The Undocumented Americans (One World Essentials)

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Researchers have shown that the flooding of stress hormones resulting from a traumatic separation from your parents at a young age kills off so many dendrites and neurons in the brain that it results in permanent psychological and physical changes. One psychiatrist I went to told me that my brain looked like a tree without branches.

Undocumented immigrants in Florida who do not have insurance have experiences that are not dissimilar from those of other uninsured people, but the key difference is that it is impossible for undocumented immigrants to purchase insurance, even if they can afford it.

One of the bogeymen of the right, in this country or any Western country, is the image of the sick immigrant—the supposed strain on the healthcare system, the burden on emergency rooms and taxpayers. I cannot overstate how little interest I have in changing the minds of people who might believe this—I’d honestly rather swallow a razor blade than be expected to change the mind of a xenophobe. But I’m curious about the bogeyman so I thought to explore it.

She tells me of a Dominican pharmacy elsewhere in Miami that sells a drug that helps addicts cope with withdrawal without a prescription. “They know they’re doing something they shouldn’t be doing, but they understand the human necessity,” she says.

“I have gone to them with my face swollen because of molar pain and they gave me something for the pain. I can go to Walgreens and they won’t give me something even if I’m dying in front of them.”

“I have migraines and I have a Cuban neighbor who loves me. She was born here, and she’s insured. She goes to her doctor and pretends she has migraines, she says that the light bothers her, that she throws up, and he gives her medication. She shares. A lot of people count on other people. My sister is a citizen and she gives her blood pressure medicine to a woman who is undocumented.”

For years, the chief doctor there was an Indian man who didn’t speak great English and didn’t speak great Spanish but who spoke with patients of all nationalities and languages without an interpreter anyway.

We buy special glasses for the first solar eclipse since 1918. (I stare directly into the sun because I’m drawn to self-harm.)

When I was in the second grade, I got an 85 on a math test, and I hid the test from my parents. When my father found it, he took me on a car ride and explained that as a cabdriver he made a hundred dollars on good days and sometimes regardless of how hard he worked he would make fifteen dollars on a bad day, and it didn’t make him any less of a person. My mother took me aside and asked me who the first man on the moon was. Neil Armstrong, I told her. Now name the second man on the moon. I don’t know, I said. Nobody does, she said. If you’re not number one, you’re nothing.

So Esme and some other ladies formed a subgroup called You Are Not Alone, and they stand across the street from the Miramar USCIS offices and invite immigrants in line to approach them for coffee, water, doughnuts, ponchos, and phone chargers. Esme saw a woman give birth waiting in line in hundred-degree weather. We see you, and you won’t get away with this! the women yell at officers.

Her husband died of brain cancer in 2012 after being turned away by every local hospital they approached because he was uninsured.

“Why operate on his heart if he had at most six months to live?” she asks. “Medicine is a total mafia.”

“When my husband died, I was low. I was in this country alone with four kids and little work. I thought about going back to Argentina. But I said, you know what, I’m not the first this has happened to and I’m not the last.”

While browsing the menu, as small talk, she tells me she was an international affairs lawyer in Bolivia, specializing in Russian relations. She lived in Russia for six years and is fluent in Russian. Now she has been here sixteen years and is a housekeeper. “It’s fine!” she says. “I knew what I was getting into.”

People think cleaning houses is easy, but it’s a dangerous job. None of them have been personally assaulted, but they all know women who have been groped or raped on the job, who have had their wages stolen, who have been psychologically abused and then forced into silence by employers who threatened to call ICE on them.

How often do you have nightmares? Every night, they say. Esme dreams about concentration camps nightly, about having to hide people in her home, people who can’t make a sound.

“If they give us papers, psychiatrists will get rich because we’re all crazy,” Isadora says. We all laugh.

In 2016, 45 percent of Flint residents lived below the poverty line, the highest rate in the country for cities with more than sixty-five thousand residents.

As the city got smaller and blacker and browner and poorer, public services crumbled. Firefighters and police have been cut, and arson is rampant.

The undocumented community in Flint has been affected by the water crisis in disturbingly specific ways. Flyers announcing toxic levels of lead in the Flint waterways were published entirely in English, and when canvassers went door-to-door to tell residents to stop drinking tap water, undocumented people did not open their doors out of fear that the people knocking were immigration authorities.

She sends back the salsa because it is too mild. The owner of the restaurant, whose husband knows Laura from her work in the community, comes over personally to say the restaurant is popular among white people and they are the reason the salsa is too mild. She then apologizes and brings over two hotter, spicier options.

Empty plastic water bottles have become so abundant that people shove them into the spaces in their wire fencing, so yards and lots look like modern art exhibits.

Flint Mich

When you walk through Flint the most striking aspect of the streetscape, second only to boarded-up houses, is the sheer number of bars and churches. I ask Margarita if Flint residents are especially religious, and she says they just need the services the churches provide because the state is so absent.

it’s not exactly how I’d have described myself (self-made cult escapee) but how other people like to describe me (Yale PhD student)

He knows that some people in the Latinx community are undocumented, so he tends to ask his co-workers to stay in the car while he goes alone and deals with the paperwork.

“There is a huge problem with trust in the community,” says Margarita. “The state can say the water is made out of gold, and people still wouldn’t drink it.”

Flint

Having to use bottled water makes everything about running a household more difficult.

But then the doctors told her to go back to Mexico because the radiation would be too expensive here and she wouldn’t be able to pay out of pocket. Junior asked her if she wanted to go back. She said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Then the company was sold to an owner from Ohio who was going to hire only American citizens. Theodoro’s bosses broke the news to him on New Year’s Day 2012. “I had been working for just about two hours and they sent for me. Theodoro, they said, we can’t keep you here. This company isn’t ours anymore.” They gave him a certificate saying he was one of the best employees they’d ever had, and they hoped that when he showed it to future employers he wouldn’t have to wash bathrooms anymore.

Theodoro did not hear about the lead in the water until it made the international news. “When you’re undocumented, you’re the last to know,” he says.

So when Theodoro tells me he gives his own rations of filtered water to the dogs, I feel like dying, but the kind of death that rebirths you into something less painful, like a tree, a tree like him.

Why do you give them your own water, I ask him. Well, they can’t really speak, but if they could speak, they’d have a lot to say, he tells me.

In addition to the high water bills they have to pay to the city that poisoned them, they will now have to buy their own clean water.

He took her to a detention center. She was detained for a month, alongside women with theft and drug charges, all of whom complained that they thought she had been unfairly detained. She didn’t have a lawyer then and she doesn’t have a lawyer now. No one has wanted to take on her case. She’s making phone calls. She begins to cry and admits she doesn’t have much hope but doesn’t know what will happen to her son.

She is a single mom. She had a baby, Lidia, when she was twenty-one. During her pregnancy, which was during the water crisis, doctors responded to any health concerns she had by telling her to drink more water. “I would tell them I had fever and vomiting and they kept saying I needed to drink more water, everything was me needing to lay off the Coke and drink more water; it was a constant dismissal. But I didn’t have money for anything other than tap water so that’s what I drank.”

Ivy remembers, in vivid detail, the day she realized the water was dirty. “I remember taking a shower one day, and when I ran my hand over my skin there was a sticky layer all over my body that hadn’t washed off. It was like jelly. I felt dirty. My neighbor brought a water jug to our house wanting to know if our water was like hers. It was yellow with some brown film in it. Yet we got letters from the city saying it was fine, that they were taking care of it. So what can you do?”

What I saw in Flint was a microcosm of the way the government treats the undocumented everywhere, making the conditions in this country as deadly and toxic and inhumane as possible so that we will self-deport. What I saw in Flint was what I had seen everywhere else, what I had felt in my own poisoned blood and bones. Being killed softly, silently, and with impunity.

I’d drunk the social mobility Kool-Aid from college prep programs run by white people when I was in high school and didn’t know how to reconcile all that with what I was seeing in Flint.

At a city meeting dedicated to planning the party, a woman stormed out of the room with her husband, saying, “I’m a compassionate person. I believe people who come here have to come here the right way. It makes me angry when I hear people talking about harboring illegals.” The city has a population of approximately six thousand people, 94 percent of whom are white. This is where the boys live.

Javier Quintanilla, their dad, had lived in the United States for sixteen years. He was stopped for driving without a license in 2008, and local police alerted ICE. After a deportation order was issued in 2011, he was granted a stay to remain in the country, and he dutifully checked in with immigration authorities every six months until March of 2017, when an immigration agent met him at his appointment and told him to get ready to be deported.

“Omar does not cry,” Patricia tells me. “He has not cried once. He is stoic and strong, but he is the one who asks after his father the most.” Classmates have been taunting him at school. “I hope your mom gets sent back to Mexico too,” they tell him. I ask him how he is sleeping, and he says that he tells himself his dad will be gone for only a few weeks. “Last night, I did not sleep at all because I missed my dad.”

Stories in the news often end at the deportation, at the airport scene. But each deportation means a shattered family, a marriage ending, a custody battle, children who overnight go from being raised by two parents to one parent with a single income, children who become orphans in foster care.

One study found that family income dropped around 70 percent after a deportation. Another study found that American-citizen children born to immigrant parents who were detained or deported suffered greater rates of PTSD than their peers.

I know Javier wants the children to move to Mexico to be with him, and it is a source of fights with Patricia. “I think it’s selfish to take the children to Mexico,” she says. “This is their country. The whole point was to allow them to receive an education here.” A coffee plantati...

Andres, who will start high school next fall, walks a few miles down to the local public library to do his homework when he needs a computer, but with winter coming, it gets dark early.

It’s the same people who donate every time, older white hippies and children of immigrants, not my former Harvard classmates who post pictures of themselves at rooftop happy hours every day, the kids who work at Silicon Valley start-ups, the ones who have precious weddings with hashtags and babies they want to make sure you know the sex of.

There are no clowns in fields with machetes in America. There are white moms who threw stones at the little girls in Little Rock and there are white moms who wish Andres and Omar and Elias and Greta’s mom will be deported too. There are no clowns in fields with machetes, but there are ICE officers who pose as nice people trying to buy a piñata off the Internet, meet you in a parking lot, and detain you.

I’ll become an immigration lawyer, like Peter, so nobody’s dad will ever be taken away again.

In 2016, he was given a stay on the removal order as long as he checked in every six months. But under the current administration, the authorities have all but stopped granting stays, so in July 2017 he was ordered to leave within the month. Just like Javier. The day of his scheduled deportation, he claimed sanctuary in the church, a space that Immigration and Customs officers do not enter. He has been living in the church for over three months.

Dishwashing is a popular job for the newly arrived. It doesn’t pay great, the hours are long, and it’s boring and grueling, but Leonel was thrilled to see a job opportunity materialize so quickly after arriving.