Temporary. Alien. (Not) Alone.
By: Shruti Devgan
Tags: Trauma, International Student, Stigma, Immigration, Sociology

Passport and Visa Stamps (Personal Collection)

When the officials at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi rejected my application for a tourist visa for the first time, it was the start of a new millennium, 2000 and I was a 20-year old undergraduate student. My sister had gotten married earlier that year and moved to the U.S. My parents and I had our trip all planned out. Naïve in our optimism, we had bought the airplane tickets even before getting our visas. We should have known better, the adage “passport to freedom” didn’t apply to us. After all, borders and boundaries, walls and citadels are built precisely to exclude people like “us.” While relative to refugees and others migrating to escape desperate situations, we are certainly privileged, yet, we do not have the transnational mobility afforded to holders of Euro-American passports. At every step of the way, we must “prove we are worthy and deserving of this privilege…in collating all the documentation required for the visa; engaging with immigration at the port of arrival,” fending questions, offering compelling justification and narrative for something as seemingly simple as a “family visit” to the extent that it seems like we need to defend our very existence.

The memories are hazy now. We had set out early that morning for our visa interview, stood in line waiting for our turn. If I remember correctly, the embassy didn’t schedule appointments at the time, it was purely on a first come first serve basis. I remember vaguely being pretty upbeat as we waited in a long line in front of the embassy building for several hours. I don’t remember how many hours now. What happened after that is most certainly a blur. Our turn finally came, the American officer at the window took a quick few minutes to peruse our documents, asked us some basic questions, and then that’s when it started unfolding — my parents were granted the visa while my application was rejected. Again, in what is hard to recall now, I had protested. Somehow, I had found the courage to overcome my lack of confidence. What was happening seemed completely unjust and unfair and I said what I could —I think I had asked the officer why they rejected my application. I had tried to assure him of my intentions. After all, I only wanted to visit my sister and her family. This didn’t get me anywhere of course. If anything the officer directed a few barbed comments at me. No one gave me a straightforward reason for rejection, but the popular perception was that several aspects of my identity, among others being a young, unmarried, middle-class female student, placed me in the “risk category,” of “those people” from the global South who use the pretext of visiting the U.S., only to overstay their visas in search of a “better life.”

As I write about this now, trying to recall details, the advantage of hindsight makes it seem that the sadness that overcame me that day was portending the years of sadness, fear and anxiety that lay ahead. I applied for a tourist visa twice more in the years between 2000 and 2005, rejected both times of course. After finishing M.Phil. at my university in India, done in anticipation of getting a Ph.D. from the same school, some other personal developments led me to make the hasty decision to apply to graduate schools in and around New Jersey, where my sister lived. Given that I was “marked” as a failed visa applicant, I had been forewarned about my adverse chances of getting an F-1 visa when I got through a graduate program in the U.S. Somehow I defied the prophecy then, but the precariousness and uncertainty are far from over.

This is my fifteenth year living in the U.S., but I’m still here on a temporary status. So when we got another piece of horrible news yesterday, at a time unprecedented in most of our lives, the anxiety that lives just below the surface, emerged yet again. I was on an F-1 visa until I got my Ph.D. The Ph.D. can take considerable time to finish and you have to apply for a renewal every few years, not knowing if your application will get accepted. You have to navigate the bureaucracy of registering with the university and getting approval, every time you intend to leave and come back. In other words, the fear, dejection, humiliation I felt that first day in 2000 never left my side, and now uncertainty was part of the equation too, because I was making the “mistake” of creating a semblance of “home” here in the U.S. Neither is the F-1 the only category of visa you have to fight for, there are other bureaucratic hurdles and confusing acronyms to get familiar with: the OPT that might just as easily be denied as the F-1, the H1-B visa, as fickle and unpredictable as the other categories (though less so for those of us working in universities).

Yesterday, July 6, 2020, immigration authorities announced that international students on categories F-1 and M-1 visas studying at American universities

operating entirely online may not take a full online course load and remain in the United States. The U.S. Department of State will not issue visas to students enrolled in schools and/or programs that are fully online for the fall semester nor will the U.S. Customs and Border Protection permit these students to enter the United States. Active students currently in the United States enrolled in such programs must depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction to remain in lawful status. If not, they may face immigration consequences including, but not limited to, the initiation of removal proceedings.

If this had been 2014, my last full year in graduate school, I would have been in this place. As a former international student and current temporary visa-holder with a long personal-political story of getting visa applications rejected, I feel extremely anxious for all students who are dealing with this stressful situation on top of everything else.

When I had first applied for a U.S. visa, even though I was on the way to earn a degree in sociology, I did not realize that what I was dealing with was a deep structural issue. Of course, I grew up in a postcolonial context and I had learned to be properly subservient and intimidated of all things Western, but I still didn’t recognize how this rejection was about race, neo-imperialism and class. I had no idea that this was yet another manifestation of the long history of Asian exclusion in the U.S., the legacy of immigration exclusion laws against Asian immigrants to prohibit their entry into the U.S. I did not know then of the process of racialization, of extending racial meaning to a previously unclassified group and “imparting social and symbolic meaning” to visible differences, that created “Asian Americans” as the non-White “Other” in relation to the larger category of “White American citizens” in the late 1960s and early 1970s . Had I known Bhagat Singh Thind’s story of being acknowledged as Caucasian and yet his American citizenship being revoked because he did not fit the “popular meaning” of “White,” the rejection would have still hurt, but maybe made a little more sense. As much sense as categorical inequalities and structural injustice can make. If I knew then about Japanese Americans’ incarceration in internment camps when “[e]ven possession of U.S. citizenship did not protect rights and liberties granted by the Constitution,” would I have felt less wronged? Perhaps at some unconscious level I started learning that I embodied “contamination,” carried the “tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion” but lacked the framework to articulate this. I certainly did not know then that I had suffered trauma, I did not assimilate or experience the rejections “fully at the time, but only belatedly, in [their] repeated possession.” Using a feminist lens allows us to see that “social context, and the individual’s personal history within that social context, can lend traumatic meaning to events that might be only sad or troubling in another time and place.” Traumatic experiences are not finite and finished, they are chronic and persistent, defying linear time. They lodge themselves in the body. Revisiting trauma, such as what I’m doing now, is fraught, “the very act of rendering [traumatic experiences] into narrative form lends them a coherence which they do not have.” And yet, “even if language is insufficient for the task, it is, if not all we have, then at least one of the most effective tools we have for communicating that which must not be forgotten.”

As a transnational subject, I live in a number of contexts, temporalities and places simultaneously. As a Hindu, the dominant group in India, when I hear current news about Muslims and other minorities being persecuted in state-sponsored violence, I feel infuriated and I can articulate that anger openly and freely. Not that I do anything especially productive or extraordinary, I only ever post on social media. I don’t see my posts as particularly radical or outrageous either, but these days even offering a few words of support for groups manufactured as the “Other” is quickly distorted and given the label, “anti-national behavior.” I’m sure the fact that I’m not in India acts as some kind of protection. From a place of privilege and safety, I find it possible to both feel anger and express parts of it. On the other hand, when I hear about immigration restrictions (the latest one targeting international students; and what was announced a few days ago, the “freeze on green cards for new immigrants and suspen[sion of] new H-1B, L-1, J and other temporary work visas for skilled workers, managers and au pairs through the end of the year”) I feel anxious, agitated, afraid and sad. Of course angry too, but the fear is so overwhelming, maybe it’s the trauma that I still struggle with, that doesn’t allow me to perform anger the same way. Trauma, after all does not leave your body. But there is a price to pay for speaking out, especially from my vulnerable position as a temporary visa-holder. I don’t express anger also because of the fear of persecution, the continuation of a temporary, alien life.

So, what’s the point of this post? That sociological imagination — the ability to see the connection between my own fate and the fate of international students, but also that of all immigrants, with or without documents dealing with constant dread and humiliation — gives me some insight into understanding my own story and the stories of countless others. That I empathize and stand in solidarity with international students and everyone else navigating this onerous systemic issue. That I know that there are individuals and groups with privilege who are doing the work of resistance.

That in the words of Audre Lorde “it is better to speak remembering that we were never meant to survive.”