Four LI immigrants tell their stories

As Long Island’s foreign-born population continues to grow, immigrants weave into the fabric of society: opening businesses, becoming active in local schools, organizing cultural events and assisting other immigrants within their community.

The newest Census Bureau population data, released last week, show immigrants growing to more than 16 percent of the Island’s estimated 2.87 million people, up from 14.6 percent in 2000.

Based on data from 2005 through 2009, the American Community Survey found that most new immigrants come from Latin American countries. Asian immigrant populations also continue to grow on Long Island.

The immigrant share of the Island’s population was higher in the early part of the 20th century, according to census data — more than 20 percent up to 1940 — and most immigrants at that time came from European countries. Similarities in their lives and those of newer Long Island immigrants can be found in a hard-work ethic and devotion to family.

Four women who, through different routes, found their way to and established their lives on Long Island tell their stories:

SUEY TOM

To Suey Tom, 89, America was the mythological Mountain of Gold. With war as an uncertain backdrop in 1940, she left China for New York and marriage to a man she knew only through an exchange of letters.

“She got off the ship and married him. That was the deal,” Tom’s eldest child, Helen Chin, president of the Chinese Center on Long Island, recalled. Tom has lived with Chin, 69, a retired New York City educator, and Chin’s husband in Port Washington for six years.

Tom arrived on Ellis Island in 1940. After about a month in quarantine, she went to Brooklyn with her new husband, Sam Tom. The Mountain of Gold of Chinese myth turned out to be a “mountain of laundry” for Tom, Chin said. Tom worked in her husband’s laundry and looked after the couple’s three girls and two boys. In the early days, the family lived in three rooms in the back of the laundry. Tom said she learned English by speaking to customers.

“I got no time to go to school,” Tom said. “I work hard. I raise up the children. I always tell the children, ‘You got to go to school’ . . . So my children all finish college.” There are few regrets about leaving her homeland. “I’m happy I came here,” Tom said.

ONAI SINGH

The quest for higher education motivated Jonai Singh to leave her middle-class life in Calcutta, India, for America in 1992 to study at St. John’s University in Queens. Her boyfriend, Tito, who became her husband, started studies at St. John’s two years earlier.

“There’s some families who come for a better living. But when you’re as young as we came, you’re also coming for higher education,” said Singh, 42.

Education remains a force in her life on Long Island. The Singhs have lived in Searingtown in Nassau County since 1998. Jonai Singh left a career in the fashion industry to raise their two daughters.

She is the current co-president of the Council of PTAs for the Herricks School District and president of Herricks Indo US Community, a nonprofit that helps the immigrant community “understand the public schooling system,” which she labored to learn about on her own.

She cherishes her American citizenship, “proudly” reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at events. “I have so much emotion . . . It reminds me of my entire journey. You cannot take a moment of this for granted.”

ISABEL SEPULVEDA-DE SCANLON

In 1991, Isabel Sepulveda-de Scanlon, 53, left Chile for her second stay in the United States — the first ended in the 1980s after a failed marriage to a U.S. citizen. She decided to return to the U.S. because it was where her daughter, now 25, was born. She has since remarried and raised a second daughter, 16.

She now lives in Southampton as a naturalized citizen and member of the East End’s burgeoning Hispanic community. Sepulveda-de Scanlon is a sales and marketing representative for a North Fork fire and water cleanup and restoration firm and publishes a free, bilingual newspaper, Voz Latina, out of her home. Her early years in East Hampton, where she had relatives, tell a classic immigrant tale of working hard to get ahead.

“We arrived on a Tuesday. I rested on Wednesday. On Thursday, I bought the East Hampton Star and I started marking jobs that I can go for interviews, and one was the East Hampton hardware store,” she said. Sepulveda-de Scanlon got that cashier’s job, which paid $6.25 an hour. She quickly started a second cashier’s job at a restaurant two nights a week, took care of an elderly woman on Mondays and worked part-time at a shoe store, a punishing schedule she said she kept up for a year.

“When I see what I have done here, the newspaper, starting a not-for-profit . . . it would have never happened in Chile,” she said.

YANIRA CHACON

In 1982, Yanira Chacon left El Salvador for the United States out of fear. “We were afraid of losing our life,” Chacon, 50, said of the political unrest in her native country. “Eight members of our youth group were either disappeared or killed in a very short period of time.”

She joined her family in the Bronx, overstaying her tourist visa. “So automatically you become without status, an illegal immigrant. . . . It was really scary,” she said. “I was in this country seven years without having any immigration status.”

She sought political asylum, but said her case stalled. After many court hearings, and a brief detention, she said she obtained American citizenship in 1997.

Chacon married, raised four children and left New York City for Long Island in 1987. She lives in Uniondale, where, after years of working for several Hispanic advocacy organizations, she has become director of Casa Mary Johanna, an outreach program for a mostly Hispanic population that is run by St. Brigid’s parish in Westbury.

As the debate about undocumented immigrants rages, Chacon is anguished. “We have not had real immigration reform for so many years, and there are so many families who will love to get into this process as soon as they can. And it’s not possible. It’s a little bit sad.”