For Lane Yon, "Mayor" of Bear Necessities, Obstacles to Immigration Hit Home

Lane Yon works at Bear Necessities on Wednesday. Yon is fighting to bring his pregnant wife from Cambodia to the United States. (Nathan Schwartzberg)

September 2, 2010
By Jeff Stein
The Cornell Daily Sun

Bear Necessities food service worker Lane Yon — nicknamed “The Mayor” by his co-workers because “he knows everyone” — has spent endless hours over the last several years chatting with and befriending Cornell students, hitting Dino’s with members of the basketball team, and even attending the occasional fraternity party.

But beneath his buoyant, bubbly exterior, Yon has been painfully struggling in a way many of his Cornell friends might not know. His wife, Kim Por, has been denied entry into the United States by the American embassy in Cambodia, according to Yon, since 2008.

And Por is expecting. To prove his marriage was real and to see his wife, Yon spent the summer in Cambodia. With Por two months pregnant, Yon is hoping to have his child born in the U.S., especially because the American hospitals are better than those in Cambodia, he said.

Yon expects to hear again from the immigration office in about a month, but he is trying to resist high expectations.

Yon said that the American embassy believes his marriage with Por “is a scam” because, in its view, the two are “only married because of [his] green card.” They’re “giving me the run around,” Yon said of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.

According to Prof. Stephen Yale-Loehr ’77, law, an immigration professor who also practices immigration law at an Ithaca firm, Yon’s dilemma is representative of a larger international trend.

“In some countries, like Cambodia, getting the documentation that the immigration agency prefers is a lot harder [than in other countries],” Yale-Loehr said. Getting one’s real wife through the immigration service’s stringent criteria is “often is a problem,” he said.

No one knows exactly how common is the practice of “sham marriages,” Yale-Loehr said. In 1986, the U.S. government estimated in a report that one-third of all marriages reviewed were “shammed for green card purposes,” but, Yale-Loehr said, the study was faulty.

“One has to look at it from both sides,” said Caryl Uzelac, the executive director for a U.S. immigration law firm based in New York City. She said that real marriages can be “very difficult to prove,” and that the U.S. has the responsibility of protecting its borders.

Still, this has not been much solace to Yon, who expressed frustration with those who conduct sham marriages.

Yon has traveled back to Cambodia five times since his marriage to Por in 2008 in an effort to prove his marriage is real. “What can I do to make [the embassy] believe [me]?” he said.

In October, Yon’s lawyer, Hilary Fraser — who Yon said is helping him for compensation less than her regular rate — wrote a letter to Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-22nd) asking for help.

“We are all aware of the high fraud rate in Cambodian U.S. immigration applications … However, this one I assure you is legitimate,” Fraser wrote.

Hinchey’s office wrote back that they were unable to render an “advisory opinion,” but recommended Yon try contacting the Department of Homeland Security.

Yon said he is now “trying to get a hold” of Cornell President David Skorton to ask for help. He said he “hopes this story will get [Skorton’s] attention.” He also said that he is now “getting assistance” from U.S. Senator Kristin Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

After years of disappointment, Yon is getting frustrated with his position.

“Some nights I want to give up,” he said, adding that it is difficult “working late hours without someone to support you back home.”

Other Bear Necessities employees said they have seen Yon’s struggle to bring his wife to Ithaca take a toll on him.

“We’ve seen him cry sometimes when he talks about it,” said Anne VanDonsel, Yon’s co-worker of two years.

Ronnie Horton, Yon’s shift supervisor, said that the “family” of workers “see when he’s emotional” about Por and try to “make it so he doesn’t get down.”

“Just bring her home,” said Yon’s co-worker Helen Quick.

Yon said that he plans to go back to Cambodia “if [Por] gets denied again.”

“I want to start my life already, buy a house and have kids,” he said.

The history behind Yon and Por’s relationship may lend support to the marriage’s validity.

A few years ago, Yon’s father, Kennedy, set up an arranged marriage for Yon in Cambodia, where Yon was born. Kennedy had changed his name when his family came to Salt Lake City in 1988, “sponsored by a Mormon family,” because Yon’s father “respected [U.S. President John Kennedy’s] Vietnam policy,” Yon said.

Back in Cambodia, Kennedy found a wife for his son. Yon had planned to accept this predetermined bride, but when he arrived in Cambodia, he broke off the match because “we had nothing in common.”

Yon’s father was infuriated and decided to cut off support for his son. His decision plunged Yon into a depression. He did not know what to do with his life, he said.

Then he “bumped into” his future wife at the mall.

“In South East Asia, [a] guy can’t pursue girls,” Yon said. But since Yon, whose family came to America when he was seven, was “so Americanized … I went up to her and said I liked her.”

“She was scared of me [and thought] I was from a mental hospital,” Yon recalled, laughing. But he persisted, and the two were married in 2008.

During the course of his interview with The Sun, Yon was approached and high-fived by several students, some of whom knew him by name. He has over 70 friends on Facebook who were or are Cornellians. He said that he occasionally goes to fraternity parties “just to get out of my place to have people to talk [to] and have fun.”

He also said that members of both the tennis and lacrosse teams are particularly adamant about getting Yon to come to their parties, “but I just don’t have the time,” Yon said.

Yon said that he likes a lot of things about Cornell but that it is a “stressful environment.”

His plan, after working more in the U.S., is to “take these skills back” to Cambodia and open his own American restaurant in the model of Bear Necessities.