What It’s Like To Be A Writer On A Green Card In 2025
There come these weird moments in life when you see yourself from the outside. They can happen when a political ad panders to you, specifically, or you walk as part of a large group of people. You are always yourself but experience jolts you into recognition of your person as countable datum.
This has been my experience of the wave of anti-Palestine population cleansing that the government has been surfing lately. Student visas are easy to suspend and academics are generally unlikable, so they've started there. I teach at a university and write for a living.
I’m here on a Green Card and I want to keep being a writer and a teacher and to have this little blog that publishes on political language and Palestine. There are words for people with jobs teaching at university whom conservative leaders decide make good first targets. Intelligentsia was one that was once quite popular? What a pompous word. It’s kind of funny.
I came to New York in 2010 at the age of 21 to study and never left. Right now, I'd also really like to see my family back home. I’m unwilling to travel because if I traveled I’d have to delete or at least temporarily suspend this blog while I went over the borders, and I won’t. It’s never a big deal, writing and publishing little notes in public, until it is.
The Stopgap
I’m ashamed to say I really didn’t see this situation coming. In the past, whenever my dad asked whether Uncle Sam might look askance at some activity of mine, I would reassure him that my ability to remain in the country was not an issue of my rights. It’s about the right of my spouse, who is a US citizen, to have me here with them. When that changed I didn’t even notice.
At the end of the last century I grew overcome by the unlikelihood of my own life. I am 11 years old and I live in London in 1999, I thought to myself—how fantastically unrealistic, statistically. Simply by the fact of existing somewhere so very important—and people kept informing me that England was very important—I seemed to have beaten tremendous odds. I was not a crab living on a resource-low island in 1755. But was that to my credit, or simple luck? That seemed naturally to be the next question.
My parents grew up white in colonized countries and some of their family members put themselves on the line to end of apartheid and some didn’t. Children don’t understand that kind of thing—the calculations people make around safety. I certainly didn’t.
Being born in England was luck, I figured out. What you get by luck you can spend and exchange. I don’t think that the US government has deported any citizens of the United Kingdom on ideological grounds yet, and I frankly doubt that they will. Makes the whole operation ring a bit hollow, doesn't it?
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