On Being Foreign and Confused
I’ve been a foreigner most of my life. When you live in a country long enough to shed the label and look of the tourist, your treatment and impressions as a tolerated foreign presence give each country a unique signature: these impressions colour every aspect of life as an expatriate, and provide richness to the memories of living in each country.
Stay somewhere long enough, learn the language and adopt the accent, and you can pass for a local. This blurs distinctions, and after a time your status becomes that of a native. Nevertheless, the perspective of being a foreigner never quite fades for the "aliens", as my current host nation likes to refer to us, and we carry it with us as a memory of our experience in a foreign nation, for the rest of our lives.
When in sub-Saharan Africa, my status as a European visitor gave a unique but constrained insight into local culture, as the gap between their experience of life and mine, not to mention the difficulties of communicating through a few talented multi-linguals, made bridging the culture gap an uphill struggle. It is striking that they expressed as much of a desire to bridge that gap as I did, if not more so. They are as afflicted with curiosity as we are, they merely lack the opportunities to travel that we have. I found myself answering more questions than I was given the opportunity to ask.
Travelling and living around Europe I see the biggest strength of being part of the Union. Our press may complain endlessly about the ins and outs of the European Union’s bureaucratic machine, and "Brussels" may well have become a dirty word in European political discourse (much to my dismay, I was born there), but the free movement of people – one of the essential freedoms enshrined in the Treaty of Rome – combined with the Schengen agreement, have resulted in a continent accustomed to the presence of multiple nationalities in the same place. These "foreigners" (the word is too strong) are not merely tolerated, they are at home.
Which brings me to my current home, the east coast of the USA. There are many things to admire and like about this country, not least the sheer scale of its institutions, the spirit behind the words of its founders and the attempts of many to keep that spirit alive in the present and for the future. But how distorted good intentions can become under pressure. After a year, I still feel very much like a foreigner here, as the interactions I have with the state, the people and the immigration services change almost weekly, keeping me constantly off-balance. Violent swings in the perceptions of Europeans, based largely on what was printed in the papers that morning, have taken me by surprise on a number of occasions over the past year, and the paperwork required to retain permission to study here seems to never stop.
Much of the administrative immigration hassles are, of course, due to the terrible attack on the World Trade Centre. This has resulted in a need to improve national security. I see the level of security in two ways. There’s the extent to which the borders have been closed and the security of the castle has been reinforced. There’s also the extent to which the need for such measures has been attenuated through a diminution of the threat itself. The two are related: the US’s terrible failure in defusing tensions has resulted in a huge increase in border protection and internal security costs. Were the goal to render the border protections and internal security ever more necessary, the administration could hardly have done a better job.
This is symptomatic of the current state of mind in the US. The subconscious belief seems to be that the US should be able to stand, impregnable, against any threat from the outside. Once this is the case, the level of external threat becomes irrelevant. This idea is outdated and its effect on those that live inside the castle, and those that would interact with it, is profoundly negative.
Today, I received a message from the International Office at my university, stating
We write to inform you about new Department of State rules that will lead
in many cases to substantial delays in visa issuance at U.S. consular posts
abroad.
If you plan to travel abroad and obtain or renew a U.S. visa stamp before
you return you will first need to make sure that it will be possible to get
the visa in the time you have available.
Delays in visa issuance are expected because the new rules require consular
officers to interview most visa applicants in person but do not provide
additional resources to handle the increased workload. Consular posts that
do not already have appointment systems have been instructed to consider
establishing them and the Department of State has acknowledged that "many
posts will face interview backlogs."
This follows the introduction of SEVIS, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, which “provides tracking and monitoring of non-immigrant students and exchange visitors and their dependents”, a system that needs to get told every time I cross a border so that I, as a potential threat, can be tracked.
The Homeland Security Advisory System, which rarely seems to drop below “Elevated”, sometimes hops up to “High” based on undefined “increases in chatter”, causing delays to hundreds of passengers and filling airports with long lines that snake through entire terminals as every third person is asked to remove their shoes, boot up their computer and "please step this way". The increases in costs resulting from the heightened security levels are causing a "cry wolf" effect whereby states that can ill-afford to pay for such massive deployments of police under tight budget constraints are scaling back their response as no terrorist strikes occur, thus defeating the entire purpose of the exercise.
Passing immigration with a foreign passport has become an ordeal. A friend of mine, who has entered and exited the US numerous times during her studies here, recently had her immigration documents put in a big red folder, and was sent (escorted) to the INS desk to wait in line as if her documentation were invalid. There was nothing wrong with her papers, they were just checking for the hell of it, but the considerable cost in time was borne by her.
Over 13000 Arab and Muslim men in the US are facing deportation after voluntarily registering with the INS following a request that they register following 9/11. The believed that by co-operating they would be treated leniently, most had "lapses in their immigration status". Instead they're all being thrown out because they made themselves known in order to help improve homeland security. Many of the families are packing, but many are going underground.
Finally, the Patriot act is in the process of eradicating many of the checks and balances that are so admired as the genius of the constitution. Patriot II is waiting in the wings for some terrorist incident to carry it through to the legislature, and the voices of civil libertarians, loud though they are, seem barely considered in the debate, and risk attracting the criticism of being "unpatriotic".
I don’t know where all this is leading. Having not predicted this state of affairs based on the events of the past, I feel ill-equipped to predict anything much at all for the future. I feel that the political reality has little to do with the facts we are given, and despite the huge amount of information available, feel that I am missing key pieces of information that would allow me to judge what our leaders' long-term plans are, assuming they have some. Politics and press-conferences look like stage-managed shows designed to elicit a specific reaction in the audience, rather than communications of information that allow independent judgement and critical thinking.
One can only hope that tensions will ease despite the actions of the US, or that those actions will evolve into a less coercive form of international relations. The recent efforts in the Palestine-Israeli conflict are a positive sign, but success there will take years, and failure can take but a moment. Solving that conflict may well defuse much of the antipathy that exists in the world, but solving it badly may do the opposite, and the US is perceived to be biased by the Palestinian side of that debate, despite being their best hope for peace. Working on improving relations with Arab nations – and by that I mean their people, not just their dictators – will provide an easier backdrop to future interactions.
Posted by nlvp at June 9, 2003 11:59 AM