Legal
In 2017, I became a citizen of the United States of America. Shortly after, President Trump, in his first term, decided to “cancel” the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, DACA. This made thousands of people vulnerable to deportation. In response to that, I wrote this. I’m posting it here because I saw it in my Facebook memory file and it surprised me. I knew there were tensions in the US surrounding immigrants and Jews, I felt those tensions, but until I read this again, I didn’t remember feeling them so acutely.
So I post this here as a way of commenting on how long, and how hard the proverbial frog has been boiling. We left America in September. It was the right thing to do.
Legal
Over the last few days Steven has been mentioning how glad he is that I am a citizen now and not a legal permanent resident. He says it like this: “I’m so glad we had you naturalized.”
I know what he means, I’m glad too. Every week we hear about two or three cases of people with their green cards being yanked away from their families and sent to the country of their birth. Official reasons for doing this are becoming increasingly thin. Sometimes it’s a traffic misdemeanor that sends a father of three “back” to Mexico, sometimes — well, there are times, more and more lately, when I don’t remember hearing a reason at all.
If the dissolution of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals didn’t alarm you, this should.
Green Card holders undergo rigorous screening. We are fingerprinted and the FBI screens everything about our personal history. When you are issued that Green Card you are supposed to be able to relax. It’s America’s way of agreeing that you are a good person, saying “we like you, you can live here forever.” It’s supposed to be permanent.
Something about it though — something about it started to shift by the time I got my Green Card. Everyone told me I could relax but it just didn’t feel as though that were true. Driving anywhere, I regarded police cars with suspicion and fear. I still dislike the sight of a police car but now I can reassure myself that I look completely white and nobody can tell from my driver’s license that I am from anywhere but here.
I don’t think they’d single me out for persecution, I think I look pretty ordinary. Certainly, I look ordinary enough to be overlooked, right?
But I still worry. I worry every time I’m criticized for being too “aggressive” with my opinions, which happens a lot, I worry every time I interrupt the police and ask why they’re stopping someone outside the loft, or why they’re NOT stopping someone — and tell them I expect an explanation because that is my home, my front yard and if you’re going to stop some random black guy whom I’ve observed only walking through the parking lot but not stop the white guys who seem, clearly, to be doing drug deals in their car right under our porch, or parking and sleeping in their cars in our parking lot, or smoking a cigarette and watering their dog on our front steps, or having screaming, threatening fights with their girlfriends at the foot of our front steps — every time I do that, and truth is, when we’re at the loft, I do that a lot because these are all things that have happened while I was at the loft, working at my desk, at the window of my office, anyway, every time I talk to the police about any of these things — I wonder if they’re making notes about me, and I worry that when they see me do anything, anything at all, that might even be slightly off perfect, they will come down on me like an anvil. I worry.
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Increasingly, in fact, when people are parked under my window doing things I know are illegal, I speak to them first — my aim here is to make them feel uncomfortable, to let them know they’ve been caught in the act, so to speak. But their reactions are not the reactions I would expect. Instead of scaring them off the property, they reassure me that their brother is a policeman or say they have done this for years and they’re not going to stop now, or they attack me for being a bitch or they just laugh.
The fact is, my place in this community, as an immigrant, limits my civil rights and as time passes, I am more and more aware of that.
I worry when I correct someone who assumes we celebrate Christmas every year, and tell them we’re Jewish. I think twice about saying it and when I do, I scan their face to see if they’re secretly bothered by that. I wonder if they are members of a white power group, I tell myself not to be afraid of being open about who I am because I have every right to be fully myself here, the rights and responsibilities of Citizenship extend equally to those born here and those naturalized here.
People fly confederate flags here, even here, in the Northeast where we have a reputation of feeling nothing but contempt for that. I don’t see it every day but I do see them on the back windows of trucks, above the gun racks, or hanging from the porch of a house in one of the back neighborhoods of town where the tourists do not go.
Those flags means racism, yes but they also mean they expect any newcomer to “know their place.” Those flags also mean sexism — basically, the confederate flag means the person flying it believes that only strong, white, men have the rights conferred by citizenship and the rest of us better watch out if we behave as though we think otherwise — those flags are a clear threat of physical violence a threat that has been made into a reality more than once.
What I’m saying is, under the current Presidential administration, even citizenship feels a little shaky. I am also saying, in the U.S., a person’s sex makes a difference to the exercise of their rights. I am a woman who does not, by American standards, know my place. I challenge authority on a regular basis — the Millbillies find me “harsh” we have no friends there because I am not feminine enough for Mill standards — seriously, that’s a thing and it bothered me once but it doesn’t bother me anymore. Sexism is thriving in America, nowhere more so than in the bourgeois art world, where “gender” has supposedly been abolished.
And in case you think this sort of issue never arose in Canada, let me tell you, it did. But it came up in Canada in the context of being the assumed life partner of a man who came from an “old money” family. That’s a ridiculous statement in a country that’s only 150 years old, but it’s the truth. People in the upper classes of Canadian society are expected to maintain certain standards that I flatly refused to acknowledge, never mind attend to. One of my ex’s friends used to refer to me with a sneer as “determinedly downwardly mobile” for my political views.
I have no answers, I’m not sure why I feel compelled to write about this but I do feel it is important to chronicle how it feels to live in Trump’s America right now, as an immigrant woman and a practicing, (however casually) Jew.
I am not the kind of person who believes in borders. It seems to me that people born on earth should be allowed to live wherever on earth they care to live, provided they can find a way to get there. Citizenship, it seems to me, should be a planetary thing.
But forced to embrace one set of ideals over another, it does seem to me that the ideal of free speech, and the ideal of all humanity being created equal and equally entitled to a broad spectrum of human rights -which is the foundation of the American Constitution, seems like a set of principles to which I can certainly and in good conscience, pledge my allegiance.
What we’re going through right now is not normal. Not only is it not ideal, it’s not American. I want to make a note of that, bookmark it, just draw my finger through the water to remember what it was like to be here, in this moment, under this regime.
Just in case.
