The deportation of immigrants from the U.S. has been in the news recently, and immigrants who are undocumented are frightened.
Sasin “Pun” Tuangiaruwinai immigrated to Forest Park eight years ago, but he’s not worried about being deported, even in what feels like an anti-immigrant atmosphere, because he has dotted every “i” and crossed every “t” to make his immigration legal. His is a story about migrating according to the State Department’s priorities and procedures.
Pun’s grandparents were immigrants to Thailand from China. In fact, the website Quora estimates that up to half of all Thai citizens have Chinese ancestry to one degree or another. His parents, he said, are middle class. His father is a college graduate and owns his own business, and his mother works for Norwegian Lutheran Ministry in Bangkok where he grew up.
When he graduated from high school, it was assumed he would go to college, and his mother encouraged him to study in the U.S. He obtained a student visa and had a place to stay as soon as he got off the plane, the student center owned by St. Paul Thai Lutheran Church in Forest Park.
Christians make up less than 1% of the population in Thailand, a very small minority in which everyone seems to have connections with everyone else, whether they live in Thailand or other countries, especially the U.S.
He studied at Triton College for the first two years to save money and finished up his degree in management information systems at DePaul University.
“I could not have made it without the support of the Thai congregation,” he said. The Thai church provided him not only with housing but a cultural community to which he could return every day after his adventures in a new land.
One of the challenges, of course, was language. He had studied English in school, but learning a language in a class is very different from communicating almost 24/7 with native speakers. “I would record the lectures at Triton,” he recalled. “The professors would speak so fast I could not understand everything without listening to what they said again.”
Another challenge is maintaining your legal status. The requirements of Pun’s F-1 student visa included:
Being enrolled as a full-time student at a school accredited by the U.S. Department of Education
Maintain a good academic standing
Have sufficient financial resources to support themselves
Adhere to the conditions of their visa.
Because an F-1 was only good while Pun was a full-time student, his next challenge was to get an OPT (Optional Practical Training) authorization, without which he would have to return to Thailand after graduation. OPT allows immigrants to gain experience in their field for two or three years and then go back to their country of origin.
Unless they can find a company that sponsors them, which means the company they are working for has to obtain H-1B status from the U.S. Dept. of Labor. H-1B status — are your ready? — gives permission for aliens to work in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability. A specialty occupation is one that requires the application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and the attainment of at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. The intent of the H-1B provision is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.
In Pun’s case that employer turned out to be the Golden Triangle, a high-end antique dealer owned by Chauwarin Tuntisak and Doug VanTress, two members of the same Thai Church that provided housing to Pun to this very day.
The two owners wound up spending many hours and thousands of dollars, mainly in legal fees to obtain the status that would allow Pun to stay in the U.S. What helped them prove that Pun provided them with a service unavailable from U.S. citizens was not only his degree but the fact that he was fluent in English and Thai.
The next hurdle to clear was getting a green card, signifying status as a lawful permanent resident, which allows the holder to work in the U.S. indefinitely and provides a pathway to U.S. citizenship.
What makes Pun’s immigrant journey more interesting and at the same time more complicated is that last year he got married in Thailand and Nutchanart Chantakua is now living with him in the student center.
She is here legally because she is classified as his dependent, but as of now she can’t even get a job legally.
So even though they didn’t have to brave the Darien Gap to get to this country, he, and now they, do still have challenges ahead for them to hurdle.
