I Have a Green Card Now. But Am I Welcome?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/opinion/sunday/immigration-el-salvador-trump-united-states.html

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My best friends and I try to camp on a Northern California river every summer, in the hopes it becomes tradition. We have done it three of the past four years. This year, because the Russian River was low, we went westward from our usual spot. On our way, we drove past a house with a Confederate flag flying over it. My friends are white; I am not.

I felt uneasy when I saw the flag, but not unsafe. A year ago, I would have felt different.

I had recently returned to California from El Salvador, where I had lived until I was 9. Inside my wallet, I carried a card that granted me the privilege to not have to constantly worry about being stopped, searched, deported.

The date printed on my actually green “Permanent Resident” card is July 11, 2018: 7/11, a date that will always remind me of the bright blue 7-Eleven Slurpees I used to drink. And also, in the year 2018, of a long summer of the Trump administration’s cruelty on family separation. A summer when “Where are the children?” was a trending topic.

Then, even though so many of the kids were still not with their parents, people forgot about the kids, or the people fleeing for their lives and hoping that this country would grant them asylum.

That was until a few weeks, and now, a few days before the midterm elections. The president stirred up fears of a caravan that was an “invasion of our country” — so dangerous that he is sending thousands of United States troops to intercept the invaders at the border. He’s also floated the idea that, despite the Constitution, being born in this country is not a guarantee of citizenship. This is the cynical manipulation of white Americans’ fears; fears of the other. Watching this on TV, I feel exactly like I felt in my first days in this country in 1999 — different, unwanted.

This is the country I can permanently stay in now.

I was born in El Salvador, a small Central American nation of 6.5 million people, in a town near the coast, 30 minutes from the airport. A civil war that the United States invested in plagued the country for more than a decade before the war finally “ended” in 1992, two years after I was born. El Salvador’s homicide rate is one of the highest in the world. My family over there calls it “the situation.” As in: We lock our doors at 8 p.m. because of the situation; or, the situation doesn’t let us go to that part of town. The situation has driven, is driving and will continue to drive hundreds out of the country. A Salvadoran caravan left the capital last Wednesday.

My father left because of the war in 1991. Mom followed three years later. I followed, unaccompanied, in 1999. I did not understand what a border was, or what legality meant. What I did understand was that I wanted to be reunited with my parents, to be held by them.

I faced corrupt cops in Guatemala, had M-16s pointed at me in Mexico, had a shotgun pointed at me by an Arizona rancher. The group I was traveling with was surveilled, followed by helicopters. The border has always been highly militarized. The caravan is a caravan because it is safer to flee in numbers.

Before July 11, I had been under Temporary Protected Status, which the Trump administration says it wants to end, even after a judge ruled it must stay in place. The status is finite, meaning it does not provide a pathway to citizenship. But I worked hard, did well in school, went to college, became a writer, published widely, wrote a book, earned some acclaim. I have known the whole time that every grade, every poem, every student evaluation, every paper has been a piece of evidence that might prove my “worth” to someone judging it. This was enough to clear the way for an Employment-Based Extraordinary Ability visa (EB-1), and then a green card.

Whether I wanted to or not, I’ve lived within the exhausting and dehumanizing dichotomy between the good versus bad immigrant narrative. If I behaved badly in school, or wasn’t learning English fast enough, I was fulfilling what was expected of me, bare minimum. If I was excelling, I was one of the good ones, one of the immigrants that people often ask, “Why don’t they give you papers?”

The final step of the green card vetting process was to return to El Salvador, where I hadn’t been in 19 years. I had to pass medical exams and an interview at the American Embassy. In other words, to obtain the legal right to remain in the United States, safely away from the country I fled at age 9, I had to go back to that country. I was woken up by gunshots five times while I was there for around a month.

While I was in El Salvador in June, waiting for my interview, the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the border was in full swing. I was staying with my grandfather. One morning I decided to check my email. I hadn’t looked at it in days. Someone had sent a link to a news story: “We have an orchestra here,” were the words a border patrol agent said in a recording released by ProPublica.org. I knew better than to click the link, but I did anyway. Grandpa had already gone to the market and brought back tamales de elote, beans, queso fresco. He never let me go to the market with him. That little girl’s cries and the cries of the other children on the recording were the coldest rain that did not stop. My chest opened and has not closed since.

On the Russian River, enjoying the end of the summer, my green card inside my wallet, my friends asked how I would define being American. We tried to come up with definitions, but they seemed to fall short.

I remembered waiting for my number to be called at the United States Embassy in San Salvador. G44. Three arrows were painted on the embassy floor, leading from the street to the interview booths. A green one for green card applications. A yellow one for other visas. And a purple one for visitor visas. I followed the green one to a seating area from which I could see the rest of the people in the room, the visitors and the other-visas, make their way to the interview booths. I waited one hour, then another, for G44 to be called. I tried to keep calm as I watched people argue with the officers or simply cry on their way out of the embassy, following the same colored lines they had stepped on hours earlier. I imagined they had all been denied, and wondered how many of them would try to leave by other means.

It has been strange to navigate the good news of my visa and now my permanent residency, along with the rise of President Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric. I still cannot vote until I’m a citizen. That possibility won’t come true for another five years.

I think the closest thing to defining American is a false sense of safety. With this card in my pocket, I should feel safe, or at least safer, but I truly don’t. Not when there has been a rise of people with legal documentation getting stopped by ICE. Not when the president himself is questioning the 14th Amendment. It has been hard for me to accept that I have, in a way, benefited from the “American dream,” whatever that may mean today.

Javier Zamora is the author of “Unaccompanied,” a book of poetry.

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