The Undocumented Americans (One World Essentials)

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Welcoming an undocumented immigrant with a deportation order into a church has to be done carefully so it cannot be misconstrued as harboring a fugitive. As a first step, the church makes clear to ICE that they are acting within their capacity as a sanctuary space in accordance with their beliefs as followers of Jesus Christ. They send a fax to ICE headquarters announcing that the immigrant is there once he or she arrives so nobody can claim they are “hiding” them. All parties are aware of the immigrant’s whereabouts. They’re wearing ankle monitors given to them by the Florida private company GEO Group. Sanctuary works because ICE has a policy against forcing their way into places of worship. Violating that policy requires special permission from ICE headquarters, but so far that hasn’t happened, and one immigration lawyer told me he thinks that if it did happen, “all hell would break loose.”

In the United States, the tradition of immigrants claiming sanctuary in churches dates back to the 1980s, when a network of churches took in nearly five hundred thousand refugees fleeing the death squads in Central America.

After sending in undercover informants to infiltrate the movement, the federal government charged two Roman Catholic priests, a nun, and a Protestant minister with conspiracy to smuggle aliens, and they faced jail time of up to twenty-five years. They got probation instead.

talk. I feel grief at the knowledge he’s in there. I feel as if someone is being killed and I am being forced to watch it, blinders on, and the bullet travels in slow motion, but I cannot stop it.

My father was working as a deliveryman, and the owner of the restaurant hired a new manager to oversee the deliverymen—all immigrants, nearly all Mexican. The guy was Puerto Rican—an American citizen—and became immediately abusive, calling the delivery guys wetbacks and spics, threatening to call ICE on them, yelling at them, getting up in their faces. My father fell into a bit of a depression. I had just watched All the President’s Men for the tenth time, and what I did was I made myself a pot of tea, put on my best posh accent, dialed *69 to block my number, and called the restaurant. I asked to speak to the owner. I said I was a beat reporter for a big city newspaper, and I had just received a tip from a customer about overhearing racist abuse in the kitchen and did he have a comment. The owner said he’d handle it and asked me not to write the story. I don’t know, man, I said, it’s a pretty good story. In the end, the manager was fired, and the cloud over my father lifted. My father was furious when I told him what I did, but not for a minute in the fourteen years since have I felt that what I did was unethical, nor have I felt guilty for having a man fired. I’d do it again but my accent would be better.

We pay taxes too. In 1996, the IRS even made a special provision for us to be able to pay taxes without Social Security numbers—that’s the ITIN number, which you’ll see advertised everywhere in immigrant neighborhoods.

But as an undocumented immigrant, everything we do is technically against the law. We’re illegal.

I personally subscribe to Dr. King’s definition of an “unjust law” as being “out of harmony with the moral law.” And the higher moral law here is that people have a human right to move, to change location, if they experience hunger, poverty, violence, or lack of opportunity, especially if that climate in their home countries is created by the United States, as is the case with most third world countries from which people migrate. Ain’t that ’bout a bitch?

The children visit their father at the church every day after school, and every night when Johnny has to leave the church, to return to his fatherless home, he cries and that makes Francisco cry too.

Flor made me her special hen soup with a hen she had killed specially for me.

She enjoyed dangling provocations in front of us. I’ll cheat! I won’t hand this in! I’ll talk back to my teacher! She was going to either do or not do those things anyway, but she liked it when we pleaded with her, gave her lectures on the importance of grades, and insisted on talking to her principal when she was treated unfairly by a teacher.

We were making dinner in the church basement one evening when Johnny suddenly asked his sister Brianna why their dad wasn’t allowed to go home. He had long outgrown the original explanation, which was that his dad worked at the church, a special job with no time off. Brianna said there was an evil man who wasn’t letting him leave. Johnny then turned to me and asked why the dinosaurs died.

The extinction of the dinosaurs is the only tragedy Johnny knows. He doesn’t know about Hiroshima. He doesn’t know about the Holocaust. He doesn’t know about the Trail of Tears. He just knows his father can’t come home and he knows the dinosaurs died.

Franny slips into some dissociative moments too. Sometimes she’ll speak in the present tense about past events that haven’t been true for a year and a half. One evening, Francisco was discussing how he used to wake up very early to go to work at the factory where he worked for fifteen years and Franny said, “What do you mean, Daddy? You still wake up at five A.M. every morning to make it to work.” Francisco gently reminded her he didn’t. She’s having sleep problems. She feels exhausted but cannot reconcile sleep, often until four in the morning, her mind running with thoughts of her father.

My mom and dad squeezed onto one mattress and my little brother and I onto the other and I wish I could say we looked up at the stars but there were no stars, per New York’s famous light pollution, but there was the moon, and there were the pop pop pops in the background that were either the sound of kids playing with fireworks or the sound of a cop shooting one of us in the back, the odd ice-cream truck playing “Turkey in the Straw” or “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” which none of us immigrant kids had ever heard before, a car blasting salsa, a woman screaming in drunken ecstasy or else in alarm.

The twisted inversion that many children of immigrants know is that, at some point, your parents become your children, and your own personal American dream becomes making sure they age and die with dignity in a country that has never wanted them.

For one thing, most available jobs for undocumented immigrants are jobs Americans will not do, which takes healthy young migrants and makes them age terribly.

Aging undocumented people have no safety net. Even though half of undocumented people pay into Social Security, none are eligible for the benefits. They are unable to purchase health insurance. They probably don’t own their own h...

According to the Migration Policy Institute, around 10 percent of undocumented people are over fifty-five years old. This country takes their youth, their dreams, their labor, and spits them out with nothing to show for it.

He has always been the best at his job, no matter the job. He worked as a taxi driver for his first twelve years in America, a time before MapQuest, let alone Uber, and he has the entire city memorized, every axis on the grid, all five boroughs and parts of Jersey. Since then, he has worked in restaurants. Now he is usually the oldest person in the kitchen. Out of respect, the younger guys all call him Don.

The first picture is of a man maybe in his late seventies, wearing a green button-down, khaki pants, and aviator sunglasses. His lips are downcast. My dad said he was applying to be a dishwasher. The second picture is of a man maybe in his late forties who is wearing a black baseball cap, a gray sweater, and maroon pants. My dad said he’d had a stroke—his right arm was paralyzed and he had a limp in his right leg. He was also applying to be a dishwasher. Apparently, he was a fucking fantastic dishwasher, how, I don’t know. When he sent the pictures, my dad also texted me:

It’s hard to see men like that not get jobs. We’re invisible because of the circumstances that force us to be here at the agency…old age…illness…the fucking papers. Do you understand. A million thoughts rush to my head. It’s too much to think about.

But I remember every person who ever left my dad a really good tip when we lived off his tips, I remember every one, you don’t understand, I have been thinking of those nice Puerto Rican executive assistants for the past fifteen years, it was always the Latina executive assistants, very rarely the white people in power, and I remember how he felt for the rest of the evening when he came home.

Octavio tells me that much of the discrimination older immigrants experience is at the hand of younger immigrants. That they will stand within earshot of the older guys and loudly wonder what they’re still doing here, or outright say they’re too old for the work.

I ask how he feels on a daily basis as an older man without family here and Octavio says that he feels depressed and anxious. “What kills us is loneliness. I feel lonely even in a room full of people. I feel destabilizing anxiety and pain. Doctors say I don’t have anything, but I know I’m sick.”

“I think some men who grow old in this country get lost here. They are unfaithful to their wives or turn to alcohol or drugs as a way to blow off steam, to forget their pain. I’d say that out of every hundred older immigrants, ten succumb to depression, anxiety, or worse.”

I think about the work of Roberto Gonzales, a Harvard scholar who has conducted longitudinal studies on the effects of undocumented life on young people.

The trick to doing it is asking Americans to pity us while reassuring them with a myth as old as the country’s justifications for slavery—that is, reassuring Americans with the myth that people of color are long-suffering marvels, built to do harder work, built to last longer and handle more, reminding them what America already believes in its soul, which is that we are “impervious to pain,” as scholar Robin Bernstein has put it. We can only tell them we’re sick if we remind them that sick or not, we are able to still be high-functioning machines.

“I don’t feel at home in this country,” Octavio says. “Even immigrants in extreme poverty find a way to send their deceased loved ones back home to be buried. They won’t be alive to feel happiness again, but they will feel at peace, finally a place to rest. All the dead want is a place to rest.”

He says this may be his last year before going back to Guatemala. He came here to make enough money to send his kids to school back home, and he did it. One is a mechanic, another is studying law, and the third is an aesthetician—Octavio financed her salon. “Everyone who kills themselves through their work is doing this for their children,” he says. “If you don’t have kids, why would you kill yourself like this?”