When it comes to the reign of Christ, we are all immigrants.
It happened in New York City in 1996. Phones started ringing all over the city, in the wee hours of the morning. They were ringing in the apartments of undocumented aliens: those silent, nearly invisible people who empty the city’s wastebaskets, bus the city’s restaurant tables and sit at droning sewing-machines in the garment-district sweatshops. These were people who had come to New York to follow a dream: the beautiful, alluring dream of citizenship in the United States of America.
Some of these people had come on tourist visas; they simply never went home. Others had paid — handsomely — for a smuggler to convey them in — perhaps in a small boat, or wading across the Rio Grande, or crouching in the damp darkness of a shipping container.
They’d been working long hours, those undocumented laborers — and for very small salaries, always in cash. But they were thankful. Rarely did it occur to them that this was unfair, that they were being exploited, for they were in America, after all! They were working. They were saving their money. One day, they might even receive the greatest prize of all: a green card, the immigration document that would make them permanent residents — legal immigrants, at last.
Hossain had a business degree from a university in Bangladesh. He’d been working in New York as a bartender, all the while dreaming of the day when he could get financial aid to study computer science in an American college.
Uddin was a 32-year-old chef, also from Bangladesh. His plan was to save his money so he could open his own Indian restaurant.
Julie was a 42-year-old housekeeper from Trinidad. She dreamed of going home and seeing her five children for the first time in six years. Without a green card, though, she would never risk leaving the country, for she couldn’t be sure that she could get back in.
That’s what those fran
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