The long journey home – what my newborn son's passport made me realise
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Illustration: Simon Letch.
My son’s first passport came this week. It has a blue cover, but there is no kangaroo holding up a coat of arms. Instead there’s a defiant-looking eagle, and the familiar cadence of “We the people …” on the first page. It is a US passport, and holding it in my hands, I feel many emotions.
Despite living in the US for more than 15 years, I don’t have a US passport. This was my choice to make; my employer sponsored me for a green card, but the paperwork seemed never-ending. Among other hurdles, an advertisement was placed in The New York Times and on local radio seeking applicants for my job in order to show there was no American who could take my place. I had to prove I didn’t have syphilis, and was X-rayed to check I didn’t have tuberculosis. On two occasions, agents from the Department of Homeland Security came to my office in a Times Square skyscraper to establish I was, in fact, real. (On each occasion I was out getting coffee, and my boss was left to reassure them that both I, and the magazine we worked for, existed.)
The process of gaining official status as a resident wore on and on: long, circular conversations with my lawyer in his pokey little office above Grand Central Station; forms demanding my every biographical detail; and, most difficult of all, arriving back in New York, the city which was undeniably my home, only to endure fraught conversations at Customs with border agents before I was reluctantly allowed back into the country. And so, in the end, I gave up. Until, that is, I held my son’s US passport and realised I needed one, too.
Americans, I’ve found, have little to no idea what immigrants to their country go through. But then again, neither do most Australians. Every time I talk to someone who has come here from another place, I am struck by how arduous their journey has been, and how determined they must have been to call Australia home. Even countries which embrace the rhetoric of diversity and multiculturalism – or at least did until recently – make it extremely difficult to join their club. And that’s even if, like me, you are a privileged person who
can afford a lawyer, and plane tickets, and have a perfectly nice other country to which you can retreat if it all gets too much.
Of course national borders have their place. I am not suggesting we do away with them. But what we are seeing in Australia, the US, the UK and elsewhere goes much further than reaffirming the right to sovereignty. It’s the rise of rhetoric which devalues the contributions of all people who happen to come from somewhere else. When you think about it, denouncing immigration makes no sense: you want to keep out the very people who desperately want to be here? The people who by definition bring a different perspective and an unshakeable desire to contribute?
One reaction to this dismaying state of affairs is to turn away. But feeling angry about it makes me want to engage more, not less. This time around, I’m going to get that passport, eagle and all. If all goes to plan, I will vote in the 2020 presidential election. And once we’ve filled in the paperwork and my son gets his Australian passport, I will try to remember how lucky he is to have it.
To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age.
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