Ceremony creates 185 new citizens
Some came to the United States seeking freedom. Some sought opportunity in the world’s last superpower. Others chose to stay here simply for love.
On Friday, 185 immigrants living in Eastern Washington and North Idaho were made U.S. citizens after renouncing allegiance to any foreign prince or potentate. Magistrate Judge Cynthia Imbrogno administered the oath of citizenship to them during a Law Day ceremony at the Masonic Temple in Spokane.
It was a happy day. You could see it in the faces of the people waiting in a long line that stretched through the dark corridors of the historic building. It was the kind of day that could make even the most cynical of us, naturalized or native-born, proud to be American.
There were 185 different stories to be told. Salim Alqureishi’s was perhaps more heroic than most.
He fled his native Iraq in 1991 after having been arrested and beaten by Saddam Hussein’s security forces in Basra. They beat him, he said, for speaking out against Baathist oppression. It was a beating that left him permanently disabled, robbing him of some motor skills and the use of his left arm.
Alqureishi, 48, said he has four children in Iraq. He arrived in the United States in August 1997. Now remarried, to a Russian immigrant, he has an American child and a new life.
“I love it,” he said in a thick Arabic accent. “I am so glad I’m here.”
Marcelo Salazar also swore allegiance to the United States on Friday. But he has been serving his adopted country for three years in the U.S. Air Force. The 22-year-old airman first class from Mexico is stationed at Fairchild as a medic.
Why does he want to be an American citizen?
“So I can get deployed to the Middle East.” Salazar believes citizenship will improve his security clearance.
Born in Mexicali, the son of a veterinarian’s assistant came to the United States when he was 16 or 17. He said it was a challenge to adjust to a new society and a new language, but it was worth it.
“Now I want to give something back to the country that opened its doors to me,” Salazar said, “a way of saying thank you.”
Each year the Spokane office of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, in partnership with the Daughters of the American Revolution, schedules the citizenship ceremony to coincide with Law Day. In 1958, President Eisenhower proclaimed May 1, the international workers’ holiday, as America’s day to celebrate its “heritage of liberty under the law.”
Love led Jean McFadden to take the oath Friday.
The native of the United Kingdom was visiting Palm Springs five years ago when at the age of 75 she met her future husband over a game of bridge.
Bruce McFadden of Spokane, now 74, said he was just passing through the California town and stopped to check out a group called “Widows and Widowers.”
The two were married 10 weeks later.
“You won’t make us sound too ridiculous?” pleaded the former resident of Manchester, England.
“It’s only right, I think,” she said of naturalization. “I’m very proud and happy to be a citizen of this wonderful country.”