A Migrant Life *

*This story first appeared in an edited form as "Perspective" in Bender's Immigration Bulletin (May 1, 2007, Vol. 12, No. 9)

"You will be a traveler for ever and ever and will never be able to settle down."

-Ibn Arabi, 12th-13th Century Spanish scholar

When I first started out in this profession I would've never guessed that one day I'd go into private practice and handle cases involving mail order brides. After all, I'd gotten into law to help the underserved and the disenfranchised-- the migrant farm worker, not to represent the middle-aged American man who'd gone overseas to get a docile wife with whom he could barely communicate.

Not all of us with a law degree choose to work for the poor. With its emotional toll, it has a tendency to encroach on your personal life and leave you feeling like an empty bucket. You snap easily because of the injustice suffered by a client, or you're simply too exhausted at the end of the day to engage with others after hearing about someone's misery for hours. I've struggled not a few times with bouts of total fatigue and burnout, wondering why I wanted to take on what seemed to be an insurmountable task. But, like a blank sheet paper, there is always the thought that just maybe something extraordinary will fill the page.

I started my legal career almost two decades ago, and in that time I have met people from just about every corner of the world. There is no doubt that my work has made for many lively conversations at cocktail parties. Yet I also carry some of the delicate stories of my clients safely like eggs in a basket. Some will inexplicably stay with me over the years, like the young, soft-spoken Ethiopian man from a nomadic family who was tortured by his country's former regime. He spoke no English, but his French was perfect; he'd studied at the Alliance Francaise in Dire Dawa since his grandfather had worked for a French railway company that provided free education for its employees. A taxi driver had found him wandering, lost and confused, at the train station in Washington, DC and brought him to me. I worked at Catholic Charities then, and was perhaps the only French-speaking immigration lawyer in town who didn't charge legal fees. The Ethiopian was relieved to meet me, and a smile spread across his face when he heard the familiar language which I spoke to him. We had the common thread it took to get things done, and he recounted his story of imprisonment and brutality as I prepared his application for asylum in the United States.

Honestly, there were other clients whom I secretly hoped would be deported, even while I zealously represented them. One was a smart-ass Bosnian with an overblown sense of entitlement who had fled the horrors of the war in former Yugoslavia. He was living the American dream, having earned his university degree and a well-paid job, but immigration authorities were threatening to take it all away. He was my client because I believed he shouldn't be stripped of his "green card" for a lie he had told out of desperation when he filed an application in a United Nations' refugee camp several years ealier. But he was frustrated by an ambiguous system of justice, with mounting expectations of what I could do for him that were ignited by a fear of the unknown, and he took it out on me. After putting up with his many demands, I'd be overcome with a fantasy of him being put on a plane bound for somewhere far away. It's often easier to cope in this raw way rather than to admit you are an impotent cog in the Government's wheel.

I've also traveled a distance since the beginning of my career-- from Rochester to Washington, DC, San Francisco, and back to Buffalo, my hometown. I have migrant blood too. My maternal grandfather immigrated with his family to France from Spain during the First World War. They'd been humble orange pickers in Spain, my grandmother reminded me when I started representing migrant farm workers, as though there were a bit of destiny in my life. The boys in my grandmother's village in the French Alps would tease her when she began dating my Spanish grandfather. "Aren't French boys good enough for you?" they would taunt her.

On my father's side of the family there were men with elegant black mustaches who had emigrated from Spain to Argentina, and to Cuba, where they learned the profitable trade of tailoring which they brought back to the motherland, passing it along to the next generation, down to my grandfather, whose shop still remains on an elegant main avenue of a city in Northwestern Spain. Until not so long ago, Spain was a poor country that sent waves of its people across the ocean to the Americas, as had Italy and Ireland. It strikes me when my Latino clients, on the verge of being deported from the United States and noting immediately my dialect of Spanish, inquire about the possibility of immigrating to Spain, where, at least, "they speak our language."

I arrived at the Port of New York on the H.M.S. Queen Mary; a chubby, wide-eyed French toddler, holding my mother's hand, with a child's small cardboard suitcase in the other, my father trailing a bit behind us. It must have been raining the day we landed in July 1966 because my mother and I wore raincoats and my father carried an umbrella. It isn't the image of the immigrant arriving at Ellis Island desperately hoping for a better life. My mother was much too chic in her strappy sandals clutching a boxy beige handbag, but I am "off the boat." My father had received an offer to teach Spanish Literature at the University of Michigan to a bursting generation of Americans who were entering college in droves. And though the U.S. was undergoing a cultural revolution and a political transformation unmatched in decades, especially on university campuses, my parents seemed to have much simpler things on their minds as they stepped off the ship into a new life, like how to decipher the baffling language and find comfort in the quick rhythms of this country.

My parents both held doctorates and a traditional European idea of education when they came to the U.S. They did not settle into a gritty, urban, immigrant enclave where day-to-day life could be transacted in their native language and culture, and store signs advertised and overflowed with familiar goods. The immigrants with whom they associated were generally equally educated, and employed at or attending the universities where they taught. At the time, food products from home were not easily accessible as they are today, so my family made do with Wonder Bread, Triscuits and Muenster cheese, and simply enjoyed baguettes, croissants, pate and sheep's milk cheeses on our annual summer trips to Europe.

Conversations at our house when I was growing up revolved around literature, theater, film, art, and sometimes, when guests came to enjoy my mother's five course French dinners with an abundance of wine and champagne for dessert, the discussion would turn to international politics. In daily life my parents assimilated well, with the nuances of the English language being perhaps harder to overcome, especially nonsensical prepositional verbs. Call up a friend, hang up the phone, write down a phone number. To this day my father, the Spaniard, pronounces "sheet" shit and "shit" sheet. My mother still demands of me, "is that yes or no?" when I utter that incomprehensible "uh-huh." And like many immigrant children, I was asked by my mother to answer the telephone to find out what an anonymous caller wanted, since she had a difficult time understanding English without the benefit of observing the speaker. Besides the fact that my mother could make fruit tarts, choux a la creme, crepes, and baba au rhum, she never once baked a chocolate chip cookie. Regardless, I grew up in the suburbs like many other white American children.

People say it's not surprising I became an immigration lawyer with such a background, but I still think it is, since I grew up in an upper middle class setting raised by highly educated parents, where I wasn't really a foreigner except when I had to pull out my "green card" to cross the Peace Bridge from Canada. I could have become a tax lawyer just as easily. I actually went to law school thinking I'd become a consumer lawyer. But now when people ask me what that field is about, I realize I don't even really know anymore. I stumbled onto immigration law almost by accident, and have come to belong to a world that was never really mine.

On a record-breaking hot and muggy evening in mid-August, less than a month after I'd taken the exhausting bar exam, I was charged with distributing little red "Know Your Rights" booklets in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole to the migrant farm workers who traveled to Upstate New York from June through November for the lettuce, cucumber, peach and apple harvests. My prospective employer wanted to know whether I could handle this novel responsibility which was not taught in law school. So during the job interview I was taken on a tour of the migrant housing in counties along Route 103, north of the Thruway that crosses the State and is parallel to Lake Ontario. One of the agency's attorneys and I went resolutely from migrant camp to migrant camp until well after the sun had set. I noticed right away that the camps were purposely hidden from sight, shielding an uncomfortable reality from the passersby in what was otherwise an idyllic countryside smelling of moist, fertile green earth. The workers, who were often preparing or eating their supper when we arrived, were very interested in and grateful for the legal information we brought. They asked lots of questions, especially about their wages. "Are we supposed to get minimum wage? Are they allowed to deduct housing costs from our pay? Can we get overtime?" Those without documents wanted to know how they could get a work permit. An immigration amnesty law had just been passed, and these people were keenly aware that getting papers to live and work in the U.S. would make their lives much easier and allow them to plan a future.

The farm workers lived as single men or as families in decrepit, weather-beaten trailers, colorless cinder block housing, and shack-like structures devoid of personal touches. They kept their belongings in boxes or crates, or hung them across clothes lines. In one place, two Haitian families drew the only water from a spigot behind the trailer they all shared and it only ran cold. That night, I saw something I had never seen up close-- poverty. Decent people who remained poor though they traveled with our country's harvest, and woke up at dawn six or seven mornings a week with a long day's work ahead of them in the steaming summer sun. The idea that all one needed to live well was to make an honest living cracked around me. Until that point in my life, poverty had only been a theoretical discussion.

A year or so after starting my work, I went to Mission, Texas to conduct depositions in a lawsuit my agency had filed against a local grower. Mission, in the Rio Grande Valley along the border with Mexico, is home to many of the Latino migrant farm workers who make up the migrant stream that winds its way north for the harvest during the summer months. It's also the gateway to America's abundance for many impoverished Mexicans. They arrive by land, over the bridges, wading, swimming, or even inner-tubing across the great river. With papers and without them, they hope to earn a decent wage and send money home. Poor countries' economies receive up to $230 billion annually from such remittances from their citizens abroad and Mexico is no exception. The clients I represented in those days lived in South Texas during the North's cold season, or in Florida, where they picked oranges in the winter after winding their way back south following the apple harvest in New York.

The Florida migrant stream was more diverse than the Texas stream, and included not just Mexicans and Central Americans, but Jamaicans and Haitians as well. Decades earlier this same migrant trail had been traveled by African-Americans, as exposed in the television documentary, "Harvest of Shame," by the legendary Edward R. Murrow, which aired on Thanksgiving 1960. In the movie, Murrow solemnly tells unknowing Americans, "This is the way the humans who harvest the food for the best-fed people in the world get hired. One farmer looked at this and said, 'We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.' " This circular movement of people that follow our nation's harvest is probably hardest on the children who often tag along with their parents, and whose well-being is jeopardized without the stability most kids crave in their lives.

Picking produce is dangerous work. The U.S. government reports that agriculture is the most dangerous industry in the nation, and in Florida, the Jamaicans and West Indians do the most dangerous work-- sugar cane cutting, an excrutiating task introduced to the Caribbean during the 17th and 18th century slave trade. Sugar, discovered by Europeans in Egypt, was among the most profitable goods of that era given the West's demand to satisfy its sweet tooth . The men who cut cane do most of cutting bent over at the waist, using a sharp cutlass to rhythmically cut the crop in the proper manner. Injuries are obviously common. Still today, I occasionally come across a former cane cutter who entered the U.S. on a special visa and never left. I always praise him for his past work. Usually he'll look at me with a surprised look, but will inevitably grin and nod, and probably wonder how it is that I, a white girl from the suburbs of America, recognize a cane cutter. One recently confided in me that sugar cane can soften the skin.

In the lawsuit we filed on behalf of the Mission workers, there were allegations of false recruitment promises. Three families had been enticed by an unscrupulous farm labor contractor to travel to a small farming town near Buffalo to work for an area grower during the early summer harvest. The contractor, acting on the grower's behalf, promised the workers a certain wage and other benefits, which they never received. At the depositions, one of our clients, a middle-aged Mexican woman, was being aggressively questioned by opposing counsel about the conditions at the migrant camp where she'd lived with her husband and children, since we'd contended they'd been sub-standard. She was already nervous about the ordeal and was responding shyly to the interrogation, but she didn't know what to say when the grower's attorney sarcastically queried, "how can you complain about the free housing up in New York when the houses down here are just as bad, if not worse?" I'd been to her home in Mission. While it was certainly a very modest little house, she and her husband owned and took care of it. It was filled with mementos of her children's accomplishments and with the hopes of a close-knit religious family of three generations, much like the homes of the Italians who arrived at Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century. Our client and her family had hosted us there with graciousness and generosity, setting a table of spiced chicken, frijoles, homemade tortillas and other Mexican food we crave in the Northeast.

The impact of the years I spent representing migrant farm workers unwittingly determined my professional life. Representing farm workers, 93% of whom are foreign-born, and half of whom have no papers allowing them to work in this country, though wanting nothing more than to contribute, led me into immigration law. I've spent most of my career representing those who cannot afford to pay a lawyer. Even when I went into private practice for a brief three years, I could not let go of my sense of commitment to these hard-working, determined and idealistic people, and was frustrated by the constant fee-collecting that characterized private practice. Representing mail-order brides, simply because there was a someone willing to pay for the service, did not live up to my expectations of working toward justice.

The controversy around immigrants is an old debate that keeps arising anew, particularly during troubled times such as these. In the way African-Americans have been associated with crime, Latinos are tagged as "illegals" crawling over our border and threatening our orderly Anglo-Puritan way of life. Most recently, Arabs and Muslims have gotten caught in the cycle as today's "terrorists" who have no respect for our democracy. Benjamin Franklin once made blistering statements, aimed at Germans in 18th Century Pennsylvania. "They will Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them." He feared that new immigrants would "swarm" into our neighborhoods without regard for our laws and customs and values. Why, he asked, should we suffer outsiders who prefer ethnic enclaves where they "establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours?" The painful truth, he added, is that these newcomers are so culturally different from us that they will never assimilate like past immigrants, posing a grave threat to the society we cherish. Apparently, later in life, Franklin became more forgiving in his ideas, and recognized the economic benefits of immigration. It seems that as the historical wheel turns, Americans have consistently come to the same conclusion.

When I was in private practice, I was contacted by a personal injury attorney in Syracuse, NY. What he told me sounded sadly familiar. At least ten migrant farm workers, mostly Guatemalan, had been living in grower-owned housing in a rural area north of Syracuse when a propane tank in the kitchen exploded while they slept. The housing was described by the press as a "two story concrete block structure" that was "leveled" by the explosion. The County Sheriff reported that emergency crews did not even know how many had been in the building. "You don't know how many people are there until they report for work in the morning," he told reporters. Seven or eight workers were taken to a hospital in Syracuse. Some fled before they could be helped, no doubt fearing immigration authorities, the migra, would come for them along with the ambulances. One man was killed, and five others were so badly burned they were unidentifiable. A deacon from the Spanish Apostolate of the local diocese, whom I knew well from my farm worker days, was at the hospital helping out as best he could. The P.I. attorney asked me whether I could be available in case Immigration showed up again at the hospital. They'd already been there asking questions even though the victims were heavily sedated with morphine. I wondered to myself what these workers had been promised when they went up there to work.

Private practice also brought some rewards, unlike the mail-order brides, like helping a twenty-something Somali woman with two little boys who'd entered the U.S. as a refugee when she was just shy of fourteen. As a girl she had been placed into deportation proceedings in Buffalo. She was barely sixteen at that time, and had spent less than one year in the U.S. after fleeing the violence in her native Somalia. She left her home in Mogadishu as civil war ruthlessly ripped the city apart. She'd witnessed militiamen shoot her father, beat her mother and leave her for dead, and rape her eldest sister. In the chaos, the girl was told to run away with the neighbors, loyal clansmen who could help her get out of the country to safety. She and one of her brothers fled and left behind their parents, siblings, and all that they had ever loved. After a day or so on the road to Kenya, away from the brutality, her brother was shot to death. The caravan they'd been riding with was stopped at a checkpoint by militiamen demanding identification. In a nervous panic, the brother inexplicably jumped off the truck and sprinted. The bullet hit him in the back and he collapsed, face down on the dusty, unpaved road. His sister could do nothing but watch as the truck pulled away.

The Somali girl and her clansmen's family arrived at a refugee camp in Kenya. The neighbor couple in whose care she'd been entrusted died, but she remained with their son's family. The family, which now included this girl, was interviewed by immigration officials and was admitted to the U.S. as refugees. She arrived in the U.S. just before a wintry Christmas. The photo on her arrival documents is of a full-cheeked girl with curious eyes who looked extraordinarily innocent despite her ordeal. Her head is covered with a hijab and she smiles sweetly at the camera. I have no doubt she was polite and always respected her elders.

Unfortunately, the family who saved her life made the girl pay dearly for its charity. After moving to the U.S., and settling with them near Washington, D.C., she was not allowed to attend school. Instead, she became the family's servant and was subjected to physical abuse at their hands. Then, in a truly cruel act, they drove the quiet girl to a department store in the Buffalo area, telling her the journey was simply a family shopping trip for winter clothes. Once they arrived at the store, they instructed her to go find a coat she liked. When the girl went to find the family at the spot where they'd left her, no one was waiting for her. She waited and waited, and then began to cry.

The girl never really understood what had happened to her while in Buffalo, and certainly did not realize that Border Patrol had put into deportation proceedings, alleging that she'd gone to Canada and returned to the U.S. without proper papers, which meant that she was obligated to appear in court before an immigration judge. She never came back to Buffalo once she caught the bus back to where she'd come from and was placed into foster care. She went on to build a life in this country, going to high school, learning English, working in fast food, and having two children. But as a result of ignoring the requirement to attend court, she was ordered deported in abstentia. She never had reason to think anything had gone wrong since just a couple of years after she'd been apprehended at the border near Buffalo, she received a "green card." Seems one hand of the government did not know what the other was doing. Unfortunately, it finally caught up with her when she tried to become a U.S. citizen.

Although half of all migrants in the world are women and the number grows each year, I now almost exclusively represent men facing deportation. In the federal detention center that houses these men whom the U.S. Government is seeking to deport because they are here illegally or are "green card" holders who've been convicted of crimes, even minor ones, I am always struck by the commitment of the women who visit them. Some of the women come almost daily for several months, often with young children or infants in tow in the dead of our notorious winter. They drive for hours to this unknown farming town forty miles east of Buffalo where an unassuming, yet state-of-the-art, immigration prison was built after Congress declared mandatory detention for all those subject to removal from the U.S. There they wait patiently in the lobby until their names are called. They've completed a number of forms, have had their identities checked on visitors' lists, and entered their names in log books, just for a thirty minute conversation with the man of their lives, separated from him by a wall of plexiglass. If they must share the visit with another loved one, they will have even less time to catch up, since all visitors must share the allotted half hour. I am told that some wives and girlfriends don't even bother to make the long trip from New York City for only a half an hour daily visit.

Many of these women have also emptied their modest bank accounts to pay hefty attorneys' fees in a desperate hope of keeping their family together, not realizing that redemption is not a word in the immigration vocabulary. Then one day, I no longer see a familiar woman in the lobby and I know her man is gone, most likely forever.

These women must be quite resilient, and the genuine sacrifice they make to maintain their brittle relationships with men on the brink of deportation is either impressive or sadly pathetic. I see many of the detained men regularly in the legal workshops I give at the facility, and it is clear that not all of them share the same level of commitment and respect to their women. Yet even the most macho among them will play along if need be since detention brings long stretches of boredom, and a visitor, especially a woman who loves you and dresses up for the occasion, is a very welcome distraction. She brings him the comfort and cash he needs while in jail, even when he just brings her heartache when he's home. Of course, some women have let me know in no uncertain terms that they are fed up with the bullshit, and they will play no role in trying to defend him from deportation, but of course, those women don't even think of coming to visit.

U.S. citizens are rarely exposed to the labyrinth that is immigration law unless they face the process themselves, usually by marrying or befriending a foreign national. One of the most frustrating aspects of my work is trying to make a citizen understand what every undocumented person inherently seems to know: that there are very few avenues to legality, and those lucky enough to get papers can still lose them if they go astray. When I meet a U.S. citizen and her immigrant loved one, the first reaction I get when I say that there's nothing I can do, that the law simply offers no means by which this person can stay in this country, is a determined, "that can't be There must be something that can be done." I often bite my tongue because I want to say, "you just don't get it, do you? This is the tale of every immigrant. I have known many, many such deserving people. But the way we feel about immigrants is in our newspapers every day-- Americans want to close the border to more immigrants." Obviously, she thinks her beloved nanny's or fiance's plight is the most terrible situation of injustice she's ever encountered. But she's only encountered that one. I haven't though. So I seem hardened and callous with my routine responses and lack of compassion.

Sophie Feal

August 2007