How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love America
Going From Unauthorized Immigrant To Unlikely Citizen
Nine years ago I left the affluence of Canada, its work security and public healthcare, to become one of 10 million unauthorized Immigrants living in the United States. I wasn’t fleeing any danger but also didn’t have any strong attachments. I was trying to find meaning in my life beyond late capitalism. So I arrived in Ann Arbor a few days after my twenty-fifth birthday, swearing off suburbia and my parents. I began to speak vaguely about the purpose of my life and my trips to Customs and Border Protection agents and others. And after a year, the CBP started taking notes on my so called life.
Traveling back and forth, never more than a half dozen times a year, I’d board an overnight Greyhound in Toronto, upholstered in a blue jazz pattern and filled with other Immigrants. I often wondered if their stories were as twisting as mine and where their journey would take them. Having served as a Canadian Customs Officer for three summers, I knew better than to rehearse my story, instead imagining a world where I was settled as a freelance designer. Whenever I was questioned, I relayed my imagined life, and not my under the table work in service — prepping sandwiches without much artistry. I didn’t intend on staying all these years, content with a subsistence lifestyle. I didn’t want to be American, I simply wanted to work. The minimum wage and lack of healthcare was never reason enough to stay here permanently, but I persisted, year after year, temp job after temp job, season by season. In all that time, My only regret is having missed my niece’s lavish baptism in Canada when I couldn’t leave the country without risking my reentry. Everything else seemed excusable by Americanisms.
Turning American
I would hang out at the historic venue, Arbor Vitae, where we partied and watched touring bands. The story goes that the original tenant was an esoteric architect, transformed an unused loft into an independent performance space. When he died, the exposed wood came to support room dividers. There were aquariums, neglected pianos and instruments strewn about the quarters, and the loft was turned over to writers, punks and jazz students. I’d seen and smoked the indie music subculture of America, falling in love with its eccentricities as I slowly grew into my non-conformity in the Midwest.
I was at a loft show when Obama won the election in November, 2008. The liberal counter culture college town poured into the downtown, young folks banging pots, fists raised in praise of the end of tyranny. We must have thought that the seat of Presidency meant change, but we only later realized that power sits with a corrupt Congress. Though Canada’s safety and ease was always beckoning, it turned conservative, which made me feel like I could live here indefinitely. I applied for an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, paid taxes on undocumented earnings along with millions of other unauthorized Immigrants and I hoped for the best. Without any real security, that’s all you can do. But I also prepared for the worst, deportation or detention. It would be another two years of border crossings, some close calls with the CBP and run ins with police. The CBP started to document my stories, growing suspicious of my regular crossings. I was also pulled over on my moped for a busted headlight on a rainy night. I handed the policewomen my license, told them I was staying with my friends and borrowed their moped. Sitting on my moped, waiting in the drizzle for them to run a background check, I thought about being deported, about not seeing my girlfriend, abandoning the affordable communal housing I’d started, leaving without saying goodbye to everyone. Despite riding with an expired license, the officers looked the other way and one day, I finally reentered as a permanent resident. I stopped worrying. My first drivers license, social security card and bank account all followed.
Why is there no taboo when it comes to asking a person about their immigration status? Americans who think it their civic business will often casually ask me to divulge mine. I don’t think they realize they’re just revealing their own elitism. If you must know, the most common choices are H1B, TN or K3. But since you aren’t asking, I won’t say. All you need to remember is that America is a land of Immigrants.
So how are you here?
I don’t see much meaning anymore in an American identity since fifty percent of natural born citizens would fail the naturalization test. I also don’t understand how a person can be “illegal”. Certainly their employment or actions can be judged illegal, but a life itself cannot be illegal, or alien for that matter. I feel for migrants and the dehumanizations they must endure. I’m one of the lucky ones.
Without the comforts of roots or the privilege of inheritance, I’ve grown skeptical of this nation’s mythologies, those paraded during election rallies and insinuated on the news, the ones that rewrite injustice and erase contributions. Seeing that the mythology of America is the subject of much anti-intellectual debate, I support narratives that afford Immigrant Americans a self selected identity, like a MacArthur Fellow or a hard working family man. Not the prescribed second class of loafer, criminal or illiterate. Diversity simply isn’t enough; we want acceptance.
I, Immigrant, always in a state of becoming, never settled in the comforts of past place or present climate. Frequently, in a cycle of starting with little, being offered less and burdened with high expectations.
I have to stop and stand in awe of what is sometimes possible but rarely simple. A few years ago, I was unemployed and applied for food stamps, like many of the underemployed in Michigan. I was denied, of course. New Immigrants do not qualify for aid in their first five years. A structural policy that denies the newly vulnerable emergency support. That is xenophobia as mandate and it must change. Other nations offers a wealth of support services to newcomers, to help them settle and participate in society.
The fragility of American identity under its mythological construct is revealing itself, fracturing at every class, gender and race, between the unauthorized bottom 5% and the authorized top 1%. Equally evident is that even citizenship is no longer a guarantee of a secure livelihood or state protections.
I also happen to be in the fortunate position of deciding whether to become an American citizen. By now, this is as frightening to me as it must be to naturals. I’d be turning this country a shade of majority–minority. And when I saw Commit To Citizenship, an initiative to support permanent residents in naturalizing, I finally heard a politician ask us to engage civically as voters. I’m still baffled by it since my relationship with America and its –isms is complex. There are days where I hate it here, or am hated, and on those days, I wish to leave. Also, it costs $700 to file for my right to citizenship, where it’s only $100 in Canada. The writing of this essay doesn’t quite cover the fees. Still, so many of my good Americans friends make me want to become one, or at least a more recognized one.
I used to ask myself, what I might lose or gain from all this? Nothing I presently do is contingent on citizenship. Though I still have a general anxiety at the many border checkpoints, it didn’t occur to me until recently to ask, what would an American say if asked if they were an American?
“Jose Antonio Vargas actually would have stood a better shot at leaving southern Texas through an inland checkpoint — not through the airport — by exploiting a strange loophole pioneered by libertarian activists outraged by what they see as an infringement of their Constitutional right to freedom of movement.” —
There are certain places here where we can’t move about freely, civic minded as we may be. At any checkpoint within a 100 miles of the border or any of the 33 inland checkpoints, a CBP agent may detain anyone to investigate their residency status. Known as the border search exception, checkpoints can appear at domestic ferry terminals, airports or road borders. But many Americans simply refuse to respond or be detained, in which case, it’s left up to the CBP agent.
After learning about this, it occurred to me that the stubborn, self-serving, refusenik Americanism is the answer to my question of what would an American say. In spite of the warped attitudes of many White adults here, that Immigrants make the economy worse and society dangerous, an estimated 11 million permanent residents are eligible to naturalize this year. The nation will be majority non-white by 2035, and this majority of minorities, Latino, Asian, White and Blacks, could change how Americanism is defined through Congressional elections. And I’ll be damned if my liberties as a resident here will be dictated by the likes of corrupt, xenophobic, or misogynist politicians.
I’m going to Commit To Citizenship, because Immigrants improve things. I recently drove across the country with my brother and parents, from Toronto to my home in Oakland. It was a breathtaking chance to see the country, the diversity of its people, landscape and culture. I celebrate the heterogeneity here as it adds so much economically and culturally but we cannot simply be acknowledged just for the variety of food, music and arts we bring. We need to be free to express our diverse identities if this secular democracy is to function. And I’m finally realizing that I’ve always been free but only now returning to my liberty. I hope you realize the same.
I’d like hear what being an Immigrant American means to you. Better yet, show it with #ILookLikeAnAmerican or #ILookLikeACitizen.
