NEWFANE — An early lesson has come back to me as I consider the good work happening in southern Vermont to support Afghan refugees, as well as Central Americans and others seeking asylum.
Ultimately, I am reminded that, whatever our beliefs about immigration in the U.S., we should remember that we are talking about human beings who want to protect their families, make a better future, and meet their basic needs for food and security - like all of us.
When I was an immigration attorney in Providence, R.I., I often offered rides to my clients to their hearings before the U.S. Immigration Court in Boston. Much of the time, a big family would accompany the asylum applicant to court - not because their testimony was needed, but to offer support.
Their children knew how important the hearing was to their parents and to their own futures. Kids hung on an emotional precipice as to the fate of their parents, and everything depended on what that judge would decide.
Neither the kids nor their parents hesitated to lose a day of school for such an important event.
* * *
On this day, almost 20 years ago now, I drove up with Mario, the adolescent son of my client, while Romeo, his wife, and their younger child followed me in their car. The father had come to the U.S. 15 years before, and both children had been born here.
The first order of business in the car ride was to put on music acceptable to a teenager.
I assumed that Mario, like many young people, would prefer American music, so I suggested rock 'n' roll, joking that he probably had to put up with his parents' music all too often.
But he surprised me. He said Latin music was his favorite; he looked at the small music collection in my glove compartment and picked out an eclectic, Cuban-French mix of rap and R&B. His choice scrambled my usual assumptions.
I asked him what he liked to study in school. Ah, here I was vindicated: He didn't like school. Now he was sounding more like a normal teenager.
But alas, foiled again! He didn't like it because it wasn't challenging enough.
He had recently built his own open-source software, an alternative to Linux, and had begun to distribute it. He was frustrated that his school didn't even offer Chinese, and he had learned enough to read novels in the language.
A seriously enterprising 14-year-old.
* * *
Romeo, his father, became a young adult during the most brutal years of the guerrilla-military war in 1980s El Salvador. His own education had ended before he completed one year of schooling, and he was functionally illiterate.
It was hard for him to put together a timeline of events which had led to his fleeing El Salvador. Dates were critically important to know backwards and forwards in an immigration court. The government attorney and the judge would grill him on the order of events, dates, and chronology, over and over, testing his story to see if it held up, in a manner that would make a lot of sense to educated Americans.
But in the countryside of El Salvador, time was much more fluid and often receded in importance. Further, Romeo had grown up fearing authorities, keeping his eyes down when spoken to, unable to “logically” articulate the traumas that had led him to flee his country.
All these qualities worked well to survive in El Salvador, but that led people like U.S. Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers and Immigration Court judges to doubt his credibility - and, equally important, to not identify with him, to be blind to his full humanity.
Unfortunately, the way so many North Americans view Central Americans.
* * *
What intelligence, what opportunities were stolen from Romeo because of the time and place he was born? His child, Mario, showed incredible ingenuity and intellect, perhaps passed down to him in his father's genes.
Imagine what his father might have achieved in better circumstances. It drove home to me the waste of so much human potential because of poverty, war, gender-accidents of birth.
The judge denied Romeo's asylum claim. I don't know if the family eventually found another way to remain in the U.S.
Immigration is a complicated issue with no easy answers. But at least we as citizens, we as the U.S. government, can treat people like the human beings they are.