Among the jobs Marlene and Dario Pereira did on their long immigrant journey from Sao Paulo to Providence was cleaning Stop & Shop supermarkets in Fall River, Middletown and Narragansett. They went in late at night, polished the floors, cleaned the offices and left before the first customers came through the door. Then they went home to fix breakfast for their children, whom neighbors kept an eye on.

“It’s a very hard job,” says Marlene. It was the kind of job, she says, that immigrants would do but no one else would. The Pereiras — Marlene and Dario and their children, Dario Jr. and Amanda — are all about hard work, about taking sometimes meager opportunities and making the most of them.

Dario Jr., who manages two sandwich shops, heads for Rhode Island College in a few weeks. He graduated from Classical High School in Providence, where he did very well, and was accepted at some very good schools. But he had to stay close to home and go to RIC because there is no scholarship money available to the child of a Brazilian family that doesn’t have green cards.

It is one of the strange twists confronting a family that seems to do everything right and yet finds itself with a terrible uncertainty hanging over its future. Will they have to return to Brazil? Will their children, who have become students in America, have to make an incredible readjustment in their young lives? Will the hard work, always paying their way and taking no public assistance, count for something?

Right now, there is uncertainty on uncertainty. Marlene Pereira is waiting to hear from an immigration judge about the alleged violation of her work permit guidelines.

It seems trivial, but it is an example of what immigrants face in trying to navigate their way through the tricky, ever changing ground between what’s legal and what isn’t.

Marlene says she took a job at Brown University in what Brown calls dining services. Her official job title on her work permit, she says, is food preparation and cook. She saw no substantial difference between the two. Immigration officials did. She has been waiting for two years for an immigration judge to hear the case and determine if the move from food preparation and cook to dining services really is a violation. In the meantime, the Pereiras are left in limbo, with no chance to obtain a green card, that precious credential on the road to citizenship. They cannot leave the country until the hearing is held.

The long wait for a judge is not unusual, says Carl Krueger, staff lawyer at the International Institute in Providence. He says the six immigration judges in Boston are currently scheduling cases 18 months in the future.

When told about the Pereiras’ situation, Krueger said it is not unusual. He said immigrant children will often excel in school, then “hit a brick wall” when it comes to applying for scholarship aid.

So the Pereiras are not unusual. That is probably the best reason to tell their story. Amid all the uninformed spew about the immigrant pillage of public resources, it seems a good idea to consider this family that owns a house in Providence and asks for nothing but fair consideration.

“We work hard, pay taxes, buy a house,” says Marlene. “We’ve never gotten one penny from the government. It’s all out of our pocket. We have done no crimes. We try to be good citizens.”

One of the really interesting things about the immigration debate is that it often takes the immigrant experience to remind the lucky natives how truly lucky we are.

Consider what the Pereiras have been through on the way to that modest house in Providence, where they wait for a judge to hear them.

Dario Pereira lost his job as an inspector in an auto-parts plant in Sao Paulo 10 years ago. Marlene, a nurse’s assistant in a hospital, took a second job in another hospital to help make ends meet.

She believes God led her and her family to leave Brazil. And the United States seemed the obvious destination because of the opportunities it offered Amanda and Dario Jr.

There was no real plan, no connection here waiting to line up jobs and housing. After a long and often frustrating application process, they obtained passports and visas.

Dario came first. He arrived in Somerville, Mass., on a cold January day in 1999. His wife and children stayed behind to sell their house and most of what they owned. He shared a small apartment with four other Brazilian men. And he went every morning to a labor exchange. The stories he had heard in Brazil about plenty of jobs paying $25 an hour turned out not to be true.

Some days he worked. Some days he didn’t. He remembers one job in a hotel basement, replacing pipes as part of a renovation project. The ceiling was low. There was water on the floor.

His wife and children, who were 6 and 9, followed the next month, even though there was little waiting for them.

“There was nothing here and nothing there,” says Marlene.

They moved to a small apartment in Framingham where they shared a bathroom with 20 people. Marlene scrubbed it before letting her children use it.

They took jobs where they could find them and learned English as they went. There was a time when Marlene and Dario held down five jobs between them.

When they moved to Fall River eight years ago, it was a little bit of heaven. Everybody, it seemed, spoke Portuguese. And people were kind. They brought things to fill the modest apartment on 16th Street. Dario delivered the Fall River Herald News, then went to his job on a cleaning crew at the Harbor Mall. Marlene went door to door, doing manicures and pedicures.

After selling the house they owned in Fall River, they moved to Providence three years ago and bought the house where they live now. Dario is a carpenter, working for a cabinetmaker in Warren. Marlene does housekeeping. They have their driver’s licenses and Social Security cards. They have their work permits, which they first obtained in 2003 and which remove the “illegal” designation.

Amanda Pereira, who graduated from Community Prep with honors, is a sophomore at Classical. And it worries her that too often people look at immigrants without seeing the things they do and the contributions they make.

“They see us as one big blob,” she says.

It’s easier that way. Because if we start really looking, we’ll see families like the Pereiras. We’ll see hard work and scholarship. And we’ll have to consider the real possibility that this place is made better by their being here.

bkerr@projo.com