On Immigration

With photos taken from my travels. I guess we really do photograph what we love.

I am flying on a plane today.

It will take me to my country of birth, Great Britain and, when I land, someone will tell me to go through the automated passport gates that let British people with their British passports slide smoothly and seamlessly back in to their country. I will tell the person that this won’t work and they will insist I do it anyway.

I will try the gates and they won’t let me in. They never have. This is a long collection of stories about that, as well as about so many other stupid things that happen and have happened to me, a white, English male, at borders. But first, I am going to tell you about a bank note.

I have a Canadian one dollar bill in my wallet. It was passed to me as a curiosity not long after I went to Canada, at the start of wet 2015. I didn’t know then that I wanted to stay in Canada, though I did know I wanted to be there more, to visit more after finding so much I liked. I also knew that I had to get out of Britain and go to other places, because the world is very big and it is peculiar to only want to stay in one corner of it, like a mouse in a nook.

I kept the dollar bill. Canada stopped making them in the late 80s, so it served as a curiosity and even a kind of totem. At first I kept it for fun, but as my life plans changed, it became a sort of companion. At the end of 2016, in a winter that turned wondrously white, I decided I wanted to stay in Canada and in the wet spring of 2017, a wrinkling bill still in my wallet, I began that process, a process that mostly involved documents. There’s nothing quite like immigration to remind you that your life, to someone else, is mostly a collection of documents.

–

Once upon a time, someone was very unhappy with my documents. It was March 2015 and I had recently flown back from wondrously white Sweden (for which I had the right documents: my British/EU passport) to a wet spring Canada (for which I also had the right documents: my visa). That dollar bill wasn’t part of any of my documents, but it was still in my wallet.

I tried to take a bus down to Seattle, to then take a train to California, to go to a convention and visit a video games developer. The bus crossed the US/Canada border at around six in the morning and unloaded us into a barn-like facility. A border guard asked me if I was on the Seattle bus and I told him I was. He flicked through my passport and was unhappy with the stamps and tickets in it. “Show this page,” he said, flicking to what seemed to be the wrong stamp, and the line moved forward to a desk where another guard asked me about my travel plans. I told him I was going to take a train down to California.

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

Now, here’s a thing: when you’re telling the truth and someone says “I don’t believe you,” your situation is what’s most commonly referred to as A Problem. If that person is in a position of authority and has a gun, ratchet that up a notch. If that person begins to shout at you, to search through all your possessions in front of you and to ask you about all the things you’re carrying, even the things you take for granted and barely think about, dollar bill included, you’re having A Day.

I had A Day.

I saw a lot of things that day. I left the border some time in the late afternoon, after talking to a different guard about everything from my job to my family history. Toward the end of one of several protracted discussions, he leaned back in his seat and said “I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong.” I wasn’t sure what I would’ve done wrong, taking a trip like the many, many others that I had before. The guard’s boss, who ran the whole border crossing, decided I was an “edge case” and that I wasn’t in any trouble, but couldn’t visit the United States ever again in my life without a specialist visa. My passport was also flagged.

I am now, for the rest of my life, on a list, and after being told I didn’t do anything wrong.

–

During the blazing summer of 2002 I read a carefully-researched journalistic feature about migration. It talked about how lots of people leave Britain all the time. It talked about how immigration figures can often ignore emigration, and about how students arrive to study, but then leave, or temporary workers arrive to work, but then leave.

British people were also leaving. A lot of British people were leaving. Some moved and some retired and some found work elsewhere. There was, the feature said, also a brain drain. A lot of smart people wanted to leave.

A lot of other people thought immigration was a huge problem because they only looked at one figure. They thought that Britain was like a sickly old man, forever inhaling but never breathing out. I thought the feature would fix this misconception, but that turned out to be like thinking that eating once will mean you’re never hungry again.

I wanted to leave, but I wasn’t smart. You can tell who is smart because they have a degree. In both 2002 and 2007 I researched the possibility of leaving Britain and going to other countries, Canada among them. Everybody wanted a degree, though. I couldn’t go. I didn’t have my documents.

–

I think about nationality sometimes. I didn’t get to choose where I was born, I must’ve missed that meeting, but I was born with the advantage that my passport gave me easier access to many other countries, with relatively little fuss. Trips to Europe demanded nothing and my first flight to the United States required me to fill in a landing card that asked me if I had ever been a Nazi. This was very funny, because I wouldn’t know how to start to buy into such a racist philosophy of believing I was better than everyone else, but also because I was pretty sure the Nazis had been defeated sixty years before.

That first flight was the blazing summer of 2002. I went to the United States partly because I had never travelled independently before, partly because I hadn’t travelled all that much anyway and partly because I thought it was a small act of defiance. The previous year, terrorists had flown planes into buildings to kill thousands and to try to make everyone feel scared and helpless. It stopped everyone flying. The foreign currency processing center I worked in at the time ground to a halt, because nobody travelled. It was, our boss said, very bad for business. When people don’t move around, money doesn’t move around.

It was a strange time and people often forget that these events were followed by mysterious anthrax in the mail and then a sniper who drove around the D.C. area shooting people dead. There was lots to worry about and even I was irrationally scared when I boarded that first plane, but by the time an airport border guard was asking me what my deal was, all my fears had evaporated. I was safe and I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was also British, and we were Best Buddies. Other British friends of mine had visited the United States for months at a time without incident. It was all fine. Travel was exciting. Travel was invigorating.

I learned later about how you get nationality. Being born in Britain didn’t automatically make me British. I was born in Britain and at least one of my parents was British. There’s also something called jus sanguinis, whereby your parent’s nationality can determine yours, wherever you’re born. It’s not uncommon in Europe, but Canada also has it. Have yourself a Canadian parent and you’re automatically a Canadian, wherever you pop out.

But then there’s jus soli, which is more of a New World thing. If you’re born in Brazil or Argentina or the United States or Mexico or, again, Canada, you have the automatic right to citizenship in that country, whoever you popped out of. Good for you. You can be born in one country to a parent from another and you are entitled to two citizenships straight away. You did good. Well done!

And there are some very cool combinations out there that give you all sorts of free passes. All sorts of documents.

–

I talked to a bunch of people after my border turnaround in early 2015. I talked to a lawyer who cost four hundred dollars and who told me nothing I didn’t already know and who also got some things wrong. I talked to someone who used to work in immigration and they told me border crossings could be arbitrary and that border guards weren’t always very well trained. They told me that the border, United States consulates and the United States State Department all had slightly different and conflicting rules to enforce. After all those terror attacks, the United States felt scared and helpless and that something had to be done, so spent a lot of money changing, among other things, how its border worked. Not immediately, but gradually. A constant, firm push. They did this not because they thought it would make the world a better place, but because they thought it would make their world a better place.

One of the things that changed was a new visa waiver program, which people like me were allowed to travel on. Unless something caused us to be turned around at the border. That bumps you off that plan. Forever. Even if you’re told you haven’t done anything wrong or a man at a consulate seems confused as to how this happened.

In summer 2015, I went to a United States consulate to apply for the first of the United States visas that I now hold. To prove I was who I said I was, I took an armful of documents and testimonials with me, plus my totemic dollar bill. Since the things I do are pretty public, you would think that it’s easy to verify who I am and what I do, but I still took every document I could think of. The United States consulate would not allow me to take anything else in except those documents and it sent me in with a whole bunch of other people who were applying for other visas. We all rode up a big elevator and then sat in first one, then another room as the hours rolled by. I was the only white person in this group and, as I watched people go up to windows for interviews, it felt like we were all under suspicion. Like we’d all done something wrong.

Barack Obama smiled at us from a picture on the wall and there was a flag in the corner. Nobody said very much. Everyone looked nervous. We very much had the impression that we shouldn’t talk. We sat there with nothing to do and nothing even to read.

A man called my number and gave me an interview. He asked me about my work and my life and whenever I even began to think that he needed proof of something, I pulled forth a document, though I also think I had an easier time because he recognised that we were Best Buddies. He looked at my flagged file and asked about the incident at the border. I told him the story of how I’d been stopped and spoken to. He gave me a hugely quizzical look and asked me one of the last questions of the day: “But they let you in, didn’t they?”

–

By summer 2017 I had all the documents I needed to apply for Permanent Residence in Canada. They were one hundred and forty-four pages of the most boring biography you ever read, including a history of travel transformed into the most mundane shopping list and tax documents that showed my income for the last five years, as well as details about my business and how it’s growing. Mostly, the point was to show that I was good at my job and that the job made money go into my bank account. If Canada grants me Permanent Residence, Canada can tax the money I (reliably) make, as my business and my income grows. I included an explanation of what I do and how I’d like to do it more, and bigger, in Canada, plus some character references and examples of work. I’d like to think that I bring more to Canada than just the money I spend, but I don’t know if immigration cares as much about that sort of thing. They can have whatever information they want about me.

Here’s a secret: They can’t have my dollar bill.

I submitted the application in August. In October, my company hosted its first convention, bringing 800 people (and their money) to Vancouver. I spent money. They spent money. The company spent money. I hope immigration noticed. It was very good for business, all those people and their money moving around.

Canada asked me, as they often do with certain kinds of people applying for Permanent Residence, to leave and to await a decision. If I’d been a different kind of person applying for Permanent Residence, perhaps a spouse or in a particular job, I could’ve stayed. I did not want to lie about any of this. Since I was applying to bring myself and my money and my business to Canada, they told me to take those things away for a while.

I left, rippled dollar bill in my wallet, to spend some time in the United States, wondering if I might return soon.

I love visiting the United States. I love many of the people there, some of them a lot, and even with all its problems, it still has so much goodness and possibility and such a variety of people who want to work together to make it better. I like talking to these people and I like seeing all the different places in which they live. There are so many of them and they are all so different and, like the best bits of Britain, this is what helps to make them wholesome and good.

–

Two years earlier, I gave the United States consulate my passport and they printed a maxed-out, five-year media visa inside, though I remain flagged and every time I cross the border a guard will peer at notes on a screen which I am not allowed to see or request. Sometimes I am sent for secondary inspection and quizzed. I must always show that I am not going to be A Problem, I must always show my good intent, in something that is the opposite of innocent until proven guilty. My rights as a person entering a country are not the same as my rights if I hold that country’s nationality. The Constitution and Amendments and Bill of Rights weren’t written for me, and when I turn up at a border I don’t have a lawyer with me to remind me of what I’m allowed to do, or to debate a border guard if they may be misinterpreting a rule, and I am definitely not allowed to see the information that is kept about me. So I bring documents.

I am leaving the United States after spending a legal amount of time in it on the Business/Tourism visa I also hold, after spending a long time seeing different parts of it, many new to me, and spending thousands and thousands of dollars as a visitor, all my money moving around. I still imagine that my next visit (another where I will spend my money, before leaving again), will elicit more questions and suspicion, regardless of my long history of legal travel. Who knows. I am not sure what those border guards think my plan is, but the guard in 2015 was very angry that I was on a bus to Seattle but that I said my final destination was California. I don’t know if he perhaps thought I had some clever, coy, Seattle/San Fran switcheroo planned. That this is some trick people pull all the time that is the equivalent of the ???? before Profit.

I talk about the money I spend as a traveller because I hope this will remind people that my existence has a positive economic impact. I’d like to think that I bring more to America than just the money I spend, but I don’t know if immigration cares as much about that sort of thing.

–

At the end of last year I stood at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. I stood at somewhere called Immigrant Point. There I read these words, in letters each as big as my head, carved into stone:

“We opened the gates to all the world and said, ‘Let all men who want to be free come to us and they will be welcome.’”

They were the words of President Woodrow Wilson, from his State of the Union speech on July 4th, 1914. In the same speech, he also said “We did not name any differences between one race and another,” and “We did not set up any barriers against any particular people,” and “This independence of ours is not a selfish thing for our own exclusive private use. It is for everybody to whom we can find the means of extending it.”

He was talking about how America wanted freedom and democracy for everyone. That anyone who respected these things should be allowed them. In the same speech he was also talking about the freedom to do business all around the world. Ethically, of course, but he wanted the United States to see money moving around. With the flow of people there was also the flow of money. Being accommodating was not unprofitable.

I spent some of my time in the United States reading news about immigration and worrying about myself. I read about how the Department of Homeland Security, set up after my visit in the blazing summer 2002 and made up of entities like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or Customs and Border Patrol, had a budget five times larger than the FBI. I saw how this money was spent in news of people on planes and trains stopped and asked for their documents, or people deported aggressively and enthusiastically. I read stories of American citizens deported in this fashion, so quickly that the agents deporting them didn’t verify their status of check their documents. Some didn’t have documents. You really need your documents these days.

I thought about how I’d gotten in trouble without having done anything wrong.

–

Opening the gates is brave. If you open the gates, people come in, and many of those people are different. That’s a scary concept. They might do and want and need different things. If you close the gates, shore them up, raise the drawbridge and fill the moat with hydrochloric acid, you’re much, much safer.

Everything inside is wholesome and good.

–

I think about climate change sometimes. I think about how so many wars are over resources or territory, and how climate change will affect our ability to get some of those or keep some of those. Some countries will have their industrial and agricultural capabilities altered by climate change. Some will flood more. Some might spend a lot more time underwater. A lot of people may lose their homes or their livelihoods or their safety. It won’t all happen at once, though. These things happen gradually. A constant, firm push.

And it is constant. History, really, is geography. It’s where you were when something happened, what you had nearby and how it helped. Battlefields are geography. Cities are geography. Natural resources are geography. Sometimes countries do well because they happen to be in a good location. Sometimes they do well because they happen to have the right resources. Sometimes both. There are some very cool combinations out there that give you all sorts of advantages. You did good. Well done!

History is geography and geography is people moving around. In the future, lots of people are going to want to move around. Are going to need to. Their lives may depend on it.

–

Great Britain has always been defined by being an island. It has given them certain advantages. It certainly stopped the Nazis, who rampaged around Europe like wicked toddlers but never found a way to cross the channel. Twenty miles of water halted Hitler and his ego, halted him enough for a multinational collection of pilots from as far afield as Canada and Czechoslovakia, Poland and Jamaica, to win the skies and keep the waters Nazi-free.

The Royal Navy also became a muddle of all sorts of nationalities, united to beat back Nazism and all its rage and cruelty and intolerance. Beyond Britain, dozens of countries and their dependent states banded together as allies to fight and, even before it entered the war, the United States helped by sending aid and equipment and resources. Even then, we were Best Buddies.

All these different people came together to make something tremendously strong. It worked. The Nazis, meanwhile, were obsessed with checking everyone’s documents.

One obsession they had was about who you were born to, not so much because that might give you some jus soli or jus sanguinis right, but because it might mean you were a Jew or a Romani or some other kind of person who they considered an animal and wanted to shoot or burn or gas. They had people on planes and trains stopped and asked for their documents, even people pulled off the street aggressively and enthusiastically, and took many them away to be murdered. The Nazis thought they were better than everyone else but in fact had made a terrible error. They were worse than everyone else.

–

In the wet spring of 2017, as I walked around with a wrinkling dollar bill in my wallet and collected documents for my Permanent Residence application, there came the one year anniversary of a moment when more people in Britain voted to leave the European Union than voted to stay. They voted to shore up their borders, to change how they dealt with their neighbours and to be as mentally separate as their island is physically separate. They did this not because they thought it would make the world a better place, but because they thought it would make their world a better place.

Many, perhaps most of those voting for that, were very worried about foreign people coming illegally. They felt scared and helpless and that something had to be done. They wanted them to have the right documents and they wanted those checked thoroughly as those people arrived on their planes and trains. It was the logical conclusion to a decade that included vans driving around the country carrying billboards telling immigrants to go away, that included thousands of students being incorrectly deported, that included the use of more than a dozen Immigration Removal Centres, in which Britain began to hold women and children, and into which it wouldn’t allow UN inspectors. Britain has been working hard to close the gates, shore them up, raise the drawbridge and fill the moat with hydrochloric acid, to keep everything inside wholesome and good.

Their decision will also change how my passport works. I will no longer have the right documents and no longer be able to swan around the EU in the same way. I will remain exactly the same person, but those documents and rules will transform.

After the vote, after the drawbridge began to be raised (not immediately, but gradually), businesses and people started to leave Britain. Stemming the flow of people would stem the flow of money and those businesses liked it when money moved around.

There are definitely people in Britain who believe they are better than anyone else. As other people start to leave, maybe they will be the only people who are left, all patting one another on the back in congratulations about how much better they are. I imagine not only that few or none of these people know about all the pilots and all the sailors from all those countries who served and died so that Britain could stay free, but I also imagine that few or none of them want to know. They believe they are better than anyone else less because of what they do and more because of where they were born. They did good. Well done!

–

I am very tired of crossing borders these days. Tired and torn, like the dollar bill. Travel is not exciting and travel is not invigorating any more. Travel is me worrying about what I wear, if I shaved, if I seem professional or if I have the right documents, or perhaps even if those documents and the rules around them have transformed in some way I don’t understand or am not ready for. I don’t worry about my intention because I know I don’t mean to break any laws or lie to any border guard, but all I need is someone to say “I don’t believe you,” for some reason I will never fathom and never have the right to question and I will have A Day.

Some Canadian or American border guards will understand my work and my business and it will be fine. I already know that guards of both countries will continue to be confused sometimes and there will be more times when someone pulls me aside. It seems like this is what my life is now. A constant low-grade fear that travel, for business or pleasure, will go wrong. That there is some other flag, somewhere, that will determine what goes wrong next. That for even writing this I will end up on a list, a list that I am never allowed to see or even know about, and my life as a traveller will get even tougher.

Sometimes I think about my application for Permanent Residence. It has been nine months now. Because of the kind of person I am, a person not getting married, not working for a Canadian company and not hurling lots of money at investments, I’m not in a category that moves very fast. It might be processed soon. It might not be processed for a long time. Even though I qualify for the program, it might get denied. Something could go wrong. Laws change, governments shift and politicians fidget. Documents and rules transform, and what you thought you held for sure in your hand in one moment could be nothing but mist in the next. I’m sure you understand by now why I trust none of this.

–

Yesterday, the President of the United States said that some immigrants weren’t people, but were instead animals. He was responding to a question about criminals who might or might not be immigrants (and yet must be, because everything inside is wholesome and good), from a person who wanted to give Immigration and Customs Enforcement more power. He said that, that because of “weak laws,” these criminal animal immigrants kept getting back into the country. As a white man who finally got his university degree and who has all his documents and who has no criminal record and who even knows just a little bit about law and jus soli and jus sanguinis, but who still has trouble at the border, this was surprising.

With my qualifications and my business and all the money that I spend in the United States, plus my white face and British accent, I face scrutiny every time I try to get in. Even with my documents. Me and everyone like me must be fingerprinted and photographed and interviewed, over and over. I suppose there are people in the United States who have never been to their border or seen how it works, so they take someone else’s word for it, but I have never seen a “weak law” at the border or at the consulate.

Some of the things I did see at the border, on that day that I was stopped and turned around, included a man who worked for Microsoft being shouted at by a border guard because, after being asked to explain his job, he explained his job. They included two men who had forgotten to declare a $50 bottle of alcohol and were being detained. They included a lawyer who told me that everything in the room we were in right now was being recorded, as it was in every room at every border.

Things friends of mine have seen at the border have included a border guard who refused to believe that an American was from a state called Mississippi. Mississippi is a river, they said, not a place. They have included a border guard saying that the visa they have been holding does not exist, that it isn’t a real document. They have included a guard printing off a picture of their face and drawing a line through it, because they forgot to declare an orange that was in their bag.

The guards, I’m told, can lie, and sometimes they are trying to catch you out. Or perhaps some really do think Mississippi isn’t a state. It’s hard to tell. Just remember that you are guilty until proven innocent. And that five times the budget of the FBI is going toward shouting at staff from Microsoft and intimidating people who have oranges in their bags. This is how they close the gates, raise the drawbridge and fill the moat with hydrochloric acid, and yet somehow all the bad people, who are only ever outside, are apparently still getting in to ruin what is wholesome and good. They must need even more budget. Even more power. Even more hydrochloric acid.

I have also never seen animals at the border. I have only seen people. They have been all kinds of people, from all kinds of places, and that has made them wonderful, yet a circumstance of birth that they do not control has meant some have needed more documents than others. Not everyone can be Best Buddies.

–

Like most of those other kinds of people, I will not be able to step through those automated passport gates when I head back of my country of birth, a country I also never chose in the identity lottery that is nationality. I will instead be directed toward a border guard who will look at my passport, say nothing and then wave me on. The drawbridge will lower.

This has been happening to me for a long time. It has happened to me across decades and across passports so, toward the end of that wet spring of 2015, my dollar bill in my wallet, I asked one of those border guards why. He gave me a hugely quizzical look and tapped away at his computer. Then he said a line that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

“Somebody with the same name as you has done something very bad.”

How curious. I thought everyone inside was wholesome and good.

Sometimes I think about how, even in my home country, I have been flagged without having done anything wrong.

–

My favourite book is Slaughterhouse-Five and I have read it over and over for twelve years now. The opening chapter always makes me cry. The narrator talks about trying to write the book and journeys he took while doing so, as well as things he thinks about, sometimes.

On one journey, it’s always time to go and he has to keep moving. On another, he gets stuck and can’t move on, no matter how much he wants to.

I know you’re supposed to enjoy the journey as much as the destination but, believe me, all I want in life now is destinations. I’m a thirty-eight year old man who was the only person in his family to go to university, who had to work and pay his way through his degree, who taught himself his trade, who built a business with his friends, who is an abuse survivor, who wanted to make the world better with what he did and who fetched and provided the right documents he was asked to, every time. “Can I come in yet?” I want to shout, “How much more do you want from me?” and, “What do I need to do just to move unmolested through this world?”

Sometimes I prefer “How much shit do I have to eat for being who I am?” and “Do you want me to smile again so you can see it still smeared on my teeth?”

–

My plan for the dollar bill is to frame it. I hope that I will get to put it on a wall in Canada and that it will remind me of first coming to and then deciding to stay there.

It is a mess now. Old and ragged and ripped, trapped in gates, fallen from drawbridges and splashed with hydrochloric acid, it’s a reminder of the toll that all of this has taken.