Punishing the People We Claim to Protect

I STARTED NOTICING the candy sellers a little over a year ago: women, often with babies strapped to their backs or toddlers in tow, selling chocolate bars and packs of gum for two dollars apiece. The candy sellers are now ubiquitous on the New York City subways, one of the most visible manifestations of a new wave of migrants from Central and South America. They spend their days underground, moving from train car to train car offering their wares to indifferent commuters who mostly pretend they don’t exist. For these migrants, who are barred from applying for work permits until their asylum applications have been pending for at least six months, selling candy on the train is their only recourse.

“When you try to sell, people act as if we’re not talking to them,” a 21-year-old Ecuadorean migrant told the local New York news outlet Documented. On good days, she might make $30; on bad days, she’d wind up with no more than $5. “But you have to keep fighting to be able to make some money,” she said, gently crying. “Because without work, without anything, sometimes we can’t eat. But that’s why sometimes my tears come out like this.”

I buy candy from the sellers when I have cash on me, an admittedly rare-enough occurrence that, a few months ago, I started making a point of carrying singles in my bag for this specific purpose. On my recent commutes, my interactions with the candy sellers have punctuated my reading of two new books about the experiences of single mothers who migrated to the United States—Accidental Sisters: Refugee Women Struggling Together for a New American Dream by Kimberly Meyer (with Alia Altikrity) and Forced Out: Migrant Mothers in Search of Refuge and Hope by Susan J. Terrio. Neither book is about women in the subway sellers’ particular situation—asylum seekers who, locked out of the labor market by a byzantine set of regulations, must nonetheless find a way to survive. Yet both help explain how systems that were ostensibly designed to protect vulnerable people have instead created new obstacles to their survival.

“When we talk about immigration policy, it’s important to think about the people behind the policy, because policy choices have real consequences,” Representative Ilhan Omar writes in the foreword to Accidental Sisters. Meyer and Terrio each look at the beneficiaries and victims of these consequences. Meyer delves into the lives of six refugee women who have resettled in Houston (a city that has settled more refugees over the past decade than anywhere else in the country), while Terrio focuses on 10 undocumented Central American women living in Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the fastest-growing immigrant destinations in the United States. Though the specifics of each story differ, the broad strokes are largely the same: women leave their home countries under violent circumstances and end up in the United States. The books’ subjects are all mothers; they all struggle to learn the language in this unfamiliar country, to find work that allows them to support their families. Even in the relative safety of the US, they find themselves fighting to survive.

Despite these similarities, however, the women in Accidental Sisters and Forced Out can be divided into two groups: on one hand, resettled refugees who are US citizens in waiting, and on the other, a permanently undocumented underclass. There is a vast chasm between the two—one occupied by people like the candy sellers, whose status is, as of yet, undetermined. Depending on the outcome of their cases, asylum seekers could end up among the lucky ones, either granted status in the US or else deported.

Read together, Meyer’s and Terrio’s books emphasize the arbitrary nature of the United States’ legal immigration system. Both focus on displaced women, some of whom are welcomed here (albeit reluctantly) while others face the possibility of removal from the country at any moment. This difference lies in the distinctions between the refugee and asylum systems. The women in Accidental Sisters—two are Iraqi, two are Syrian, one is Sudanese, and one is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—fled their homes for other countries, where they registered as refugees. (Four of the six briefly lived in Jordan.) These women were undocumented for a time—effectively stateless. After registering as refugees, they were provided with some assistance from the United Nations, though the benefits they received were meager at best. Like others in similar situations, the women had no say in where they’d end up; they could be resettled in the United States, Canada, somewhere in Europe, or, as is the case for most, nowhere at all. Less than one percent of all refugees worldwide are resettled, according to data from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Despite the horrors they’ve endured and the losses they’ve faced, the women about whom Meyer writes are lucky. They faced starvation, kidnapping, torture, rape, and the murder of their relatives, but in the end they were offered a fresh start in a new country, a chance to find not only safety but also prosperity.

Prosperity is hard to come by. Meyer explains how, after arriving in the United States, refugees are provided with financial assistance but are ultimately expected to become self-sufficient as quickly as possible. “What they find when they get to America,” Meyer writes,

are low-wage jobs (without health or dental insurance), which prevent these newcomers from taking advantage of some of the benefits of the national refugee resettlement program that are their due: learning English, taking driving classes, completing recertification programs for training and degrees they already have, much less gaining new technical skills that could help them find better work.

She goes on to explain how Congress created the refugee resettlement program in 1980 with the goal of preventing refugees from becoming dependent on public assistance.

While the program was still in its infancy, the Office of Refugee Resettlement reduced the length of time refugees could count on cash and medical assistance. Today, the federal government expects newly arrived refugees to navigate the needlessly labyrinthine public assistance bureaucracy while taking on whatever jobs are available to them; it expects them, in other words, to become American, to assimilate into the under-resourced working class. Meyer relates how a local resettlement agency set up Elikya, a 52-year-old Congolese refugee who was the sole breadwinner for her family of 10 (six children and three grandchildren, plus herself), with a dishwashing job at the Hilton. The job was far from Elikya’s house, and she worked such irregular hours that she would sometimes leave her shift after the last bus had left for the night, forcing her to sleep on the street. Elikya eventually walked off the job and never came back, though she feared she’d be imprisoned for quitting. “Before I get put in jail, just send me back to Africa, because I can’t manage this situation,” she tells Meyer.

Relatively speaking, the women in Accidental Sisters are lucky. Terrio, meanwhile, writes about women who will likely never have legal status in the United States, even if they’ve lived here for most of their lives. Luna, who fled Honduras in 2005 to escape her abusive husband, didn’t think to apply for protection in the United States; even if she had, it’s likely she would have been denied. But, Terrio writes,

had Luna arrived in the United States in 2014 and applied for asylum within one year as required by law, her attorney could have successfully argued in immigration court that she had a well-founded fear of persecution based on her membership in a particular social group: women in violent relationships whose government cannot or will not protect them.

Of course, Terrio’s statement assumes that Luna could have afforded a lawyer or found pro bono representation. Luna’s two oldest children—who came to the United States in 2014 and 2015, respectively—were able to get Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, a designation for children who arrive in the US unaccompanied and meet certain legal criteria. Her youngest son, however, was denied; like Luna, he remains undocumented.

The family’s mixed immigration status—some on a pathway to citizenship, others subject to deportation at any moment—is not unusual, nor is this the only fracture that results from the impossibility of legal migration. Unable to get a visa or green card, Luna was brought to the United States by a smuggler. She left her children behind in Honduras to be raised by relatives until she could afford to bring them over; nine years passed before she was reunited with her daughter, and another before she saw her two sons. Unable to return home for her daughter’s quinceañera, Luna offered to pay for the party. “I wanted her to feel special and to have a party with music, dancing, and our favorite foods,” Luna says. “I told her that I would send the money but she refused to hear it. She said, ‘No, the whole reason for this party is for you to be here. I don’t want the party if you are not here.’”

Often, reunification is not enough to fix these ruptures. Vania, who came to the United States from El Salvador in 2004 to provide for her four daughters, ended up having a fifth in Virginia—yet, because finding childcare on her meager wages was next to impossible, she ended up sending the youngest girl, Gisell, back to El Salvador to be raised by her grandparents. By the time 11-year-old Gisell returned to the US in 2018, any emotional connection with her mother had been completely severed. “I don’t know who this woman is,” Gisell says. “She sent me back when I was so little that I hardly remember anything about this country. I don’t have a father. I have no family here. My family is in El Salvador.” This phenomenon is so prevalent in Fairfax County that local officials have started offering family reunification programs at public schools in the area, through which migrant parents and their children can begin healing the wounds caused by years apart. These programs—which also help connect families with social services—represent one of the few resources available to undocumented people in the area, who are otherwise left to fend for themselves.

Refugees, too, are separated from their families to a degree: those who are selected for resettlement can bring their spouses and unmarried children (or grandchildren) who are 21 years of age or younger. Everyone else is left behind. But unlike undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, refugees are provided with some degree of support upon arriving to the country—even if the precarious conditions of poverty prevent them from using these resources. Meyer met each of the women in Accidental Sisters through Amaanah Refugee Services, a local community group that provides additional support for newly arrived refugees. The women were members of Amanaah’s Transformed Program, which was designed for single mothers who were struggling on the path to self-sufficiency required by the government. The program, run by an Iraqi refugee who struggled with resettlement herself, provides the women with mutual support—it creates, as the title of Meyer’s book suggests, a sisterhood. Just as important as the resources the program provides, however, is the sense it instills in newly arrived refugees that someone cares about them, that entire communities are dedicated to their successful integration into American society.

The two books differ widely in structure and prose style. Meyer’s is intimate; Terrio’s reads almost clinically, like a detached anthropological account. Of course, Forced Out was clearly written for an academic audience while Accidental Sisters—though published by an academic press—reads like the product of a trade publisher and, despite occasionally cloying moments, would likely make for a relatively popular book-club read. Still, both make similar arguments and arrive at similar conclusions—namely, that the meager resources offered to undocumented immigrants and refugees are an impediment to their successful assimilation into US society. In each book, too, the subjects repeatedly (and often surprisingly) express their desire to go back home. While refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants alike often risk their lives to come here, migration can rupture families, often irreparably. Crucially, these ruptures don’t begin with the act of migration itself; they’re the outcome of the hardness of borders and the arbitrary nature of the American immigration system. (Even in Terrio’s detached, anthropological tone, these tragic outcomes are made patently clear.)

Despite these harsh realities, Accidental Sisters ends with a joyful moment. In 2020, Meyer and some of her book’s subjects created a community garden outside Gulfton, in Southwest Houston. There, they grow American staple crops alongside foods the refugees once ate in their homes. Forced Out lacks this happy conclusion. “Many years later, the dream of attaining legal status remains out of reach for all but one” of her subjects, Terrio writes. The only woman who is on track to status qualified for a U visa, a special category for victims of crime who help police with the subsequent investigation, because her husband sexually abused her daughter. The message is as clear as it is sobering: for undocumented immigrants and refugees alike, permanent status in the US can come only through suffering—and through articulating that suffering in the precise language the immigration system requires. Even then, nothing is guaranteed.

Exclusivity is ultimately what divides refugees and asylum seekers, what creates such divergent outcomes between people who, broadly speaking, have a shared experience of displacement. The president decides how many refugees can be resettled in the United States in any given year. Some years the cap is as high as 150,000; under Donald Trump, it hit an all-time low of 15,000 during the 2021 fiscal year. The number of asylum seekers we can absorb is, at least in theory, unlimited: anyone who arrives at the border and says they’re afraid of returning to their home country is entitled to an asylum hearing. Yet rather than welcoming asylum seekers—people whom, under international and domestic law, the US can’t return to their countries without a fair day in court—we have created hurdle after hurdle for them. Congress has fortified the border, littering the desert with fences and surveillance drones that have pushed migrants onto more remote and dangerous routes. Under President Joe Biden, asylum seekers must request appointments via an app before arriving at official border crossings, often waiting months for interview slots to materialize. Upon arrival in the United States, not only are they unable to work until their applications have been processing for nearly six months, but they’re also barred from accessing most social services. The result is an impossibly cruel system that punishes the people it claims to protect, an underground network of candy sellers desperate to make a few dollars on the train.

Featured image: Winslow Homer. On the Sands, 1881. Bequest of Julia B. Engel. National Gallery of Art (1984.58.1). CC0, nga.gov. Accessed July 10, 2024.