Immigration Story, from a nonimmigrant

I want to tell an immigration story for my liberal or progressive friends in this current moment. As many of my friends and colleagues know, I worked in immigration law from about 2009–2019, and still help out on a few cases here and there. In 2013, while applying to jobs post-undergrad, I interviewed with an organization called the Florence Legal Project for a position assisting individuals in immigration detention centers along the Arizona border with their removal cases. It was work I was fairly familiar to me, and I felt confident in the interview all the way through til the end.

In one of the final questions, the two interviewers told me that a lot of the people I would be working with had ended up in immigration detention for crimes I may find uncomfortable; that many people find uncomfortable — rape, sexual abuse of a minor, domestic violence, murder. Etc. How would I feel about working with those clients? It’s one of the only times in my life I would say the phrase “at a loss for words” has applied to me. I think I stammered out something like “well, I’d probably feel conflicted”; in truth, I felt conflicted in that very moment in a way that was probably evident. I stumbled through what was likely several sentences more of articulate fluff that probably sounded like just that, and the interview ended shortly after. I didn’t get the job.

That question was one I had gotten halfway through my career in immigration law and all the way through my life on this planet with other humans at that point without facing — up to what point did I hold these principles and values I was so vocal about. Even further — what exactly were the principles and values, spelled out? “Our country’s immigration system is unfair.” Unfair for everyone — just as unfair for everyone, equally? “People deserve dignity and justice.” Sure — but in situations where a victim under one light is a victimizer under another, at what point does the seesaw tip? And for whom? And how do we hold space for multiple angles of justice — or can we — or should we?

Still more years passed where I wouldn’t say I exactly had answers to those questions, though I kept doing immigration work. Those were years that saw me help a man get his citizenship who had, in the year of my birth — one year before rape of a minor was deemed a bar to citizenship — pled guilty to aiding in the kidnap and gang rape of an adolescent girl. He had since gotten married and had a family and was seeking citizenship so he could petition for his DREAMer children. They were years that saw me read, in a police report from one of countless times a client’s husband tried to kill her and was not arrested, the responding officer’s notes of smelling alcohol on my client’s breath. They were years that saw me failed by the authorities in my own life when I needed them. Years that saw so many bad men do so many bad things to me and others, unencumbered by any formal consequences, while so many of us struggled to get out of bed in those years.

They were also years that saw the announcement of DACA, Democrats selling DREAMers their crucial rights at the cost of their parents’ humanity — “they were brought here as children”; “they didn’t do anything wrong.” Sympathy bought with an implicit loan, one whose interest promised to be unbearably high. One the government has wasted no time in collecting. Whose cost will keep growing at an ever-accelerating rate and require more and more bodies to pay it. Where will we set the new standard of deservingness each time the beast must be fed. Who will become collateral damage. Whose lives will we compromise. What arguments will we use to justify it.

And all those years, all the while — the steady increase of a panicked buzz, a border like a war zone, an immigration police like an army, raids like nightmares, jails like the asylum stories of the countries the people left.

I’m not giving you a clear arc to a clear answer because that’s not what I had. What I had was that sprawl of messy, mixed, painful years I described. Who I am and how I think now that I’m on this side of them, and why it’s maybe different than who I was before.

I remember being in college during the capital execution of a black man named Troy Davis, who was sentenced to death before DNA evidence and other factors would later raise serious questions as to the fairness of his guilty verdict. After his execution (legal murder), I read an article that implored people: If you truly believe capital punishment is wrong, then yes, protest for Troy Davis. But you had better protest every bit as hard for the person convicted of a crime you find abhorrent, who definitely did it and is unrepentant. And if you don’t, or you can’t, you might need to relocate where exactly your principle lies, and articulate that to yourself.

Here’s the thing. The way we wield immigration consequences in this country is deeply inconsistent, deeply distorted, deeply reactive, and deeply not about what our system claims it’s about. If something is wrong in my life, job, or relationships, I try to find where the problem began if I want long-term change. But no one is talking about the U.S.’s long history with immigrant labor — including undocumented labor — or our colonial economic & political relationships with other countries and the migration patterns those relationships predict. No one is talking about the fact that if it were possible to affect migration by making unauthorized border-crossing unpleasant then it would’ve already worked because the US-Mexico border and the trip to get to it are proof on earth that Hell exists. No one is talking about how you can’t compare our immigration policy to other countries’ because our context is not other countries’ context; it’s very specific and the devil is in all our details. Politicians aren’t talking about any of this stuff, and the fact that no one is talking about it ought to clue us in to the fact that no one is concerned with resolving the issue they so love debate . They are concerned with how best to wield human bodies as political tools.

And in the wake of that reality, that’s not a system you can look to for justice. It’s rigged. Set up with traps to go off anytime you touch it, regardless of whether you agree with those traps or their consequences or how you feel about any of it at all.

I’m not pro-rapist or pro-murderer or pro-any of that shit. I’m anti-US immigration system. I believe there must be justice for those crimes, and I know — beyond doubt — that it cannot and will not come from our immigration system as it currently exists. Immigration law in the US is a disproportionate and terrifying amount of power that some people have over others, and you can’t pick and choose for that system to work on certain people and not others because that’s not how machines work. And ICE and immigration in Trump’s hands and even the Democrats’ hands for that matter is a big fucking ugly machine, one whose need for fuel only grows the more you feed it.

ICE shows up outside domestic violence restraining order hearings then carts off the victims and gets away with it because enough of us haven’t divested from the idea that those people must have fucked up bad enough to not deserve the same expectation of safety we have for ourselves. And because that’s a power that some people wield over others in our country and it doesn’t make sense but that doesn’t matter. This dog is off its leash, and rabid.

I say all this to say — when you’re watching the news unfold. When you’re hopefully fighting back against it. When you’re talking to your coworkers and neighbors and friends or posting or even just working things out in your own mind. Yes, there are asylum seekers; yes, there are stories that would break anyone’s heart. But there are also people who just don’t want to be poor, people with different reasons and different lives, people with checkered pasts like most of us have, then also people who I would not want to know in my personal life and you may not either: basically the full cross-section of people that you get anywhere you go in the world, because people are people, and kindness and cruelty know no nationality, gender, race, or religion.

And you can’t afford to hold up some to the light, or put qualifiers on why they deserve rights and use their goodness as a beacon to illuminate cracks in what you assume to be an otherwise functional system, and expect that to be the way out. You can’t make that your framework. You can’t make the people who are the machine’s fuel your focus because you can’t reason with a machine. You have to be careful how you talk and how you think; we all do. We have to stop using immigrants’ humanity as a bartering tool because in reality it’s not anything about them and every time we engage in that dance the politicians know just how to lead us, and every time we open that door we don’t get to choose what gets back through it.

Our immigration system is illogical, it’s terrifyingly imbalanced and disproportionately powerful, it’s unpredictable and unreliable and therefore untenable. It’s not about the people caught in it being right or wrong. It is wrong.

And I think we’re going to keep getting bankrupted (and people are going to keep getting terrorized) until that’s a place we can get to.