What Do I Gain From Citizenship—and What Do I Lose?

There are rules to who gets to live the American dream, and who doesn’t.

We were late leaving the hotel. Lars, a friend and colleague, watched me cram my handbag with the last of the detritus I somehow collect when I travel: hand lotion, a pack of melted gum, stubs of boarding passes, key cards, earrings on the nightstand, a phone charging cord, a stack of receipts that I’ll never submit for reimbursement. Lars stored all his receipts in a small plastic sleeve; he was already packed, waiting. I grabbed the last of my belongings, and he laughed.

“Oh my god, Bix,” he said, “what is that?” He pointed.

I became aware of the object I’d been clutching, so familiar to me it was an extension of my arm. It’s maroon, leather, a rectangle with a small clasp that when you release, opens the case like a book. “This?” I asked, puzzled. “Why?”

Lars explained: It was worn out, the edges a dirty taupe where the leather had eroded, the clasp hanging off to one side like a limp limb, the case itself fat with age and numerous documents. It was out of place with the polished look I hoped my matching lemon-yellow-and-grey suitcase and handbag gave me, a sign of some kind of class legitimacy I aspire for while traveling. I shoved the case into my bag, shrugged. “It’s just . . . my passport holder.”

I had more important things to worry about. Lars and I were leaving Bangalore; him to travel more than a day back to Chile via Germany, and me to take the hour-long flight to Hyderabad, India, where I grew up, and my parents—no, my mother—lived. It was 2013, and I was returning to the city for the first time since my father’s death three years before.

*

I fished out my green card from the same maroon case and handed it to the white immigration officer at a Customs and Border Protection counter at John F. Kennedy International Airport. I was returning from another trip to see my mother in India and I was anxious. It was July 2018, a month shy of my twentieth year living in the United States; a few days earlier, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had announced that even permanent residents could be refused entry to the US, and/or deported.

But the grey-haired and jolly officer just said, “Ms. Gabriel, next time you come in, you’ll be a citizen, yeah?”

Before I could reply, he grinned knowingly, and waved me on. For most everyone I know—in the US and in India—there’s only one answer to the question. But for many of us immigrants, the answer is more complicated than a straightforward yes.

*

In 1999, I took my first flight from Hyderabad to New York City. All I recall of that twenty-odd hour journey are flashes: the blue upholstery of the airplane seat; the rough headrest on which I lay my forehead and wept the entire way; claustrophobia in the airport crowded with relatives before my flight; my father’s trembling arm around me as I clung to him until I had to check in. I was twenty-two and couldn’t wait to leave home. But at the airport it dawned on me: I was leaving my family, leaving my father. The last time he and I were separated for any extended duration, I was six, and raged with fever for days.

Earlier that day, my mother had tucked my ticket, passport, and two thousand dollars into a passport case. It was shiny and had the earthy, funky scent of real leather.

“Be careful,” she warned, “pickpockets are everywhere.” I laughed. “Well, this won’t keep them away, Ma, it’s practically an invitation!” Stamped in small gold letters on the front of the case was: passport.

I arrived in the States with the cluelessness of a twenty-two year old, two overstuffed suitcases of clothes I would soon stop wearing because they marked me as FOB, and the great advantage of the English language as my mother-tongue. After two decades of being cosseted by my parents, siblings, and maids, I found myself broke in New York City, unable to cook even rice and often complimented on my English.

Why did I come? The easy answer: Education. I wanted to specialize in documentary filmmaking. In India, at the time, there was no further course than the master’s I’d already completed. Another answer: All the years I’d lived in India, I never felt like I fit in. I was stifled by my city; I’d broken up with my first love; I was searching for . . . I didn’t know.

*

I emptied out my passport case on an airline counter, this time in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It was 2014 and I couldn’t find my green card; without it, the airline couldn’t let me on the plane heading back to New York. The Bangladeshi man waited. I recalled my last act before I left on this trip weeks earlier. I’d made a digital copy of the card. I saw it now, still laying flat on the scanner in Brooklyn.

I called my partner, then I called the airport in New York. I was panicked. Crying. Yet, somehow, confident that everything would work out. Perhaps because, despite his dismal record on deportations, Obama was president.

This was two years before Trump’s election, before the constant, crushing fear and insecurity that is life now in the US for many immigrants, as it is for Black, or lesbian or gay, or transgender, or poor, or . . . the list is endless.

Ultimately, that day, because of my partner’s tenacity, his charm, his whiteness, his native-born American citizenship, his maleness, and because I had digital proof of my residence, I was given permission to fly back to the US and pick up my green card at the immigration counter. I tucked it back into the maroon case, the same case I’ve traveled with and still do. It’s practical. And familiar. Something known in unknown places.

*

My first few years in New York were a blur: Wake up at seven, sleep on the subway, get to my first job, rush to the second one (babysitting, under the table), then the third (dog-walking, also cash, also illegal), attend classes in the evening, stay on for my fourth job at the school computer lab until one in the morning. I’d eat one dollar hot dogs as a treat, shoot my thesis documentary on the weekends, sign up for a psychological assessment that paid fifty dollars and get diagnosed suicidal, hound the university for more scholarship money, get my first credit card, be both invisible and racially denigrated. I befriended other immigrants and women of color, fell in and out of love, leaned on my new girlfriends, fell out with white American friends after 9/11, financed the documentary on my Amex, submitted the film to festivals, won an award, and . . . my student visa expired. I had to choose: stay or return.

Why did I stay? I had almost $20,000 in debt, far more than I could pay back any time soon, no matter what job I got in India. As the youngest, I could have turned to my older siblings; they would bail me out. I stayed silent. After all, I was an independent twenty-five-year-old woman! I had my pride. How could I go back penniless after living in America’s streets paved with gold?

Besides, I was still searching.

In May 2003, I took the first job I found. No. I took a job I thought would make me happy. American optimism, meet immigrant reality. I gave up on documentary filmmaking because it was too expensive, but I was certain I could clear my debt. In my year of Optional Practical Training (OPT), which the US government grants international students, I worked for an anti-domestic violence nonprofit serving South Asian women. It was 2003; my salary $26,000. In today’s terms, that’s about $34,000. Back then, my rent for one room was $500; in 2018, that same room rents at $1200.

The truth is, I loved my job. I found a community of sorts: progressive South Asian women. Towards the end of my OPT, the organization applied for and obtained an H1-B visa on my behalf. I had three years to pay off my loans. I was broke.

In a coffee shop one morning, after three years at the job, I met with a couple of board members from the nonprofit. I’d written a letter of complaint to the board about the nonprofit’s power dynamics, as well as its pay. I wanted fairness, more money, and for them to file for my permanent residency. The board members reminded me of my two promotions, that my salary was in the thirties now. And no, they couldn’t sponsor me for my green card, not yet. They paid the bill as I cried into the oatmeal I’d ordered in the hope that eating would stave off tears.

*

Two things happened in 2006: I changed jobs; and I met a man—a white American, a New Yorker, an activist—at a panel on the role of men in ending violence against women. The man, his family embraced me. He, they, helped me pay off the last of my debt.

A few years later, after enough salary raises, we sold his apartment and bought a home together. Then, days after the closing, on August 27, 2010—eleven years and three days after I first left India—my father passed away.

After the funeral, I felt I could never return to Hyderabad, my birthplace, and face his absence, present everywhere in the city synonymous with him.

When I first arrived in the US, I established a ritual: No matter what else happened, I’d buy five-dollar phone cards and call my parents on Sundays. My mother would pick up the phone, we’d talk for fifteen minutes, she’d say, “Here, your father is waiting,” and he and I would talk for about an hour, until the phone beeped—beeped—beeped and—.

After his death, I switched to calling on Saturdays, unable to face the lacuna of his voice. Now, I talk to my mother every other day, sometimes twice a day. Sometimes she remembers that we spoke in the morning, sometimes she remembers what we spoke about.

On a Friday in 2011, I stood in City Hall, with my brother, my best friend (another immigrant like me), and my partner and his family, for a ceremony that took less than three minutes. We were married; all I wanted was to go home and sleep away the anguish of my father’s absence.

Within the year, my green card arrived. It had taken me twelve years, my father’s death, and my subsequent marriage, to become a permanent resident.

*

Now, in my twentieth year in the US, my father has been dead eight years. Three months ago, my mother, who still lives in Hyderabad, was diagnosed with an illness from which she will never recover. If I want to bring her here, I must become a citizen. But do I want to?

It’s an enormous privilege to be able to consider this question at this time. Trump recently announced plans to send fifteen thousand US Army troops to the southern border. Meanwhile, though I might feel out of place anywhere but New York, I can return to India; if I ever must leave the US, I don’t have children I might be forced to leave behind and possibly never see again. I don’t have a Muslim name, nor am I from one of the seven countries listed under Trump’s travel ban. I am not Black nor Latina, I was not brought here without the required documents, nor did I fall out of status on a technical error like my best friend, who had to return to her home country after nineteen years. These are my privileges all.

Perhaps my greatest privilege is that I’ve been able to commit to my search—for myself, for what I craved and feared: In 2014, I quit my job to pursue an MFA in creative writing, to write the stories I want.

This pursuit for passions—not for a better life or to avert poverty, nor to provide for family, nor, well, to live—underpins the American dream. What the dream-narrative leaves out is that even embarking on its pursuit requires privileges. When Trump upholds immigration as a privilege, he is upholding privilege as a pre-existing condition, and with it, the bedrock of privilege—its invisibility.

Every few phone calls, I ask my mother if she’ll come to live with me in the US. She never says no. Instead, she says things like: “You know I can’t take the cold, even in the summer I use a blanket.” “If you had kids, I would come right away. But now, what will I do?” “If I didn’t have my school,” (she’s been running a school for underprivileged children for twenty-five years), “I’d go absolutely bonkers.”

*

The day after Trump’s election in 2016, I drove a friend, an Indian woman visiting me in Indiana, to a ‘quaint’ touristy town nearby. I was conscious of leaving the progressive college-town bubble I lived in, of us being brown, of Indiana being a red state. I say “conscious of.” I mean, “terrified.”

Now, two years into this administration, I’m more numb than afraid. Have I become inured to the constant attacks? Or does my privilege protect me from the impact of Trump’s policies? I know what’s real as a wound to me, is my mother’s health, my mortgage, the fear that without citizenship, I might lose the people I love, the place I call home, my personhood.

Is it as simple as taking a test, making a pledge, replacing my dark blue Indian passport with another dark blue passport, wedging it into the maroon case as if it’s always been there?

My immigration has been one of choice, self-determination, of debt, and of privilege. Yet before I fill out the application for citizenship, fear reveals what is as invisible as privilege: that there is a point where self-determination confronts power and authority. Ask anyone who applies for a credit card, or a home loan, or a job. Ask most poor, and/or Black or immigrant folk. Exercising your choice doesn’t always result in getting what you want. This is the unspoken fallacy that determines who lives the American dream, and who doesn’t.

Sometimes I wish for an uncontrollable outside event, the hand of God, to choose for me. Sometimes I want to ask strangers, like you, to decide: Should I—an immigrant to, a writer in, and a critic of the United States—apply for citizenship?