When Hans Looked Too Mexican And His Green Card Was Too Yellow
A couple of year ago, I invited a friend over for a coffee. We met up occasionally to catch up and share stories. We’ll call my friend Hans, because he’s originally from Austria and because I like to keep things as anonymous on this blog as possible. But the story did actually happen.
As we shared a cup of French Roast, we discussed some of our “immigrant” war stories. Ask any immigrant, and they’ll have plenty of those to tell you. And I’d love to discuss all of them on this blog but honestly, there are just too many.
What Hans shared with me that day was a story that I simply could not connect with. He was almost deported for his green card not being green enough.
A National Park
The summer before meeting up, Hans went to a national park, Big Bend, located on the border of Mexico and the U.S. He went there with his father to see the nature. It’s truly beautiful out there. I’ve seen pictures and I’ve been planning a camping trip to visit until I heard Hans’s story.
He drove through the park and stayed there for a couple of days with his dad and on the way back, they were stopped by border patrol. Before I get into what happened, let me give you a little bit of context to the story.
It’s 2013 and Hans is thirty years old. Hans doesn’t look like the “typical” Austrian you’d expect. He doesn’t have blonde hair or blue eyes. In fact, he has very dark hair and his eyes are a dark brown. He tans easily and loves to tan which makes him look pretty dark. Unlike most white people you’d meet, he tans so well, in fact, that he’s usually darker than the average latino. And no, this isn’t a joke.
Hans has had a green card for almost a decade and has lived in the US far longer than that which means that while he speaks perfect English, he does have an accent. Hans’s dad managed to get a citizenship so he didn’t have any documentation past his ID on him. And unlike his son, his skin wasn’t as dark.
In 2013, things were slowly heating up in Arizona. A few laws were passed making the state really immigration-unfriendly. Other states considered doing the same. Big Bend was in the middle of all of it.
So back to the story, the two men were stopped by border patrol because they suspected my friend and his dad to be illegal immigrants.
The stop turned ugly almost immediately as the patrol demanded to search them and their car and to see their immigration documents.
I remember staring at Hans and letting my coffee grow colder when he told me that. Police rarely ever asks to search your car unless there is a probable cause. Border patrol has even less power, or at least I thought they did, regarding these matters.
The “Easy” way
Hans and his dad decided to take the easy way. They were on the edge of a desert with no cell reception and their closest friends hundreds of miles away. They did not resist the various intrusions on their rights and let the officers search their car all the while they made racist remarks about Mexicans and remarks about possibly finding drugs in the car.
But the car was clean. Hans’s dad told the officers that he’s a citizen (through his thick German accent) and they did not bother with him afterward. Hans, however, was a different story.
He pulled out his Green Card and immediately, the officers accused him of presenting them with fake documents. They literally told him “it wasn’t green enough”. They tried to speak Spanish at him but he could not understand them.
Now, most Americans don’t know this but Green Cards come in all kinds of varieties, depending on what year you got it in. The year that Hans got his green card (and I got mine), the ID was actually yellow. Yeah. It was yellow. It was issued yellow and there was a small bit of green on the back.
The officers searched his person, threatened to arrest him, all the while holding the actual document that proves he’s legally in the country.
He argued with them and they threatened to call the police. Hans calmed down and explained to them bit-by-bit who he was and where he was from.
In the end, one of the officers agreed that the document was probably legit and that Hans didn’t really look like a “mexican” after all. Plus their car was clean. They sent him on his way. But the entire process took around two hours in the sweltering summer heat.
Uncanny Valley
I’m a huge fan of stories that show “death by a thousand cuts”. It’s really easy to rally behind blatant injustice like disallowing Muslim’s with Green Cards to re-enter the country. It’s really easy to see the “big evil”.
Especially with prejudice. I mean, you know a racist when you hear them use the “n” word and they’re under 70 years old. You know a sexist when they claim that women are lesser beings that should be controlled by men. But what happens when things are just a little out of “ok”?
I call this the “Uncanny Valley”. The term is usually used to refer to 3D graphics that looks almost real but there is something odd and unsettling about it because there are still some unreal elements. I think it makes sense here, it looks like everything that happened was fine. It was definitely legal. But there is something unsettling and odd about the experience.
In Hans’s case, he was ultimately OK but the treatment he received meant that the wrong person at the wrong time could have had their entire life ruined by a culture of fear, racism, and hate. Hans experienced “inconvenience” but he could have easily been arrested or deported to Mexico (which would suck because he doesn’t know any Spanish).
Back to the coffee
I was flabbergasted by Hans’s experience. It had always been my belief that my green card protects me from this kind of treatment. But in fact, it was my looks. The fact that I don’t look like a Latino or an Arab. That I bear no accent and have a nice haircut. And that my clothes look like I just walked out of a church.
We shared a few more stories. I had heard of similar situations from some of my other friends. I had a friend from Taiwan tell me that police officers genuinely believed he was a North Korean spy (I’m not kidding). My Cuban friend experienced daily racism by school cops when he went to an American high school and the cops saw rednecks attacking him but ultimately forced a suspension on him for the altercation but let the white kids go. Yeah, like he would get into a 5-on-1 fight.
