The Miles Between Me. Toni Nealie
interview, for the snap of a rubber glove, to have our luggage and our bodies rifled through.
I AM AN Alien. I am A54**32. For a time I was a Non-Resident Alien, then I was an Alien on Advanced Parole. I am now a Resident Alien. The language is peculiar, drumming up recollections of 1950s comics, creatures from the swamp, pods of extra-terrestrials, unidentified flying objects, reds under the bed, and sci-fi evildoers. Some countries do not use this lexicon at all, instead using neutral terms such as applicant, overseas citizen, visitor, passenger returning and resident. The alien terminology leaves me high and dry, on a continent that feels hostile and prickly.
I am permitted to live in the United States. I am permitted to work and pay income taxes, to pay private insurance for health care, to own a house and pay high property taxes that fund local schools. I am not allowed to vote, a fact unusual to me because New Zealand, along with Great Britain, the Netherlands, Chile, and many countries in between, allows universal suffrage for all residents. I have been obliged to offer up pieces of myself—my eyeballs, my thumbprints, my history, my blood, some of my freedoms, here in the land of the free.
My iris is captured in a biometrics file with the U.S. Immigration Service, photographed by a high-quality digital camera in a Homeland Security outpost in a room with grey vinyl flooring and grey plastic chairs, in a strip mall in Norridge, Illinois. My eyes were filtered and mapped into phasors or vectors. My eyes became a series of successful algorithms. My deep brown eyes, the eyes that have held the gaze of my beloved, that are the color and shape of my mother’s, that my newborn sons searched for and struggled to focus on, are now U.S territory.
The iris scan was first used by law enforcement agencies to identify prisoners, but the fingerprint was the earliest forensic biometric record. Loops and spirals were caught in clay in ancient Babylon and China, to keep track of business deals. Prints have been identifying criminals, real and suspected, since the late nineteenth century. In 1924, during the first Red Scare in the U.S., the identification division of the FBI was set up. By the time a second such scare was underway in the forties, the FBI had one hundred million cards blacked with whorls and spirals, lined up in tall filing cabinets. By 1970, two hundred million people had their two prints inked, rolled, and stamped. Now Homeland Security stores more than one hundred and twenty million people’s prints, and the FBI has sixty million computerized records, both criminal and civil. All are available to Interpol’s network.
My own prints, with my furrows, ridges and valleys, were harvested five or six times. How many times do American authorities need fingerprints? Do they change over time? Do the bad guys change their prints? Sometimes. The 1930s bank robber John Dillinger burned his off with acid and today’s criminals alter theirs surgically. My fingers pluck mint from my garden, knead fresh bread, stroke my sons’ hair, lace themselves between my husband’s—I have not altered them.
IT SEEMS INCONGRUOUS to mention the assault on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon as background to this, to group my own potential criminality with those other swarthy invaders, the ones who pierced airspace, buildings, and human lives. To say it was bad timing to move to the United States weeks before, though, seems callous. I don’t want to trivialize the horror of that day. Nonetheless, it locked me into eight years of cyclic fingerprinting, assignations in federal buildings shielded by concrete barriers and teeming with holstered security guards, appointments in strip malls, searches in airports, and a lag of five years between my husband and children getting permanent residency and me finally being able to use the same line in the airport as my family. This altered my perception of myself to a woman vulnerable to the hands of airport authorities, to a person of color profiled as a possible enemy, to a foreigner with ambiguous status. The “security” of the greater good has become my shaky insecurity.
Being viewed as a potential threat fractures you, diminishes you. You begin to suspect your own legitimacy, your place in the long, snaking lines of mainly brown people waiting for their numbers to come up. Are you trying to sneak into a society that doesn’t want you? Are you in the shadows of illegality? Could they deport you? Could they separate you from your children? Could they make you disappear?
If you’ve ever been in a secondary interrogation room in an American port of entry, you will recognize this fear. The large room is walled off from the main passport control hall that travelers snake through after disembarking. Uniformed border officers perch up behind a high counter looking down at rows of weary arrivals slouched in plastic chairs. There are a few citizens, but most are tourists or expatriates or immigrants. There is no privacy. Yelling, crying, pleading, and sometimes urinating take place in full view and earshot of those waiting for their passport to come to the top of the pile. It’s a morality play in the public square, except we are an unwilling and undemonstrative audience.
There’s the vacationing Italian whose travel agent has not informed him that even though Italy is a friendly nation with a visa waiver, he should have a passport with an electronic chip or a current visa. When the officers finally dismiss him, he protests their treatment and tries to argue. “Do you want to leave, or shall we put you on the next plane back to Italy?” He leaves.
There’s the English student planning a Transamerica road trip for six weeks, but he’s visibly of Asian heritage, so they hector him about why he’s on vacation for so long, and how did he get that time off work? He explains that he has left his job, because he’s a student, and besides, in the U.K. most workers get six weeks paid leave, but they don’t believe him. They harangue him for forty-five minutes before letting him go.
There’s the Fijian-born Indian New Zealander with a U.S. green card who says she was in New Zealand for six months because her brother was killed in a motorbike crash and she stayed longer to help her aging mother. She quietly weeps, laying out her grief before a room of witnesses uncomfortable with this uninvited intimacy.
A Chinese woman speaks via a translator. The officer asks if she has a child. She says no. After fifteen minutes of questioning, the officer calls a colleague over.
“Why are you lying?” they ask.
“I’m not lying,” she repeats.
“The computer tells us you have an eight-year-old daughter. Why deny it?” They take turns berating her, yelling at her.
The translator is flustered, frantic, near tears. “But we misunderstood you,” the translator pleads. “We thought you meant did she have a child with her, is she traveling with her child, but her daughter is with her grandparents in China. It was confused in translation.”
There is a secondary, secondary interview room, where body searches take place. I have not yet had that experience.
I WAS ON advanced parole for years. I was not held against my will, but sometimes I felt unduly confined. How did I get to this limbo? The process started not long after we moved in 2001 for my husband’s job, as a department chair in a large college. We were pressed into the permanent residency process for employment reasons, so my husband could travel freely to international conferences and business meetings. He seemed to have moved to a different country than me, his experience was so different, so smooth, benign and friendly. He got a social security number and driver’s license immediately, a bank account, and within a couple of years, he, and our children, had permanent residency.
I didn’t achieve residency until the last days of December in 2008. I don’t know why. Maybe because my last name was different to my husband’s, or because I hadn’t secured my social security number before 9/11, or maybe because I was brown, or because something in my application had raised a red flag. I’d been convicted and fined $25 for stealing a can of tuna when I was a student. I’d had my wisdom teeth removed under the influence of Valium and left the store with a can in one hand and my wallet in the other. (Under the Clean Slate Act, it no longer appears on my record in my homeland, but I’ve illuminated my crime forever with the U.S Immigration Service.)
The tenor of the questions in that application took me by surprise. Maybe I was naïve, having moved from a country with no perceived external threats, little government corruption, four million people and seventy thousand sheep. The questions had a film noir quality, a hangover from a more sinister age. I thought of the McCarthy era, the Hollywood blacklists