Life Begins Again for Boy Left Behind

Clad in a navy-blue sweat suit and white Reebok sneakers, little Patrick Donald Espino sat impassively on his mother’s lap Friday and peered through large brown eyes at two photographers recording his every fidget.

The 22-month-old boy was silent. But the smiles, laughter, and tears of happiness of his grandmother, Thelma Moeller, and his 17-year-old mother, Maria Thelma Espino, spoke volumes about the end of a family’s 10-month ordeal.

Patrick’s arrival Nov. 3 in Los Angeles marked the final happy reunion in an immigrant saga. The first chapter occurred five years ago when 35-year-old Thelma Moeller arrived in Southern California from the Philippines hoping to earn enough money to bring her three children after her.

“Here, I call it the life of plenty,” said Moeller, a warm, outgoing woman.

“There, even if you work hard, you get nothing. Prices are exorbitant. People there are just not treated right. Here, there’s lots of opportunity for us.”

In pursuit of her American dream, Moeller overcame legal complications that compelled her daughter to leave the Philippines for California last February without her child, then a year old. The family had been told it would be six to nine years before Patrick could rejoin them in America.

At that point, Moeller turned to Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), whose aide, Rayma Jerome, helped the family traverse the bureaucratic snares. Gallegly invited the media Friday to attend his thank-you session with Moeller, her daughter, two sons and grandson at his Chatsworth office.

“You should smile at the congressman,” Moeller told Patrick, who merely sniffled with a cold. “If not for him, you wouldn’t be here.”

Moeller’s tale began July 25, 1982, when she left Manila with a tourist visa and no plans to return to the impoverished Southeast Asian nation.

She said she had earned 2,000 pesos a month or the equivalent of $100 U.S. as an assistant food and beverage manager at a major Philippines hotel. She had separated from her husband years earlier and was raising the three children herself.

Once in the U.S., she worked as a legal secretary and remarried three years later. She settled with her husband, real-estate agent and engineer Richard Moeller, in a five-bedroom home in Simi Valley. The couple also has a Los Angeles apartment.

Moeller, an American citizen, then applied to the U. S. State Department to have his two stepsons, a stepdaughter and Maria’s infant son join them. Maria is not married.

The State Department approved the application in September, 1986, and the visas were issued in February. Patrick received the required vaccinations and medical examinations.

But, three days before the scheduled departure, Maria was informed by the U.S. Embassy in Manila that her son could not leave. Under U. S. law, only “an immediate relative”--a spouse, mother, father or unmarried son or daughter--may petition for a foreigner’s residency.

That meant Maria would have to go to the United States, obtain permanent residency status and then apply for Patrick to join her.

“I felt very sad,” recalled Maria, who is petite and shy. “I felt like crying.”

Still reflecting her anger at her daughter’s treatment, Thelma Moeller said, “They really gave her a hard, hard time at the embassy.”

Fearful she would have trouble leaving later if she postponed her departure, Maria accompanied her brothers to California. Patrick remained behind with the family’s longtime housekeeper and grandfather.

When Maria applied for Patrick’s visa, she was told he would go on a waiting list that was backlogged six to nine years by the enormous number of Filipinos seeking to emigrate to the United States. Verne Jervis, a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said some applications date from 1971.

After many unsuccessful appeals to the INS, Thelma Moeller turned to Gallegly’s office in March.

“It’s a terrible thing to see individuals suffer as a result of bureaucratic inflexibility,” Gallegly said in a news release.

While Gallegly’s office pursued the family’s case, Patrick--already upset by his mother’s absence--became ill after he was bitten on the right hand by a pet rabbit. Maria returned to the Philippines July 11 to care for him.

“He wouldn’t let go of me,” Maria said of the mother-and-child reunion. “He kept crying and crying.”

Last month, the State Department approved what it calls a “humanitarian parole” for Patrick, permitting him to come to the United States temporarily while awaiting permanent residency.

Jervis said humanitarian parole is generally granted “when there’s a serious health problem or there’s a serious problem in reuniting a family.”

Upon his arrival at Los Angeles International Airport, Patrick was introduced to the wonders of a videocassette camera after his grandmother filmed his arrival on American soil. When she played it back, the child pointed to his image and exclaimed, “Patrick! Patrick!”

He cried, “Airplane!” as other jets soared overhead and called each skyscraper “plenty big house.”

His mother reports that he’s already had a taste of American opportunity. Patrick loves vanilla and strawberry ice cream, which was prohibitively expensive in the Philippines.

A quick study, he can recite the alphabet from A to Z and count from 1 to 20, though he prefers to converse in his native Visayan dialect, his grandmother said, proudly.

“I’m going to keep an eye on him,” Gallegly vowed. “And, if he doesn’t get straight A’s, I’m going to want to know what’s going on.”