They had been born in the United States, so they were American citizens, but obviously we couldn’t leave them. We had a 10-month-old baby and a four-year-old. “Go home,” everyone said-but we were home. We made lots of calls, but we were told over and over that it couldn’t be and we would have to leave the country. It didn’t seem possible to us that one small detail couldn’t somehow be rectified. We couldn’t believe it when our lawyer told us that he had missed a deadline for filing one of the documents, so our application wouldn’t be processed, after all. It was March 1999 and our visas were going to expire in December, so my husband made a routine call to our lawyer to check on our green card application status. We knew getting the green card was a very long process, but we were okay being patient, even though everything in our lives was contingent on getting that green card. We had come into the country legally-he from India and I from Bangladesh-as university students, and we had done everything by the book. Can you share what happened to you and your family in 1999 and how that experience led you to write Zara Hossain Is Here two decades later?Īt that time my husband and I had been living in Corpus Christi, Tex., for nearly eight years he had a work visa and I had a dependent visa and we had applied for a green card through his job.
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