Bedrock of Legal US Immigration Leaves Millions Waiting for Years

Julie Hirsch, a Florida resident, has lived in the U.S. since 1987.

“I came with a student visa,” she said of her time studying in New York. Her family moved to the United States from China a decade after the Cultural Revolution, a period of violent upheaval in which an estimated 2 million people died.

“[We] are survivors, you know,” she said.

Hirsch said her father, Joseph Ying Cheng, worked with the U.S. Navy during the early 1940s and through his military connections later brought his family to the United States.

“Basically, [one of his Navy friends] convinced him to come to the United States. … My father came in 1980. After that, he brought us here,” she said.

Hirsch told VOA that after her father became a U.S. citizen, he sponsored his two unmarried adult children. But a third child, the oldest, was married and decided to stay in Shanghai, China.

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