card process too. It would have been SOOO easy to just have kept her here illegally. I know multiple families who do so. But I would never break the law, nor do that to her. And how do I get repaid by the USG for following the law?? With a denial! Do you wonder why there are so many illegals here? Because the USG makes it IMPOSSIBLE for people trying to do it legally. Also, doesn’t the DOL have something better to do? It’s not like I am applying for 200 foreigners to work in a factory. Just one person, who is critical to our household and to my career and that of my ex-husband.

2. No one applied for her job.

We followed all the regs and no one even APPLIED, neither Americans nor foreigners. Still, the DOL saw fit to deny me on a hypothetical counterfactual. Perhaps Americans did not apply, they said, because of the requirement for domestic and occasional international travel in the job description. Wait a minute… They denied me the right to hire a foreign child care worker because a hypothetical American might have wanted the job, but just did not apply??? What about my real, actual job as a contractor to the USG? What about my ex-husband’s real actual job in CT? We can’t do our work if we have no child care, and we don’t have time in our work schedules to travel between states with the kids for custodial visits. The nanny does it. And because of the unpredictable nature of our work schedules we can’t use 9-5 child care. So is it better to protect the hypothetical American who did not apply for the job, or the actual jobs of two actual americans who rely on live-in child care? I’m not rich and pampered; i need a live-in nanny because I work my butt off at crazy hours and my ex lives in another state.

The denial letter says I can appeal the decision, but the immigration attorney told me doing so was a terrible idea and was unlikely to result in a reversal of this decision. I think this process is crazy. Why can’t i speak to a human being at DOL and explain our situation? I’m appealing to this forum for advice.”