The Hidden Ones
Being Seen and Not Seen in America
In light of the immigration turmoil unleashed by our current government leaders, I am sharing a newly updated WPR issue I published back in 2023 this week. It details my perspective on the immigrant experience in America. (You might recognize the little boy in the photos.)
In recent weeks, foreign-born students with student visas who protested in solidarity with Palestine and Gaza have been taken by I.C.E. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents to be held at detention centers indefinitely or at least until they are deported.
In a move that echoes the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and the Japanese internment camps in the U.S. during WWII, numerous individuals who were never charged with any crimes have been rounded up and flown to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador where they have no rights whatsoever.
The U.S. immigration system has always been heavily bureaucratic, expensive, arbitrary, and racist, but now, it appears to be far worse.
Our government has been floating the unconstitutional idea of deporting U.S. citizens to El Salvador, and here in Tennessee, the legislature recently passed authoritarian legislation that, among other things, created a covert immigration enforcement division.
As those of us who are U.S. citizens enjoy the dwindling rights and privileges that this status affords, it is important to always remember that there are people oppressed by the immigration system who stay hidden for their own safety or locked up against their will.
Their numbers are increasing.
The Hidden Ones
(Newly Updated and Originally Published in June 2023)
There are millions of them.
They wait and wait and wait . . .
Through various circumstances, a few of them landed legally and safely on U.S. soil and initiated an immigration process to lawfully reside in the country permanently.
They fill numerous forms and drive great distances to wait in long lines at regional immigration offices. They dress neatly and do what they are told to do to go through the proper channels.
Some folks fare better than others, while others fare much worse in a maze of twists and turns lined with red tape, trap doors, and dead ends.
People wait for several years, even decades, just to get a work permit. Along the way, there are multiple fees. For those who submit inadequate information or whose applications get denied, they have to start all over again.
Many of them eventually somehow scrounge up an extra few thousand dollars to pay for an attorney. They place a huge bet on a largely unknown outcome with so many odds against them.
Many of them, like myself, were children when they first woke up in an American sunrise—after being carried off into the night by their parents to an unknown land of golden arches, mermaids with lattes, and disaffected geckos who sell car insurance. These children could not know the hardship they would face in their futures within an arbitrary and systemically racist immigration process that does not care about their wellbeing.
And then, there are those who illegally entered the country of strip malls and guns. If they are caught and not lucky enough to be deported, they are held indefinitely against their will in “detention centers” that are tucked away in rural areas all across America. (The U.S. government pays billions of dollars to private companies like CoreCivic and the GEO Group who run these maximum-security detention centers. It is in these companies’ best interests to detain as many immigrants as possible for unlimited amounts of time. According to the ACLU, Congress appropriated $2.9 billion dollars to hold 34,000 people in ICE detention each day for FY 2023.)
These detention centers are prisons.
So what do all these immigrants, legal and illegal, have in common?
They are hidden.
Some move about in plain sight, and others are locked away.
Many live in cramped, downtrodden places and do all the jobs that no one else wants.
They are your janitors, gas station attendants, dishwashers, grocery baggers, servers, bussers, valet drivers, farmhands, construction workers, and garbage collectors.
They are the cleaning ladies in hotels that men in fancy suits never notice.
They are the night workers who toil away while America sleeps.
They are the people who work many hours for very little money and handle the complaints from people in pretty dresses and shiny cars.
They are people unjustly imprisoned in rooms in secret buildings.
They are everywhere and nowhere all at once.
And they wait and wait and wait . . .