#MyTimeinLine: Sorry I Couldn’t Stay
Alexa, and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty.
~ Americanah by chimamanda ngozi adichie
It’s really ironic to see Medium’s Matter host a series around U.S. immigration, given that they were one of the companies I applied to at a last-ditch attempt to get an H1-B work visa, knowing that they had sponsored others in the past. (I didn’t even get an interview.)
I’ve written — ranted, at times — at length in many places about my lifetime of experience with the fuckery that is the international immigration & citizenship system. From not being acknowledged as a Malaysian citizen till my 26th birthday, despite being born & raised in the country and following all their restrictive rules as a permanent resident with none of the benefits, to all the trouble that comes with applying for visas on a Bangladesh passport, to the bridging visa hell that made life in Australia while waiting for my permanent residency intolerable. Even a fun story about the land speed record I set in Australia for fastest time getting a Swedish visa.
My experience with U.S. Immigration was relatively straightforward, and maybe one of the easier countries I’ve dealt with visa-wise. What wasn’t easy was getting to that point in the first place. In fact, I didn’t quite get there — which is why I am writing to you from Malaysia, where I never thought I’d return to after 10 years, rather than the Bay Area or anywhere else in the U.S..
I’d been in the U.S. multiple times for family holidays (my mother’s sister lives in the East Coast) as well as various artistic and educational endeavours, such as Up with People and the Performing the World conference. In 2011, dealing with the aftermath of failing social, career, and love lives in Australia, I spent the summer at an arts residency in San Francisco’s now defunct Cellspace, and quickly got involved in a lot of arts and community projects around gender, sexuality, race, and intersectional activism. The Center for Sex and Culture became my second home, and I befriended a ton of people that passed through their doors. I fell in love with the people and the possibilities in the Bay Area, and was really heartened that people there wanted me to come back. I desperately wanted to return.
I tried looking at jobs and other options to get back to the Bay Area, and saw that my best option was through a student visa. I was very reluctant about going back to school — formal education and I do not get along — but found a program that was flexible, had a ton of space to do what I wanted to do, and (most importantly) did not require that I write an academic paper if I didn’t want to. I applied for the MFA in Creative Inquiry at CIIS, got accepted, and went through the process to get my visa.
Compared to the Australian student visa, where I had to go through a “pre-visa” process for months because of my Bangladesh passport at the time, the U.S. student visa process was relatively quick and straightforward, if a little tedious towards the end. Like Australia, I pretty much needed every financial and identification document known to man, but that wasn’t hard to obtain having done this multiple times before. My school provided a form that we both filled out, there was a lot of trips back and forth to the DHL office at Brisbane Airport, and I made my way to Sydney to wait in line at the US Consulate…where I got turned away because I was missing the print-out of a receipt that never actually came (never mind that I had a bundle of other paperwork that was in order). I found an Internet cafe open at 8 in the morning, tried to wrangle that receipt, and got back in line — and after some waiting, I got my student visa, hardly any questions asked.
I was back in the Bay Area, and had a whale of a time. 2 years went by, and it was time to decide — stay or go?
The breakdown of a tumultuous relationship, plus my Australian bridging visa, nearly turned me away from applying for OPT — the year-long extension of your student visa, meant for you to find work. I didn’t think I could bear being in a city where all the buildings would remind me of her, but more practically, my bridging visa only lets me out of Australia up to one year at most before renewal if you have a “valid reason” (usually it’s three months) and while the renewal itself is not hard — just pop into the DIBP office and pay some money — I didn’t know if I could push my luck for another full year.
The support of close friends helped me deal with the breakup, and a ton of my friends and peers insisted I stay just a little longer.
The granting of my Australian permanent residency, after 5 years of waiting, made that a possibility.
In mid 2014, employment authorization in hand, I flew back to Brisbane to kill off two birds: get my PR, and renew my U.S. visa. As an Australian PR, I could apply for the U.S. visa by post — though given that my passport nearly got lost in the mail because the Consulate forgot to write my friend’s apartment number, maybe I should have stood in line in Sydney. But everything was granted, a little later than I would have liked (I missed a conference as a result) and I was back to the U.S. for a year of work — hopefully more.
Trying to find a year of work was difficult.
Because I had left the OPT decision to the last minute, I had missed out on applications for year-long fellowships that could have easily filled up my OPT year. I immediately went on the job hunt, having started it while in Brisbane through early morning Skype chats, and landed a 3-month unpaid internship with the Global Fund for Women’s Ignite Project that I thought would translate to a longer-term paid job. Unfortunately, while I really enjoyed the work and the people, the project didn’t have any funds to hire me after those three months, so my internship didn’t go any further.
There is a provision for arts students to count gigs as part of their OPT, and volunteer hours counted towards the 20 hours/week minimum (a funny demand considering I could only work about those many hours maximum on-campus on minimum wage on my student visa), so I maximised those hours as far as I could take them. I spent a lot of my time during and after the internship organizing the 2015 Bay Area run of Yoni Ki Baat, an annual Vagina Monologues-style performance by, for, and about South Asian women, and I also worked on smaller creative projects, paid and volunteer— from helping with promotion & backup singing for queer rock opera project WildcardxFaust, to transcribing a screenplay for another friend. I also eventually found part-time work as a tutor — not as many hours as I would have liked, but it was paid work, which helped a lot with the Bay Area’s rapidly rising costs.
I was ambivalent about getting the H1-B only because I didn’t want to go through yet another round of visa headache. The process itself was already confusing — yes, the employer does most of the legwork, but you can only go for particular jobs, and those jobs need to last at least three years, and they need to pay you this much, and you have to apply by some date because the quota goes by really quickly…so on and so forth. I ended up self-selecting out of a bunch of otherwise awesome-sounding jobs because they wouldn’t fit the basic requirements. Even the multiple career counselors I visited were no help: either they were too optimistic, or too pessimistic, and they all ghosted on me despite my best efforts to do their homework.
I was told by some friends about the special H1-B for educational, non-profit, and research organizations, and how some people have successfully used it to get non-profit work: there is no deadline, and it’s cheaper overall. However, how are you going to convince non-profits and arts organizations to pony up their already limited finances to pay for your visa? Even if they’re eligible for the cheaper, deadline-free option? I know of friends who were forced to pay for their own H1-Bs, even though it’s technically illegal, because they wouldn’t get hired otherwise. Even if you offer to deal with the bulk of the paperwork, and just need them to sign some papers, it’s still seen as an administrative hassle. Why not just hire someone local? Less hassle.
It was around this time that I started looking seriously into the tech industry. I’ve always been interested in tech, though more on the media and content sides rather than coding. (The last time I learnt any sort of programming was Pascal and QBASIC in the 90s.) However, I’d noticed that the tech industry overall were way more organized and way more willing to deal with H1-Bs than most other places. Maybe it’s worth checking them out?
At the same time, I was surrounded by communities of activists and artists who felt that the tech industry solely consisted of the Worst People Ever. Everyone was a gentrifier, they were jacking up housing prices and pushing people out of their homes, they were killing culture and art and everything that made the Bay Area great. Tech was The Enemy. Nobody had any consideration for how the tech industry could be a gateway for people like me to be able to be in and afford cities that were more accepting and welcoming of us, the weirdos and the queer, the disenfranchised and the seeking — because we worked in Tech, we were automatically The Man, there goes all our alt lifestyle cred.
I threw myself into all kinds of conferences, events, and learning opportunities to gain a foothold in tech: Casual Connect, Alterconf, Lesbians Who Tech. I entered hackathons and game jams and tech summits. I tried to find bootcamps, though timing and/or money were often big barriers, but I did manage to get into a Javascript class at Telegraph Academy. I got published in Geek Feminism and Model View Culture, hoping to gain more attention and support. I even signed up for Startup Bus on a whim, and to my surprise left with the start of a highly popular and pretty potent startup idea that’s still gaining press and supporters.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough.
I couldn’t land a job on time. I did get more interviews than I ever did in Australia or Malaysia, but those didn’t convert to Yeses — one was potentially due to visa reasons, but everyone else mostly responded with “you’re great but we picked someone else”, if they responded at all. I applied for Mozilla Foundation’s Open Web Fellowship and got shortlisted, and was really keen to be involved because they explicitly said they’d help with visas — but nope, no go. There are still a lot of places that I interviewed for or applied for that I never heard back from— if they do want to take me, it’s too late now.
My friends, while well-meaning, didn’t really understand the highly arcane regulations I had to grapple with. They’d send me links to jobs, half of which wouldn’t work for some visa reason or another. They kept suggesting random visa options:
- asylum — I might have had a good case, being LGBTQ and a persecuted racial minority in Malaysia, but I’m also fairly well off and have that Aussie PR
- paying for my own H1-B — I can’t even get a job to start with
- going undocumented — which I nearly considered until my parents begged me to “stay legal” and I realized I would forever be stressed out about deportation
- and, as always, “just get married” — someone actually offered to marry me; maybe I should have taken her up on it
A handful of friends, though, were more pro-active in supporting me and probably would have been able to help if things worked out.
One was waiting on grants for a project she was running and was willing to hire me, visa issues and all — I don’t think the grants worked out though, which was a shame.
Another was an immigration lawyer and told me about the EB-1 Visa for “Extraordinarity Abilities” (or, as I like to call it, the Special Snowflake visa), which would lead to a Green Card. She looked at al the evidence I could rustle up and thought I would have a good shot, but — like all visas do — the process costs money that I don’t quite have.
The third, hearing of my despair, was willing to pay for the Special Snowflake visa. I was deeply touched, but we both decided against it, because we know that it would destroy our friendship — and part of the reason I wanted to stay was because of people like her. Not worth it.
The despair set in about a month before my OPT was about to expire. My rent was due, the last installment of Homestuck before the Omegapause was up — a bittersweet melding of timelines that made me blubber in the middle of a coffeeshop — and I knew I had to make a decision.
A miracle was not forthcoming. Probably never will.
I decided to leave.
I also nearly decided to die.
Immigration has always been traumatizing for me: its aftermath in multiple forms across my life sparked a lot of my mental health issues. Job-hunting was also stressful — in Australia, the bridging visa cut me off a ton of job possibilities, and the process got so painful to the point that I couldn’t even look at a resume anymore and needed my then-boyfriend to start writing them for me.
At that moment, making that decision also meant acknowledging that I was a failure, that I was letting myself and a lot of people down. Malaysia hated people like me and made my life a living hell, so I fled to Australia. Australia’s bridging visa limbo plus the highly White-centric circles I was in fucked me over, and the Bay Area seemed more welcoming, so I jumped ship there. And now here I was, in a city where I felt like I was just getting started, with chosen family, with so much potential…and I couldn’t make it pay off.
That hook on the door frame seemed like a really attractive option at the time.
A friend paid for a Lyft to take me to their house, keeping an eye on me so I wasn’t suicidal. I spent the next few nights with another friend, the one who then told me that she would have been willing to pay for the Special Snowflake visa if it meant I wouldn’t kill myself. I got past that dark patch, but that didn’t change my decision: I still had to go. My time ran out.
I had to drop everything, everything I’d started or thought about or built, the startup and the performance art and the community building, and leave.
Most people were sympathetic and sorry, but some people were not at all happy with my decision. They pressured me more: why not try this visa? Or that visa? Or this other thing? Why didn’t you work harder? Did you apply to every job possible? Why didn’t it work? Why didn’t you make it work? When I told them to cut it out, they got offended and claimed that they were “just trying to be helpful”.
They made me feel like I had to apologize for not getting the H1-B, for not trying harder to stay longer in the US, don’t you love us?
Sometimes I wonder, don’t you love me?
To the artsy queer radical activist subcultures who talk a lot about “community”: where was “community” when I was trying to get a visa to stay? Where is “community” when immigrants try to find jobs — or do you think we’re stealing them from you? Where is “community” when it comes to advocating for better immigration pathways, for quotas to be lifted and job requirements to be less arcane? Where are the “community” organizations that are willing to look into visa sponsorship and collectively find ways to make the process less burdensome and expensive?
To the tech industry: why are you eating up all the quota? Why are you demanding that people leave their jobs for 6 months to pay a zillion dollars to sit through your bootcamps? Why are you not valuing the work of non-coders?
To Immigration: why all the arcane restrictions? Why do your job requirements not match up with the realities of the job market? Why is so much information only obtainable by word of mouth?
To everyone else: why do you assume that immigrants are either Poor Pitiable Refugees (to be ignored once they settle down and assimilate a little) or Rich White Migrants? Why do you always accuse us of “stealing your jobs” when we can’t get hired and “dole bludging” when we get no access to benefits yet still pay taxes? Why do you make it the applicant’s fault when the system fails them?
I’m now back in Malaysia, have been since August. No luck on the job front here either. I have been trying for jobs in Australia, but no one’s even booked an interview. I‘m working on ways to get back to the U.S., but they’re still contingent on someone accepting me.
God, I’m so tired of my life being determined by someone else’s acceptances and rejections.
I don’t know how to end this. I don’t know how to end the inertia, how to end Immigration trauma, or even how to end this essay. It just feels like I have ended.
Sometimes I vaguely consider starting a website where people can vote on which country I should go to next, and their country gains points if they produce an interview, an actual job, visa sponsorship, things that make me being in that country easier. Participants of the country that wins will get prizes from our lovely sponsors (ha! visa pun!). Maybe someone would accept me then, accept me without needing me to send out forms and ten-year travel histories and thousands of dollars.
Maybe then I could stay.
Like my work? Thank you! Here’s ways that you can support my work and keep me going.
