The sunny Corina Voicu does not want to linger on the particulars of her life in Romania. She will always love her native country, she declares, and her situation there was nice. She and her husband held jobs as nurses, they had two handsome sons, and their parents' farms supplied all the free vegetables and poultry they needed.

But her husband, Mihai, whose soberness is the perfect counterpoint to his wife's effervescence, gently interrupts. "I was working for 18 years and I couldn't buy a car," he says in accented English. They lived in a small, two-room apartment where each night the living room had to be converted into their bedroom.