NB: This column appeared this morning in Business to Business, a monthly publication of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.
I was once an illegal immigrant. I didn’t swim a river or cross a desert in the middle of the night. I boarded a plane in San Francisco with my husband, a one-way ticket, and enough luggage to stock a small retail establishment. Although we had applied for residency and work permits for the Czech Republic before we left, they had not yet been approved. It could be months before they would be complete, and we knew that as we packed up our lives.
Undaunted—and unmolested by the airlines or Czech customs, despite the obviousness of our intentions—we took the route favored by the thousands of Americans who have worked and lived in Prague since the Velvet Revolution in 1989. We entered on tourist visas, nothing more than a stamp in our passport awarded for the simple act of crossing a foreign border.
Such is the nature of American privilege. Nobody assumes that “rich Americans”—even the middle class ones—would try to emigrate or find work overseas. Therefore, the questions Americans are asked when they land on foreign soil—and, more crucially, the intensity of those interrogations—are almost always a mere formality for those lucky enough to travel under the banner of the United States. It’s a stark contrast to what awaits foreigners arriving here in America.
Every arrival on our shores is viewed as a potential immigrant, a potential welfare recipient, a potential terrorist. Those who are required to get a visa before even visiting as a tourist—way more involved than a stamp on the passport, naturally—must spend hundreds of dollars and countless hours filling in forms and traveling to interviews. They must prove their intention to return to their own country and must prove their strong ties to their own home. If the visa is turned down, they don’t get a refund on the application fees. If they get the visa, they get photographed and fingerprinted like common criminals upon their arrival by air or sea.
And that’s just to be a tourist.
Anyone who wants to come to the United States to live, work, or study legally faces a far more daunting prospect. The hundreds of dollars stretch into thousands, and the hours into months or even years. If you happen to hail from a “suspicious” country, you can increase that exponentially. Tough luck, not being born here.
The result is that hundreds of thousands of people who want to live and work here come anyway, setting legalities aside. Or, like the 11 AWOL Montana State University program students from Egypt, enter legally and then try their luck at greener pastures. And, boy, does that ever gravel some American butt.
A couple of Chronicle readers—apparently troubled by the missing Egyptians and by foreigners in general—even submitted letters calling for a halt to international programs in the Montana university system and a ban on emigrating Muslims, respectively. It’s hard for me to read letters like those with anything but derision.
The fact is that most of us in Montana are American citizens due not to any legal process but to a happy accident of birth. (The place, not the circumstances. I’m not speculating about that. Please don’t send me letters.) How many of the people spouting specious slogans such as, “America for Americans!”—or even “Montana Universities for Montanans!”—know what goes into becoming an American if you’re not born that way? How many of them have ever tried to live anywhere else?
As a former (briefly) illegal alien, I have. It’s not easy. Those who would close our borders to foreign visitors, international students, and potential immigrants should try it sometime.