Worker can't stay, can't leave

The list of jobs Americans won't do apparently includes caring for our aging parents.

We leave that work to people like Virgilio Fule. He's a 62-year-old Filipino man who has been nursing the decrepit and the dying of the Seattle area for 13 years.

Despite his age, he puts in 16 to 20 hours a day. He goes to the homes of folks bedridden by cancer, Alzheimer's or multiple sclerosis. Alzheimer's patients have spit on him and hit him. The pay is low, the job security nil and many of his patients wind up dying.

It's worth every minute, he says.

"When you help ease someone's pain, or brighten them, or give some relief to their families — there's no job satisfaction like that," Fule says. "I'm very proud of the work I do."

Check that. The work he used to do. Fule spoke to me from a holding cell in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, where he's been jailed for 48 days now.

He's an illegal immigrant. He was picked up in June when federal agents raided a Bellevue adult family home. They were after someone else, who wasn't there, so they took what they could get.

Fule says practically everyone on the front lines of elder care is not from around here.

"They are Ethiopians, Haitians, Filipino like me," he says. "Americans don't want to do those jobs. You go to any home, you will see it."

As the director of a Seattle nursing home told The Seattle Times last year: "Without foreign labor, long-term care could close its doors in King County."

Now, I realize the debate about immigration has ended, at least for now. We chose to do nothing, except launch a major crackdown.

Some will find that crackdown satisfying. Cases like Fule's suggest it won't be.

First, what's the point of driving a skilled elder-care worker out of our country? Why not fine him and give him some path to stay here legally?

There's no plan to do that. Or to bring in any workers to replace him.

Instead, Congress punted on all that before junketing off on a summer break so marathon it would make an Iraqi parliamentarian blush.

So America doesn't want Fule to stay. Fine. But here's the other thing: Neither will America let him leave.

Fule isn't asking for sympathy. The day he was arrested he copped to being illegal. He opted for "voluntary departure," in which he pays his own way home to save the U.S. the cost of deporting him. In return, he's supposed to get out faster, with no deportation order on his record.

Yet seven weeks later, there Fule sits. At a $125-per-day cost to us to detain him.

A spokeswoman said the government needs time to run background checks, to make sure "we're not putting a bad guy on a plane. It's not as simple as just letting people leave."

None of this is simple. Yet Congress and the feds are taking a simpleton approach.

We should keep people like Virgilio Fule. But even if we don't, our immigration policy is the stuff of Bizarro World. It's easy to sneak into the country, but it's hard to get out.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.