My Wife

"NY Statue of Liberty" by Celso Flores is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

We often look at immigration through the lens of numbers and statistics. But the real stories are personal.

My wife Jade was born and raised in the Republic of Korea (South Korea). She had in fact lived a good part of her life there. Her father died when she was young, and her mother and sister did the best they could to live on what meager earnings they made.

My wife was blessed because she passed the national examinations to go to Korea University, considered one of the best in her country. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in nursing and became a nurse at Korea University Medical Center, also considered one of the best in her country.

She wanted to improve her English ability, so she enrolled at English Language School International (ELSI) Korea. Little did she know that this would change her whole life. I was one of her instructors. She liked me so much that she enrolled in my class twice.

When I was about to leave South Korea, I wrote my name and address for all of my students to have the chance to write to me. Jade was scared at first to reply to me, but she tried to pen her first letter to me (yes, this was before e-mails). I replied, and she was so excited that she sent me three long letters. I replied and sent her equally long letters in return.

We corresponded for a year before I wrote back that I was going to return to South Korea to visit her and another friend of mine named Mr. Wang (I will say more about him in upcoming articles). She met me at the airport in Seoul, and we went all around the city. I asked her if she would come to visit me in the United States, and at first she was reluctant. She was scared of going to a Western country as she had never traveled that far (she had only been to China on a very short tour with her family).

Despite her fear, she arranged for the tickets, the visa at the U.S. embassy (visas were required then for South Korean nationals), and when the fateful day arrived she got on the airplane.

Straightway she had problems. With herself as the exception, all of the other passengers on Japan Airlines were Japanese. They sailed right through U.S. customs when the plane landed in Minneapolis.

However, the immigration authorities took a hard line on her, and they actually took her to a room and interrogated her for an hour. By the time they were satisfied with her answers (which I had coached her on before she left South Korea), she had missed her flight from Minneapolis to Chicago. She was put on another flight by the Japan Airlines staff and arrived at the airport in Chicago a nervous wreck.

Worse, I was not there, and her luggage was lost in transit. Her flight had arrived earlier than expected. When I got to the airport I inquired if my wife's flight had already arrived. I was told it had arrived 40 minutes earlier. I immediately went to the arrival section and found Jade in complete shock, just wandering around.

She was more than happy to see me, and I reassured her that she was now safe, and I would take good care of her. I dealt with her lost luggage problem, and we left the airport. I had already arranged a hotel room for her; she got a lot of sleep. Once she had rested, I took her all through my part of the Chicago area.

After ten days of being in America, she felt so happy and was feeling better. She went back to South Korea and waited for me to visit her again. We visited each other in each other's countries for five and a half years before we got married. We had gone from being complete strangers to husband and wife. There were many bumps in the road, but since then we have been married for over 20 years.

Jade has accomplished much since she came to live in the United States. Even though she was 42 years old when she arrived in America, this did not stop her from building a life for herself. When she got her Illinois state driver's license, she was so happy. She then became a United States citizen and went to Sauk Valley Community College in Dixon, Illinois, where she earned an associate's degree in accounting and finance.

She worked as an antique dealer in an antique mall in Fulton, Illinois, and then became a health care worker for people with Down's Syndrome. In the short time she has lived in America, she has accomplished so much, and is caring for people who cannot entirely care for themselves. Her life has for the most part been good in the United States, and in her own way she has been contributing to this country.

It rather scares me when some extremists call for the complete restriction or outright banning of legal immigration to the United States. This country was built on immigration, and such wonderful people like my wife could not emigrate here if immigration laws in America become too insanely restrictive.

And there is no question in the minds of those who have come to know Jade; they are happy she is in America.

Daniel Nardini spent 22 years as a newspaper correspondent for Lawndale News and The Fulton Journal. He has published six books, including his eyewitness account of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, The Day China Cried. He is listed as an Illinois author in the Illinois Center for the Book.

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The Modern Whig Institute is a 501(c)(3) civic research and education foundation dedicated to the fundamental American principles of representative government, ordered liberty, capitalism, due process and the rule of law.

Opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute or its members.