Russian Immigrants…Emigrating
They waited in line for 13 years; but now that they’re here, my Russian relatives want out.
I couldn’t believe it when my great aunt shared with me that her son, his wife, and their young child are planning to move back to Russia. In fact, I still can’t believe it.
It took them 13 years to obtain Green Cards. Their apartment in Moscow? Sold. Their jobs? Resigned. And in the United States, shortly after they arrived two years ago, they leveraged the majority of their savings to purchase a comfortable two-story home. From the outside, they were well on their way to achieving the mythic American Dream. And they had little of apparent value to return to in Moscow.
And still, they will soon be returning to the faux democracy that is Russia—to dysfunctional courts, rigged elections, state-owned media outlets, and widespread corruption. Surely it is preferable to toil at minimum wage and enjoy the liberties America strives to provide than to return under any conditions to a country as democratically impotent as the Russian Federation?
When I still owned a vehicle, before I moved to New York City, the “Support Our Troops” and “Thin Blue Line” stickers on my tailgate might have suggested that I’m a hard-core patriot; meanwhile, that I’m vegetarian and have a history of wearing tie-dye, sporting long hair, and walking barefoot might have indicated a competing narrative. In reality—if we can speak of such a thing in any meaningful way—I’m quite a mixed bag, politically.
Or so I thought.
My reaction to the news of my relatives’ impending departure continues to be characterized by pure shock and confusion. Even with the knowledge that they were lonely here, that they had failed to find employment, that they quarreled regularly with my aunt, who moved in with them after living on her own for nearly two decades, even now their choice simply does not make sense to me. Convinced that they made the wrong decision I continue to plead, like a broken record, “What about freedom? What about democracy?”
Far from extracting from all of this a lesson about the importance of immigrant integration, about the trials of moving to a new country when you’re already in your fifties, this episode has instead demonstrated to me the hidden strength of my commitment to the American experiment. Put differently, trying to make sense of my relatives’ departure has forced into relief a personal political landscape the contours of which I had hitherto failed to examine in any serious depth. Although ours is by no measure a perfect nation I seem to have discovered that, deep down, its shortcomings are to me insignificant compared to the ideals to which it aspires.
Whatever their path, then, regardless of whether they return to the United States in the months or years to come, I am thankful to them for challenging me to think outside of my standard conceptual framework. In our hyper-polarized era, I take from this experience the lesson that, there is much to learn, about oneself and about others, when things don’t make sense.
