I am an immigrant to the United States with a EB-2 green card. I got mine through my employer who sponsored me throughout the process and I’ve stayed with my employer after my green card for five years, which I wouldn’t have been able to do without permanent residency.
This is a bit of a public announcement so should I be detained or deported, there is something on the internet that at least states my status publicly. But more than that I want to write about what’s happening in America in terms of immigration.
Some foundational human traits: we have a general tendency of not caring about things unless it impacts me. This is an economic trait that keeps our mind from blowing up with all the information coming in from the world. A coyote slowly approaching my house is very different from a coyote slowly approaching me. The house adds a layer of non-me-ness that distances the coyote from me.
We like to criticize or make fun of people who hold strong positions about something until it affects them. There was a recent account where a Florida politician revealed that she had an ectopic pregnancy that needed to be terminated, but Florida has a 6-week abortion ban. The politician stated that the left’s fearmongering made hospital staff reluctant to treat her.
Now, from the left’s perspective, this is hypocrisy and something to call out for. But when we take into the human trait into account, what the word “abortion” semantically means for her is still very different from what she experienced. We are living in the same physical reality, but it is highly likely that mentally there is still a lot of distance between abortion and her.
It would be extremely great if life went on as we thought and idealized it to be. But things don’t work that way. Even if I’m not aware of law changes, when I break them I break them. It was 4th of July recently, and many states ban personal fireworks. I may come from a firework-OK state and celebrate personal fireworks out of my state. From my perspective I’m in no problem, but the real life rules don’t work that way.
It is worth repeating the fact that this is a human trait. Along with this human trait, it is important to mention the standard in which evaluate good or bad. Of course, ethics and morality is defined by the times but in general when one does a good deed, they are good. When one does a bad deed, they are bad.
This has some corollaries worth discussing. When I’m NOT doing good, it just means I’m not doing good; it doesn’t automatically mean I’m bad. Doing something good is completely optional, you have to go out of your way to do it. That’s why it’s good. Just because we see somebody not doing good, doesn’t mean we can unilaterally criticize them as a bad person.
When I’m NOT doing bad, it just means I’m not doing bad; it doesn’t automatically mean I’m good. If I put myself on a pedestal because I haven’t punched a baby in 38 years, that would be ridiculous. But if I am doing bad because of habits I’ve accrued over the years, it’s important for me to recognize the bad I’m doing and stop even if it comes at the cost of my energy. EVEN THEN, it doesn’t make me a good person per se.
Just understanding this already removes so much hatred and anger from our hearts. Because now we can stop criticizing other people for not going out of their way to do something good. Even when we look at our life, there are instances of us backing out of good things because it comes at a cost to us. There are instances of us learning our mistakes by experiencing the consequences. It is the same way for other people.
Another foundational human trait: we take in stimuli from the world and warp it to our perspective filters. This happens to everyone and the perspective filter is what I might call karma. Mac and cheese is comfort food for me, but to my wife it’s just a gunk of gunk. This doesn’t really mean anything about mac and cheese; it’s our respective opinions about mac and cheese.
Why this is important is, we have to take into account that one word means very different things for different people. The word immigrant means so many different things to so many different people. So when we talk issues around immigration with the people around us, it’s important to think about what the word means to each one of us. Because it WILL be different.
Now onto talking about my experience with immigration. I want to share my warped view of what immigration has meant over the years, and what immigration is in a more objective lens.
I first came to the United States under a J-2 visa, which is a visiting scholar’s dependent visa. My father was a visiting scholar so he held the J-1. My sister however was an American citizen because she was born in San Diego during my father’s doctorate years.
So I lived in the same home as a person with a different status than me. This didn’t really hit that hard as a difference in my early days, but when I transferred my visa to a student visa things started to change.
You can’t change a visa while inside the United States. You have to apply for one and get approved OUTSIDE of the United States to enter with the new visa. One day my mom and I went to Nogales, Mexico to do this process with an immigration lawyer. Of course, one does this with all the necessary preparation but there’s always a chance that something may go south and we can’t enter the United States again.
It was scary, but we entered through the multiple layers of barricades and chain fences with a new stamp on our passports: I was an international student now.
This is when I started to see so many differences among students. I was a Korean kid with a student visa, but I started seeing Korean kids with American citizenship. This makes sense for Korean Americans, but there were kids who couldn’t even speak proper English and yet had an American passport.
Here you have a kid who’s even more Korean than me, but he didn’t have to go to Nogales and risk never coming back home again. Here I was trying my best to get good grades because if I get booted from this school, I’m booted from America. Then there she was, being able to afford academic failure.
Over time even more complexities were introduced thanks to money. Turns out, when your family is rich you can just pay people to come up with all these immigration requirements and you don’t have to stress out about anything. With my personal hardships and inferiority complex, this cultivated a lot of spite within me.
I barely started talking about my full experience, but even at this checkpoint there are some things worth noticing (replace Asian/Korean as anything relevant to you and it will still stand):
- When you look at an Asian kid at school, there’s no way to discern whether they’re an immigrant or not.
- By observing them in their cultural setting and behaviors, again there’s no way to discern whether they’re an immigrant or not.
- Not all immigrant experiences are the same; some people have an easier legal time, some people have a harder legal time.
- This means, even inside illegal immigration there are nuances; some would genuinely not care about following rules, while some would be under tremendous stress and fear.
Now add in some other aspects like the Korean mandatory military service and financial aid for colleges, and you have even more lines of division within the Korean immigrant “chunk”. Then add in other nationalities and their respective queueing times with the USCIS and then you would have some sense of the immigrant experience in America. The immigrant experience is a complex one.
But the thing is, if you or your loved one is not an immigrant… Why would you care?
This happens to me too. I’m not super up to date on everything that happens in Korea. But through my Buddhist order I learn about the policies and systems around immigrant laborers in Korea and boy are there some fucked up instances. I don’t know these things until somebody tells me, and I am now at the point of caring simply because I learned how to view things outside of my perspective but if I hadn’t had that ability I simply would not have cared even if I knew.
Now comes the interesting part as well: as immigrants we’re likely to be triggered by immigration policies. But this makes us very oblivious to the perspective of the American. Why are the Americans who are unhappy with immigration, unhappy at immigration? Immigrants frequently lack the ability to understand the American point of view from an objective perspective.
But the thing is, if you or your loved one is not a born and raised citizen… Why would you care?
When discussions around immigration become a shouting match between two parties that don’t see eye to eye at all, it just becomes a power struggle. Whoever is more powerful at a time will get a lot of what they want, and they’ll be angry at what they don’t get. Time passes and the power dynamic changes, and now vengeance comes. This is the see-saw that happens to collect a lot of collateral damage along the way.
It doesn’t have to be like this. But in order for things to not be like this, both parties need a more objective perspective on immigration.
I am not an expert on social policies so I’m not going to make bold claims about how things should be. But regardless of what country we’re discussing, when we think immigration it’s simple to understand that the more popular a country is, the more people want to immigrate there.
Regardless of what country we’re discussing, a country exists for its citizens. If country X exists for Y, why have that country at all? Why not just make country X part of country Y? This is the history of colonization and independence compressed into a few sentences.
Some countries are defined by the primary ethnicity of the people in it. Korea is a country of Koreans. While Korea is fairly homogenous China is a country with 56 ethnicities in it, but with the Han people being the primary ethnicity. Some countries are defined by the primary culture of the people in it. India is an excellent example of this. Some ethnicities don’t have a country of their home, like the Kurds.
All of this to say, when we discuss a country we have to take into the account the people of the country. Most immigration cases will be around different people coming into a country. So from the perspective of the people already forming a country, why would they want different people? Because it would be beneficial to have them.
With this we can see why most immigration programs are tied to labor or investment. We can also see why countries that are not so hot on the global popularity tend to be more welcoming of immigrants, and why popular countries tend to have stricter immigration policies.
I wish there were more legal ways of entering the United States. But we have to understand that no country owes anything to the people outside of that country. It is up to the citizens of that country to form a consensus around immigration and put it into policy.
All of this is just looking at immigration in a vacuum. But now we add the narrative around immigration and we get stronger opinions around why immigration policies need to lean more open or closed. Some politicians have great persuasive powers and some political parties are very effective in forming a consensus among their constituents.
Whatever’s happening in the United States is already happening. This is the result of many years’ worth of consensus. If we want to introduce changes to it, we can definitely stick to what has worked before: rallying and fighting for the changes. But we’ve seen time after time what that eventually leads to. It just leads to see-sawing with collateral damage along the way, just like the present days.
We can approach immigration from a more of a win-win perspective. But as long as we’re playing from a win-lose binary, that means the win-win is a NET win-win; there will be some losses that we will have to get for a greater win. And this win-win approach cannot come without a genuine understanding of our friends on the opposite side.
When we have to carry a heavy grocery bag, we may carry it with our right arm. But with the arm’s fatigue the left arm will come help. After a few switches the arms may collaborate and hold the bag together. Why do the arms do this? Because there is a greater mission of carrying the heavy grocery bag home.
So why should we come to a peaceful understanding? Because we can do greater things with a more harmonious society. What could that be? The possibilities are exactly what we could be exploring in our conversations with one another.
This is about 2,200 words I wrote and this barely scratches the surface of everything I want to talk about regarding immigration. I understand that this writing will likely not do anything in the grand scheme of things. But it has the possibility of changing one person’s mind, and to me that possibility makes it worth the effort (not that writing this is particularly effortful anyway).
Nothing is worth more than peace and the ability to die from natural causes; in other words, a peaceful life. This sounds pretty extreme but I think that’s what it boils down to. May all sentient beings be liberated from suffering.