The Miles Between Me. Toni Nealie
The forms asked: Have you ever been a member of a communist organization?
No. (Although when I was at university I went out with a dude in the student chapter of the New Zealand Workers Communist League. Is that paranoia?)
Have you ever been a member of a terrorist organization?
No. (Protesting against the Springbok rugby tour against the All Blacks? Concrete down a toilet at a feminist rally?)
Have you ever committed a crime of moral turpitude?
Moral turpitude has been in U.S. immigration law since 1891, but isn’t defined by statute (though State Department regulations try to clarify it), and doesn’t feature in other countries, so I pondered this carefully.
Have you been guilty of conduct that is considered contrary to community standards of justice, honesty or good morals?
How do you determine the depths of your turpitude? Stabbing Peter Fellows in the leg with a freshly sharpened pencil because he wouldn’t stop swinging on the back of my chair in fourth grade? Sticky-ing the living room floor with booze when my mother was out of town, dumping the bottles in the church trash bin across the road, lying that I was at my friend’s house? Telling my sister’s boyfriend that my sister cheated on him when he was sick with mono? Sleeping with a boyfriend’s brother? Having three boyfriends at the same time, dismissing one out the window while another was knocking at the door? Failing to act when, as a camp counselor, a nine-year-old girl confided that she had been raped by her uncle?
I was unjust, dishonest, and had dodgy morals. But I grew up. Was there a statute of limitation?
Overall, I thought I was a good person. I was kind to friends and made my kids clean their teeth after eating sweets. I believed in the common good and paid my taxes in full. I had adopted two rescue cats. I checked No. I had not committed crimes of moral turpitude.
IN THE WEEKS and years after 9/11 everything was jammed up and panicked. My husband had secured basic documents like a driver’s license and social security number as soon as we had arrived, while I focused on settling in the children, who were two and seven. I, who had been a journalist, editor, and public relations advisor all my adult life, was for the first time a “homemaker.” I had a visa to work, but no work authorization, and could not get one in any reasonable time, so I declined several job offers. I waded into uncertainty, bureaucracy, hyper-vigilance. I couldn’t drive my children because I couldn’t get a driver’s license because that would require a social security number. I couldn’t get a social security number because that would require a letter from the Department of Transportation, which would provide one only if I had a social security number. I rocketed backward and forward for days between two departments. I met others in a similar position—expatriate spouses of foreign lawyers, business advisors and consultants hired by international corporations and big agencies—trapped stateside with a driving prohibition that made us feel akin to women in Saudi Arabia.
MY LOVE AFFAIR is with my husband, not my adopted country, or the gatekeepers. I am here like so many international families of the so-called knowledge economy. I came as a package of four. As much as I know terrorism is a threat, I also know my kids are more likely to die by beer, prescription drugs, a gunshot, drowning, a speeding Ford, a tainted cantaloupe or a bad hot dog at a Cubs game. I worry about my sons as they become old enough to travel without parents. Will the blond, blue-eyed son be waved on, while his dark-eyed, tawny brother is held back?
My discomfort is incomparable to those fleeing persecution or poverty. We sat side by side on grey chairs in featureless waiting rooms that smelled inexplicably of classroom chalk, school raincoats, and urine. We were all again children, powerless before authority. It made little difference that my homeland was not an engorged or war-torn country, not one that racist politicians froth about, or one with ambiguous and contested boundaries. Aotearoa, New Zealand, is ostensibly a friend of America, part of its surveillance network and a historic ally. I thought that gave me immunity. I used to be secure in my privileged, middle-class spot in a safe, harmless, faraway country. I’m ashamed to say that at first I wanted to set myself apart from the others, to shriek: “You started it! You flirted with my husband first! You courted us, you encouraged us from the other side of the world, and this is how you treat me?” Like those I waited alongside, my skin color signaled more about my immigration status than my passport. I am a brown-skinned daughter of Aotearoa and the South Pacific, a grandchild of India and Great Britain, a mother, a wife, a writer, a friend, and more. Resident, not alien.
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