Got a buddy from Nicaragua. I don’t know his legal status. He’s been here since he was a kid. He’s married to a citizen and has kids here.
I’m in charge of the Afghani refugees at work. I’m worried for those dudes every day. The one guy is having trouble getting his green card renewed. Their English is limited, so I can’t have a real talk about their concerns and expectations. I know these guys have been through hell, and they have families that are safe here now. It would be heartbreaking if they got gotted.
In the Chinese-American community, there were probably thousands of immigrants from China who came illegally using false papers. Actually, the papers themselves were not false, they just didn’t belong to the person who claimed to be their rightful owners. Such immigrants are known as “paper sons” (long story to explain the name, just go with it). There are a lot of paper sons still living, many of whom have become US citizens, and whose children were born in the US. It’s not a stretch in my imagination, though, that these paper sons, even if they’re naturalized US citizens, could be deported. There was an amnesty for them, but constitutional issues be damned, the fascists would find a way to round them up and ship them off if they wanted to. Talk about low hanging fruit, too: most paper sons I know are well into their 70s and 80s. And MAGAts would probably be able to justify deporting the paper sons’ American-born children, too.
Ironically, some of these paper sons and their kids are MAGAts. Leopards may come for their faces, and won’t they be surprised.
It is certainly one of their goals that people born here to people here illegally inherit not citizenship, but illegality. And that stain carries forward indelibly forever for however many generations may be in existence.
I think in their more fevered circles they’d say that if a fully legit citizen by their standards was to have children with an illegal by their standards, the offspring forevermore are illegal.
Yup. What they don’t understand is that’s all of us. Including everyone in this administration.
Perhaps we give the country back to Native Americans. But oh the horror, they also came from somewhere else 30000 years ago. Horses need to go too, and anything that lived in the sea and crawled up on land. Illegal aliens, every one of them.
Donnie might be surprised that there is no one to bring him a Diet Coke.
They’ll pick a suitably white era, e.g. 1880 and say anyone here then who was not brown is a Genuine Original Citizen®™ and their offspring with other Genuine Original Citizen®™s are OK. But none others.
A friend (A US citizen of hispanic descent on the west coast) has already been stopped twice and threatened with deportation. First time he was getting lunch and they raided the restaurant he was in. They held him for about 20 minutes with the cooks before letting him go (but not before slamming his head into a gate). After that he started carrying his passport with him. Second stop was about 5 minutes.
My neighbor Abraham now carries his birth certificate everywhere as he’s been questioned twice in the last few months. He said he feels that anyone in our complex will vouch for him even if a drive is involved in it. I think he’s right as anyone would.
Like others here, I have acquaintances who are undocumented. Some are making arrangements to self deport, and it is really a question of timing. One took the precaution of getting <former country> passports for their US born, US citizen minor children. If they need to leave, they can do it fast.
The ones I wonder about are our foreign new students and post-docs. I totally understand that historically a US degree opened up lots of opportunities, but it just seems too dangerous now. Even being white, liking the wrong post on Instagram could be enough to get you stopped at the border and then bounced around from detention center to detention center for a month or two, before you’re finally sent back to your country of origin.
Our gardener has been taking care of our lawn and landscaping for twenty or more years. He does a great job and is a super nice guy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he came here undocumented years ago. We don’t ask, and I hope nothing happens to him.
I’ve noticed that the day workers who hang around our local tool rental place are much fewer than they used to be. There used to be two or three dozen guys there every morning, but now there are only six or eight individuals there.
My brother-in-law, who works for a major tech company, is being relocated to the Seattle area. He, his wife and his three kids are flying over tomorrow. All of them have the proper papers and approvals, of course, but none of them are U.S. citizens, and they speak English with heavy accents (and his nine-year-old barely speaks English all). Plus, his middle kid is autistic, and has trouble with stressful situations.
I don’t know how worried I should be about them, but I am worried. They’re there legally, they’re white-looking, and he works for a company with serious muscle, but who knows these days? I’ve been having nightmares about him, his lovely wife, or God forbit his kids catching the attention of the wrong people - and there are so many wrong people these days - and there’s no way of knowing what will happen.
We have two adult kids adopted from countries (one of them Islamic) that might draw attention, plus neither kid is white, so we do have fears. One of those fears is that they’ll do something dumb and draw attention to themselves, the second is that the one who likes to travel a lot is going to get pulled aside while returning because of his birth country, the third is that some minor thing got screwed up in their paperwork/some law gets reverted that suddenly makes them legally vulnerable.
It’s crazy that we even have these thoughts, and yet these are not crazy thoughts.
