Immigration

A little while ago I found out that a friend of mine who had immigrated to the US from the Netherlands was being given 33 days to liquidate and leave the US. I am beyond disgusted with this. Since the new draconian immigration guidelines were put in place, the INS has been auditing the immigration paperwork of thousands of legal immigrants for errors so as to have an excuse to expel them.

What makes me so disgusted with my friend's situation is that it could have just as easily been my husband and I in the same position. He was once an immigrant to the US. We went through all of the paperwork and appointments and filing fees for a couple of years before he was granted a green card. I had to support us both for a year before he was allowed to work. He was vetted thoroughly, although he comes from a country that has a friendly relationship with the US. We went through all of it just so that we could be together. It wasn't easy and it wasn't cheap. Thankfully, he already spoke English before he got to the US.

Then the election happened, and part of the platform it was run on was immigration. Suddenly all foreigners and immigrants were enemy #1. People I knew who had voted for Trump were only too happy to go along with it, parroting the anti-immigrant rhetoric. People who knew that I was married to a foreigner, but somehow they made it alright in their minds to pretend he didn't count. It's like they thought that the foreigners they knew were exceptions and that it wouldn't hit them just as hard as any other immigrant, legal or not. For my part, knowing that they would be okay with my husband being deported suddenly made me not like them anymore. Weird.

So now people I know are getting told that even though they have broken no laws and made no mistakes in their paperwork, they're no longer welcome in the US. They've built lives there and made a home in the US. Some of them have been there so long that their whole social support system is American. They were assimilated as well as anybody could ask for, a part of their community. That, evidently, was not good enough for America. It makes me want to weep from the shame and embarrassment. I remember a time when America was so proud of how people from all over the world wanted to come to America and become like us. I remember when everyone was proud of their own immigrant ancestry. They still are, in a weird sense that if you ask them what their heritage is you'll still get answered with "German" or "Italian"or "Irish", but they don't connect their great-grandparents' struggles with the struggles of the people they're pushing out. That was different. There was no illegal immigration prior to the 1920's, mostly because we hadn't written our xenophobia into law yet.

I don't know what's going to happen with my friend yet. I think we're all hoping for the best possible outcome, but I have to admit that I have lost faith in the fairness of the immigration system with all that is happening. I don't trust them to include any sense of humanity in their decisions anymore.