In January, I had to spend a morning in an office block in Pretoria where they probe your health as part of the application for certain visas you need to visit foreign lands. Something was off about the energy of the place. There were a lot of people sitting around looking nervous and vaguely defensive. The staff were being excessively polite. As we shuffled from queue to queue, I started to work it out: the vast majority appeared to be shuffling under a different code. Eventually I clicked. I was inadvertently caught up in the Trump-induced refugee crisis.
I gave in, as I do, to my need to ask questions. The hapless individual who met with my default roving reporter personality was remarkably open about his plans. He was neither a farmer nor, in fact, Afrikaans. He was a computer salesman from Limpopo and was just taking the gap. He longed for greener pastures and the land of milk and honey. He’d never been to the US but seemed genuinely surprised that I wasn’t considering the refugee status for myself. “You should apply,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be getting into America any time soon,” I confessed. “But are you sure you want to renounce your citizenship, as in never come back home?”
Clearly my sentimental, patriotic gumph was wasted on this guy. He wanted to get to Texas and this was his golden ticket. No more hopeless applications for the Green Card Lottery or having to prove himself as some kind of genius to get on the fast track to America. Now he was a special guest of the President and he was heading straight to the heart of the imperium.
Next thing, you find yourself at the airport, clutching an envelope with all your worldly documents and the small, sweaty hands of your oblivious children as you bid everything you ever knew goodbye — including that ineffable thing, your identity. A slippery thing it turns out.
In another interminable, refugee-heavy queue at OR Tambo international departures, I watched this small-scale drama unfold in a hundred different ways. Airport security is harrowing at the best of times but add the whiff of anxiety with a strong undertow of fear and the whole thing takes on a kind of existential torpor. Turns out, shuffling into the unknown with only your sour-grapes attitude to prop you up has its own smell of desperation.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” wrote Emma Lazarus in a sonnet called The New Colossus in 1883 to raise money to pay for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. Official photographers at Ellis Island, once the receiving area for all the world’s tired and poor, captured the Germans, Hungarians, Russians, Prussians, Irish, Scottish, Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Filipinos and Japanese piling through the portals to the land of their dreams — wearing their various national garbs and the blank stare of Transatlantic exhaustion. At OR Tambo, I was reminded of all these exotic others who, with the stroke of a pen, were instantly Americanised. The convoluted foreign names would be changed on the spot to new American ones and, with that, their links to the homelands they’d left behind would be severed.
I don’t know where this latest intake of refugees will finally settle in this hierarchy. Sadly for them, the dream is a little tarnished.
These people were fleeing famines, wars, poverty, civil insurrections — all the usual things that propel people to abandon everything for a hope and a prayer. They all became something else, a new American thing, there at that in-between zone — the land of passports and visas and lung-health checks.
Donald Trump’s grandparents were German prototypes who arrived in the 1880s. His mother came from Scotland at 18 and married his first-generation father. Two of Donald’s own wives came from the East — Czechoslovakia and Slovenia — and were naturalised later. There was always a hierarchy of immigration in the States: the good, the bad and the ugly (and don’t forget the “forced” by way of abduction to fuel the engine of the great land with slave labour — but that part threatens to be scrubbed from their history books and museums).
I don’t know where this latest intake of refugees will finally settle in this hierarchy. Sadly for them, the dream is a little tarnished. I don’t know what that guy heading to Texas has found there but there are some refugees who now just want to come home. Enough already with the opioid epidemic, the daily school shootings, the weather, the cheap clapboard houses, the gang warfare and paying for your own healthcare in a food desert.
In a stroke of PR genius, our government has said they’re all welcome back. Better the devil you know, I say, but I’d like to put in a request with the good people at Home Affairs: can we please leave Advocate Peet and his desperate housewife of Pretoria, Mel, on ICE for as long as possible? They bring the tone down.
I confess, there’s a sliver of schadenfreude in my heart. Don’t throw stones from your glass house or your leased Range Rover whilst pulling a Bonnie and Clyde and filching San Pellegrino from the convenience store while overstaying your tourist visa. Just don’t. They must please keep them in America and make it great again.
