A friend recently shared a unique approach to inquire about one’s well-being in these challenging times. He asks, “How are you, personally?” To this, I responded, “My wife is the best, and I have a new puppy,” taking his cue.
Furthermore, I am trans and an immigrant. Personally, my father, my children, my wife, and my closest friends are immigrants, too.
My friend and I share much in common, yet, at least for now, I find it much harder to detach my personal circumstances from the ongoing campaign of destruction than he does.
Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany in 1933, later observed that long before marginalized groups could be targeted for extermination, they were first “denationalized”—excluded from the society that safeguarded their legal rights. Enlightenment thinkers believed that inalienable rights existed by virtue of being human. Arendt, however, argued that the “right to have rights” could only be secured by a political community.
Without a state claiming them, individuals lack laws, courts, and political mechanisms to protect their rights.
Arendt once remarked that “the generally political became a personal fate when one emigrated.” As a stateless individual, she experienced this loss of rights—unable to secure papers, hiding from authorities, and interned as an “enemy alien” in France—before making it to the United States. She was fortunate. Her friend Walter Benjamin, after eight years of exile, committed suicide when French authorities blocked him from crossing the border ahead of advancing German troops.
I became stateless at 14 when my family left the Soviet Union. In return for granting exit visas, the U.S.S.R. revoked our citizenship. For nearly a decade after arriving in the United States, I carried a refugee travel document instead of a passport. Being unable to declare my nationality added complications to otherwise simple transactions, like opening a bank account.
Nevertheless, I was young, white, female, and in the U.S. parlance, “legal,” so my difficulties were not extreme. They were sufficient to make me feel precarious.
In the decades since, life for noncitizens in the United States has become considerably more challenging. Successive administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have pushed immigrants to the periphery of American society, restricting access to public assistance programs, narrowing pathways to legal status, and intensifying deportations.
The vast bureaucracy of “immigration courts” emerged, though it barely resembles any court system U.S. citizens might encounter. Its presiding authorities lack political independence, and those judged are not guaranteed legal counsel. Approximately 43,000 people are currently held in immigration detention centers, where some will remain for years.
In theory, the Constitution guarantees rights to persons, not just U.S. citizens. Yet, in 1999, the Supreme Court, aligning with President Bill Clinton’s Justice Department, ruled that certain noncitizens facing deportation cannot claim constitutional protection from selective enforcement.
