Ambala man recounts journey to US as illegal immigrant

SALEM(US): This 21-year-old youth might be among the lucky few to have entered the US illegally, stayed in jail for less than a month and still have landed a job!

For the Ambala resident, it took about 60 days and USD 60,000 (over ₹40 lakh) to land in the US as an illegal immigrant, get political asylum and a job of USD 10 per hour in a local grocery store in Oregon state.

His parents, who own over five acres of agricultural land, took loans on the farmland and their property to pay ₹17 lakh to an agent in Haryana in May this year to help him enter the US illegally through the southern Mexican border.

“We flew (from India) to Mexico,” the youth says, who prefers to be called by his pet name Bobby, told PTI in this sleepy town of Oregon inside a small rural grocery store on the eighth day of his job this week.

Not in the best of his health and having lost several kilos of weight in the journey that he has taken from Haryana to Oregon this summer, Bobby said his group comprised seven other Indians of his age from Haryana and Punjab. From Mexico, the group was to the southern US border in Texas, where they were left by the local agent. They threw away their passports and cellphones and jumped over a nearly fivefoot wall to enter what he described as the “dreamland”.

“We were arrested immediately,” he said, adding that the border patrol sleuths greeted them with “Namaste” and talked about Sachin Tendulkar and Shah Rukh Khan, indicating that the federal law enforcement agencies capture illegal Indian aliens frequently on the Texas border. The only son of his parents, Bobby, speaking a mix of Punjabi and Hindi, said he told the judge that he flew out of India because he feared “political persecution” by Indian authorities.“this is the story I was told to tell the judge,” he said. His agent helped him hire an attorney who he said charged him ₹2.5 lakh. The judge was convinced and set his release at a bond of ₹15 lakh. “There are no jobs (in India),” he said when asked why did he come to the US like this.