It was almost spring this year when I met V., but he was still recovering from his first winter blizzard.
He’d arrived in Brockton, Massachusetts, from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the previous November, with permission to stay for two years—one of 126,000 Haitians who in 2023 received what the U.S. government calls “sponsored humanitarian parole.” In Haiti, the initiative is known as “Programme Biden,” or simply “Biden,” and though it provides only grudging, temporary reprieve to its beneficiaries, it remains an object of cherished hope and wild fantasy. For many of its citizens, Haiti has become a cul-de-sac of hell. The state is broken, armed groups control most of the capital, and violence is general and specific—a daily, mortal risk. When the United States offers escape, you might not look too hard at the fine print. Three months after the program’s launch in January 2023, more than half a million Haitians had applied.
V., thirty-four, had been a radio producer in Haiti; he’d made tentative forays into hosting. V. wasn’t sure what he’d do when his time in America ran out, but he knew what he wanted in the meantime: work. “I didn’t leave my home and come all the way here to play games,” he told me, reaching over to lower the volume on the phone his three-year-old was playing with. “But now it’s been almost five months already that I’m just sitting and doing nothing.” It was stressful, he said. He had a lot of people to support. His sponsor in Brockton was a friend, but how long could he and his family impose without contributing to rent and the bills for heat and electricity?
We were sitting at donated school desks in a windowless room at the Immigrant Family Services Institute in Mattapan, just south of Boston. IFSI is the nerve center of the state’s effort to welcome new arrivals from Haiti; it’s an orderly but crowded place, and every square foot seems occupied by cadres of social workers, legal assistants, language-learning coordinators, benefits specialists, clergy, therapists, and the migrants they are helping. Even the cubicle of the lead attorney can fit only a couple of extra chairs. Most everyone is of Haitian descent. The basement is a vast warehouse of secondhand clothing, linens, books, and toys, all meticulously inventoried and free for those in need. Staffers at IFSI had helped V. apply for a work permit in December, including securing a waiver of the $410 filing fee. In April, the fee rose to $520. For most recent Haitian migrants, these amounts sit somewhere between unduly onerous and impossible; by definition, after all, they cannot yet avail themselves of legal work.
The authorities took weeks to respond to V.’s application. Eventually he was given an appointment on February 13 to do the requisite “biometrics”—fingerprints, essentially, though he had already been fingerprinted on arrival to the United States. The appointment was scheduled about fifty miles away in Rhode Island, and while transportation would be a hassle, V. considered the scheduling a good sign. But on the eve of his appointment, a blizzard threatened. Nervous about missing it, V. hired a driver to take him there for $150 roundtrip. He felt he had little choice, having been repeatedly told that “immigration affairs can be a little sensitive.” In the event, the storm was milder than anticipated. The roads were clear, and V. made it to the biometrics office with time to spare.
And then he discovered the office was closed in anticipation of the storm.
What he couldn’t figure out, as he spoke about it four weeks later, was why no one had told him. “They could have sent a short text, ‘We’re going to be closed tomorrow, you don’t need to come,’” V. said. “I waited for them to send me some message, but they never wrote to me at all.” He called the numbers he’d been given to reschedule but couldn’t understand the people on the other end of the line. He tried again and again. Now, he hoped, someone at IFSI could help navigate the bureaucratic crevasse into which his American dreams had fallen.
Kafka Meets Fanon
V.’s troubles were minor compared to those of other Haitian migrants I’ve met over the past year who have struggled much longer to get work permits—as well as with housing, finding health care for themselves or their children, and recovering from the traumas, physical and psychological, they experienced at home and on their journeys northward. Yet his travails crystalized one of the ironies experienced by recent arrivals to America: on matters of immigration, the United States has come to resemble the misgoverned countries they have fled. From the perspective of its suppliants, the system is a mash-up of bureaucratic absurdity and colonial-era othering, as if Kafka and Fanon had conjured it from a mutual nightmare.
How long could he and his family impose without contributing to rent and the bills for heat and electricity?
We are told there is a crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. What is happening at the border is in fact the convergence of other crises whose epicenters are thousands of miles away: instability and violence throughout the hemisphere, often abetted by disastrous U.S. policy; and in Washington, D.C., the chronic failure of lawmakers to find agreement on who should be allowed into the country, and on what terms.
Congress has not enacted significant immigration reform for nearly four decades, a period during which the pace of global change and flows of people, goods, capital, and information have accelerated. Consider: hardly anyone had a cell phone in the 1980s, and the founding of WhatsApp, now a major conduit of information and advertising among migrants, was more than two decades away. Our systems are fit to an obsolete purpose. In the 1980s and 1990s, as Kathleen Bush-Joseph of the Migration Policy Institute has noted, the border regime focused on single Mexican adults, while people fleeing persecution in their home countries would declare asylum at airports, not at land ports. Today, immigration patterns are much different. In 2023, nearly 2.5 million people, many with their families, arrived at the southern border without prior authorization. A portion of those let in petitioned for asylum, adding their claims to an astounding two million applications in the backlog. Even if they get a lawyer and someone eventually hears them out, the odds of getting asylum are less than 50 percent.
Stepping into the breach of congressional inaction, the Biden administration has relied on executive authority to extend liminal protections, such as humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status (TPS), to migrants from Ukraine, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Haiti, and a host of other nations. A Migration Policy Institute analysis of data available in June indicated that nearly three million people in the United States have some form of “twilight status” that temporarily shields them from deportation but whose continuance depends on the good graces of whoever is in the White House. Among them are the approximately two hundred thousand Haitians who entered on the Biden program or at the border last year, receiving two years of “parole.” Their ranks also include people who’ve built up what policy experts call significant “equities” and whose deportation, after ten or fifteen years of residing in the United States, is seen to be unfair and unreasonable. In the past, Congress might “adjust” their status to something permanent, but no longer. (See chronic legislative failure, above.)
Republicans, smelling blood, have stoked fear and made hay. Donald Trump is clear about his intent to deport millions of people; indeed, it is a rallying cry of his reelection campaign. Many Americans are, apparently, here for it. In January 2017, protesters mobilized en masse against Trump’s “Muslim Ban.” Today, 51 percent of Americans support “large scale deportations” of the undocumented. Trump has threatened—or promised, depending on where you stand—to mobilize the National Guard, use open-air detention camps, and even pull in the military to defend our nation of immigrants from what he relentlessly portrays as an invasion.
In his first term, Trump tried to end TPS (though the effort was mired in litigation) and used the Covid-19 pandemic as a pretext to block asylum claims, in contravention of U.S. and humanitarian law. Even were he not inclined to try to revoke or cut off authorization, a second Trump presidency would coincide with the expiration of parole and TPS for millions of people.
Here lies a catastrophe in wait—American carnage, to repurpose the inimitable turn of phrase, for V. and millions of others. They have jumped through every legal hoop set before them, paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege of working legally, braved snowstorms to give the government another set of fingerprints, availed themselves of exploitative notaries to fill out the forms they’ve been told are required, including their onerous fees. In a regime of deportation, the government, one worries, would know where to find them.
Get in Line
“I think that, in general, fear is the enemy of good information,” says Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. Lind has worked on immigration issues since 2009, including through the first Trump presidency, and considers doomsaying not merely a waste but sometimes harmful. Yes, Trump probably will try, if given a second term, to end TPS, cancel humanitarian parole, shut down the border to asylum seekers, and round up unauthorized immigrants. But Lind says it’s not clear whether he would be able to do any of it. The courts may block his attempts, for one thing, and for another, it’s far from clear a Trump administration would have the wherewithal—the financing and the force—to carry out deportations on such a vast scale. Nor is it clear what effects it would have on the labor force and the economy.
Here lies a catastrophe in wait—American carnage, to repurpose the inimitable turn of phrase, for V. and millions of others.
A relationship between fear and misinformation would go some way toward explaining why many Americans feel threatened by the alleged immigrant invasion. Consider these deceptions from one recent week in May: Senator Marco Rubio, on Meet the Press, claimed that “ten million, eleven million, that was fifteen years ago, today it’s upwards of twenty-five to thirty million, maybe more” undocumented immigrants are living in the United States. (Although the number has grown, the Migration Policy Institute estimates that 11.2 million unauthorized immigrants resided on U.S. soil in 2021.) Or consider how, referring to the introduction in the U.S. House of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would crack down on the almost nonexistent problem of noncitizens voting in federal elections, Speaker Mike Johnson asserted, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable.” He added, “We don’t have that number.” (Johnson may not have had a number he liked, but that’s because, as the Cato Institute put it after the 2020 election, “non-citizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.”)
And then there is the argument, often heard most fervently from people with obvious immigrant heritage, that migrants should get in line and wait their turn, like they or their law-abiding forebears did. Only in 1882 did the federal government attempt to regulate who could enter the country. And apart from the ridiculous image of our slaveholding and at times genocidal founders patiently queuing up for anything, there is a more salient problem: there is no reasonable line to get into. As the policy experts say, there are not nearly enough pathways to citizenship.
Understanding why requires (forgive me) a short primer on the immigration system. There are four main paths to lawful permanent residence, a.k.a. a green card, which in turn is usually a prerequisite to naturalization: (1) An immediate family member could sponsor you (family reunification); (2) an employer could sponsor you (employment-based green cards); (3) you could get very lucky (diversity lottery); (4) you could qualify for humanitarian protection (asylum or refugee status).
These categories have strict limitations. Contrary to the circa 2018 fake news boogeyman of “chain migration,” family reunification is quite limited. Green-card holders can petition only to sponsor their spouse or their unmarried children. Their petitions go to a wait list and subject to all sorts of ceilings and quotas. Citizens over twenty-one avoid the wait list and quotas and can sponsor married children, parents, and siblings: no one more distantly related. As for employment-based green cards, there are almost two million applications in the backlog. Because of a quota system, applicants from certain countries face decades-long waits. As for the diversity lottery, only 55,000 people a year will win it. The United States admitted about 60,000 refugees last fiscal year and aims to admit 125,000 this year.
The only flexible buckets fall under the category of humanitarian protection. The Immigration and Nationality Act has two relevant provisions: it allows any alien present or arriving in the United States to apply for asylum, and it enables the executive to grant temporary parole to noncitizens for “urgent humanitarian reasons” or “significant public benefit.” There are no numerical ceilings on either provision, and neither requires Congress’s approval.
Thus, in the absence of legislative action that could build sturdier pathways to residency, the Biden administration in its first three years issued more than five hundred executive orders around immigration. Many overturned Trump-era executive orders, or expanded grants of parole or TPS. But executive orders are always vulnerable: one president giveth, and the next taketh away. In some cases, it’s the same guy. On June 4, Biden announced severe new restrictions on asylum seekers who cross between ports of entry. It’s not clear whether the rules will have the practical effect of “sealing the border,” as dispiritingly advertised. They also contradict that pesky part of the INA that allows aliens to apply for asylum. The ACLU immediately sued.
Few Americans understand that asylum seekers and parolees are authorized to be in the United States—that they are not illegal and are protected from deportation. It is at least partly the fault of the terminology. The language used by the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection, and usually reported without context in the media, tends to obfuscate. Last year, as I began my research, I stared at tables of data on the CBP website, trying to answer what I thought was a simple question: How many Haitians had legally entered the United States over the past year? Many emails later, a response came back from a spokesperson; the upshot was that migrants paroled into the country are considered “inadmissible” under the relevant statute even as they find jobs, send kids to school, and pay taxes. “Being granted humanitarian parole is legally distinct from being admitted into the country.”
A rookie mistake, perhaps, but also, I suspect, a symptom of confused politics. Consider “parole.” It sounds related to punishment and to many comes to feel like it, but it is a reprieve against deportation, an auspice that sounds like its opposite.
I began my reporting confident I knew the difference between a “legal” and “illegal” immigrant—though I, like many others, had preferred words without the moralistic overtone, like “undocumented” and “documented.” Today, I have become skeptical of the dichotomy itself.
Home is Home
Recently I spoke to R., who fled Haiti in 2001. He had been a police officer there, working on drug-trafficking cases with the DEA and Interpol. In one investigation, he uncovered evidence that associates of a high-level politician were involved in the trade. After R.’s life was threatened, the U.S. embassy helped to exfiltrate him to Florida, where he filed an asylum claim.
R. is forty-nine now, an older generation of Haitian immigrant. He learned English by listening to NPR, had two daughters, got his real estate license, paid his taxes. In response to the earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince in 2010, the U.S. government made Haitians eligible for TPS. R. applied and has been in immigration purgatory ever since, his permission to stay meted out in twelve- and eighteen-month increments. His asylum case, like Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, has outlived his lawyer and will soon be moot: his daughter will turn twenty-one next year, and as a natural-born citizen, she can sponsor him for a green card.
But there’s a catch: over the past decade, he’s become disillusioned with the United States. It wasn’t just what Trump did in office, he said, but how popular his ideas were. “What bothered me wasn’t just when Trump became president, but that he got so many votes. I mean—I feel this country has turned its back on immigrants.”
There is much to despise in the status quo: Republican lies, the discourse of invasions and “poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump’s visions of cruelty, and some Americans’ seeming certainty that migrants deserve harsh treatment. There is, as well, the long-running expenditure of time and taxpayer dollars on state-sponsored disinformation, like the red herring that unauthorized immigrants are voting in federal elections.
Although language alone can’t solve much, it is a prerequisite to effective resistance. We should be wary of dichotomies: “refugee” versus “migrant,” “political” versus “economic,” “legal” versus “illegal.” These elide the mortal danger that many migrants have for now escaped, and gloss over the role U.S. policies have played—through arms shipments, support of repressive leaders, economic big-footing—in ruining their countries.
Something less effable, and more moving, has gotten lost in the talk. Lakay se lakay, in the Kreyol phrase: “Home is home.” I think of T., a doctor who sped through flaming barricades to deliver babies but who cannot practice abroad because Haiti’s medical schools lost their accreditation last year. C. fled Haiti after gangs shot her mother in the leg and ransacked the family store. The shelters in Boston were full when C. arrived, and her teenage daughter, who has anemia, is never warm enough, but C. is wrecked by survivor’s guilt: she can’t stop ruminating on how her mother pressed her life savings into her hands and ordered her to leave. There are fathers missing their kids’ first steps and fifth birthdays, grown children who will never see their parents again, and nights of nostalgia and loneliness.
My friend D. was in the United States for work in early March when violence shut down Haiti’s international airport. A week later, gangs looted the house she’d bought for herself and her family and lit her neighbor’s house aflame. From abroad, D. made frantic phone calls, trying to find new housing in Haiti for her elderly parents and sisters. Security guards have long fled D.’s neighborhood and the police gave up in March, but, D. notes, her mortgage payments are still due. Though a friend of a friend has offered her a place to live, rent-free, in south Florida, it’s been no vacation. She recently discovered that her own home had been set afire; family members did not want to tell her and add to her worries.
In May, after a ten-week shutdown, the airport in Port-au-Prince finally reopened to commercial flights. D. knows she should go back, but she doesn’t want to. Lakay se lakay, home is home, except that it isn’t anymore.