11-14-03news3

Student may be deported
By Jesse Phelps

When Rosemary Wallace returned to the United States in early August for her final year of study at World University, she was detained for nine hours in an Immigration and Naturalization Service cubicle at the airport in Miami, then told she had two choices: keep waiting until things got cleared up or enjoy one final month on American soil.

She said that any time she needed to do something during her detainment - for instance, at one point she needed to get some money from a cash machine - she was accompanied by armed guards.

The problem? Wallace's I20 form, which she said serves as the primary document which allows foreign students access to American schools, had not been updated per new regulations stemming from an increase in security measures in the post-Sept. 11 United States.

It turns out that the cutoff date for acceptance of the old I20 was July 31. Because she arrived a matter of days later, she will now be unable to complete her studies at the school.

Fortunately, she's got options. Wallace, who said she's quite adaptable, has already made plans to leave and visit Thailand, where she'll continue her work with thanatology, the study of death and dying and their impacts on the living.

She plans to work with families and at hospitals there. "I'll be very, very interested to see what the attitude toward death and dying is in Thailand," she said.

And the time spent in American college will not be lost. Said Wallace, "I can complete the courses online."

Not, said Wallace, that the government has been showing any unwillingness to work with her on allowing her to stay. While she and the school met several times and made attempts to clear the matter up, she was granted two extra months and two extra days.

But records submitted by the school verifying her right to be here have yet to be processed. The INS has yet to send a valid I20. As the third month begins to grow short, she said she's pared her possessions down to two boxes and two sets of clothes and made plans to stop at the American Embassy in Bangkok, to let officials know she's exited the country.

Asked whether she blames the school or the government, Wallace takes the high road, referring instead to the atmosphere of dread in America since the day the towers fell and the resulting series of laws that make it possible for a perfectly harmless "alien" such as herself to "slip through the cracks."

Wallace, a Brit who arrived in America for the first time six years ago, said she's experienced a palpable change in the people of this nation since that fateful day. Her story, she said, is one possible end that results from "the trauma and the hurt and the fear thatbthis country is in and how we legislate through fear."

It wasn't like that when she arrived. For the first few years she was here, she said, she was gifted with anything she needed. The people of America took her in and "it was like rain from Heaven."

But because Homeland Security has been tightened up in the wake of the tragic events of Sept. 2001, a visa and old paperwork no longer suffice to keep her name in the good graces of the government.
So now Wallace has made other plans. She said she won't miss America and is looking forward to her trip to Asia. "The end of the advanture is that it's the beginningof another adventure," said Wallace, "Which is, to me, what life is all about."

Still, Wallace knows it isn't the end of America's adventure, now that the nation has begun to feel its own vulnerability, its own mortality. She said that, while she can only speak for herself, she imagines that similar situations to hers are occuring in other places around the country every day.

And before she departs, she wants to share a warning. "If you are a foreign student coming into this country, then it would be of personal beneift to research constantly the change in the laws with regard to your status," said Wallace. "Because it's changing week by week, month by month. And (don't) rely on anybodyexcept yourself to get pieces of information. It's not anymore the comfortable state of expecting or allowing somebody else to know something. It's not the case, not if you are a foreigner coming into the country."

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