by Suketu Mehta
We bring these strong-smelling foods from our villages to the city, lay them out on the kitchen table as soon as we get home from the airport. As we eat, we weep. Our tears moisten the bread, which has been baked by our grandmother, who will never get a visa to come here. We send her a giro every month, Skype with her every week. It all feels unsubstantial—but this, this arepa she has baked just this morning before we got on the plane, and that we are holding to our faces, to our noses, afraid almost to eat, to consign to our bellies—this is home, this is love, this is truth, this brings back memories of happier times. Abuela: gracias.
The greatest sorrow, said Dante, was to recall in misery the time when we were happy. The sadness of a lost happy time.
The migrant’s dream: To build good houses for herself and each of her children, a family compound in the hills above the city, in her ancestral village, where all the family will gather, cousins and uncles and old people and children running about, and we will spread a sheet under the fig trees and there will be a freshly slaughtered sheep baked in a hole in the ground and the women will have been cooking for three days and there will be the good wine from the north in jugs and everybody will be there, the neighbors that we have been fighting with for generations too, and after we have eaten and drunk our fill there, we will join hands and dance in a circle to the old songs and laugh and laugh and laugh as if we never had to leave … And everybody will be there, and we will laugh so much, we will dance so much, we will eat so much, as we did in the Before.
* * *
I am here—I am writing this book—as a result of chain migration. First came Anilmasa, my uncle who struck out from a small town in Gujarat to Kent State University in Ohio to train as an engineer. Then came his wife, his brother, his mother, and his wife’s siblings. I am in the United States because of “family reunification,” or what Trump calls “chain migration.” We haven’t taken a dime in welfare. When we needed money, we borrowed from family. For immigrants, the family isn’t a chain. It’s a safety net.
In 2017, two-thirds of the 1.1 million green cards that America gave out went to relatives of U.S. residents; only 12 percent got them through employment. If America’s immigration system were to be based on “points”—if it lifted its lamp only to the highly skilled—then my family would never have been allowed in. My mother came here because her sister in Detroit, a U.S. citizen, sponsored her and her husband and their three small children. My mother wouldn’t have gotten a visa based on her skills. Because, as I discovered when I was thirty-six years old and in a car with my parents coming up to the George Washington Bridge, my mother never finished her college degree.
In March 1963, in Bombay, my mother was in the back of a taxi with two of her friends from the elite Sophia College, going to her uncle’s house for dinner. In a month, she was to get her bachelor of arts, in philosophy and French, after giving her final exams. She was confident of the results; she was a good writer, and her essays would be shown around as a model for other students. She had married my father the previous year, and I was five months growing inside her.
The taxi pulled into a petrol pump to get refueled, and her friends insisted that she move to the middle because she was pregnant. The taxi drove out of the pump, and a drunk Marwari came speeding down, broadsiding the taxi. Her friend sitting near the window had multiple fractures. The friend sitting on the other side was also hurt, and the taxi was totaled. But my mother was largely unhurt, except for some bleeding around the hip.
The doctor told her this. He also said, “If it was my own sister, I would tell her not to sit for the exams.” Because the exams involved sitting for six hours at a stretch. “You can take the exams if you want, but it could be risky for the baby.” So my mother rested in bed for some time, and then went to Calcutta and had me, but of course studying was impossible for the new mother. She never became Usha Mehta, B.A. She had never mentioned this incident to me. Once, around the time my wife was pregnant, my mother had said something about being in an accident when she was younger and asked my wife to be careful when traveling in cars. I had recently asked my mother about the full story—since I was writing a book about Bombay and our life in it—and she related it to me.
So I said it, in my parents’ Lexus, as we were coming up to the George Washington Bridge, thirty-six years later: “You gave up your college degree for me.”
“Yes,” she replied. “But it was worth it, because I got … you.”
* * *
America opens its doors to a million legal immigrants a year. Four hundred thousand of them come in to reunify with their families. Four million more are on the waiting list.
Countries should not be opposed to this kind of migration. When you have your extended family around you, you are more likely to prosper. When your son is flunking out of high school, your brother will speak to him, understand him as you cannot, and keep him off the streets. When you need to go to work and can’t afford day care, your mother will look after your child and feed her and tell her stories. When your daughter is looking for a job, your sister will tell her about an opening in the hospital she works in. E pluribus unum.
We new immigrants need it, need our extended family. We don’t have the luxury of a legacy network, three or four generations deep in the country, that will get our daughter into a good college or loan us money when insurance doesn’t cover the cost of hospitalization.
What frightens migrants most: the idea that you should come to America and Europe, and your extended family should dissolve into a nuclear one, and then disappear entirely, as you join the solitude of urban America, where half the inhabitants live alone. That you should forget the different terms for “maternal uncle” and “paternal uncle”; that you should be unaware of your grandparents’ siblings’ grandchildren; that your family shouldn’t be extended, it should be excluded—the excluded family.
Even Donald Trump is on earth because of chain migration. His mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, moved from a village in Scotland to New York to join her two sisters and work as a maid. So, on both sides, Trump is a direct beneficiary of everything he campaigns against: chain migration and climate refugees, like his grandfather Friedrich. But this has happened often with different waves of immigrants: last one in shut the door.
* * *
I spent my first fourteen years in a country that had very few foreigners. The first time I had any sort of significant encounter with people who weren’t Indian was when a delegation of Japanese university students came to my school in Bombay, when I was in the ninth grade. I had only the slightest of encounters with them; one of the female students asked to see my notebook and giggled at the doodles I’d made instead of my schoolwork. But for the longest time afterward, I was in a daze, enraptured by the foreignness of her. She could have been Zambian or Paraguayan; what mattered was that she was different, mysterious. I wanted to know people who weren’t like me. The next year my family left for New York.
In my last year of college at NYU, I discovered that I was part of a set of triplets. My siblings were an Italian American boy named Chris and a Bavarian Szechuan girl named Ming. Ming was a dancer. Chris had a comic book store in Queens. I was trying to evade the family diamond business.
We met in a writing class, and after the class everybody went out drinking and lived the life of writers in Manhattan—without actually doing much writing. We spent a little too much money on drinks and dinner, and then looked the other way when the bill came at the end and we were short. We made literary jokes, imitating Hemingway: “I went to Paris. And it was good.” We had love affairs, and embellished them in the telling, like when Chris went out with the daughter of an undertaker and she asked him to make love in a coffin in the mortuary. We were under the impression that Jill Clayburgh, then at the peak of her acting career, was stalking us, since we saw her twice in the same week at two separate restaurants where we were dining on the Upper West Side.
Chris and Ming made fun of me for my accent (since they wer
e born here, I couldn’t do the same with them) and my driving. “Did I just see you drive the wrong way down Queens Boulevard?” Chris asked incredulously early one Sunday morning as I was coming to pick them up.
They were the first real American friends I had, and they were very ethnic, in the way those who are born in New York can be. Ming’s father, a thrice-married refugee in his seventies from China and then later Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan, tried to get me interested in investing in a shoe factory with him. Christopher (“Christ-bearer,” he explained the meaning of his name) was the son of Joseph and Mary; Joe was an artist who knew exactly how to cook eggplant parmigiana. (“Just use any olive oil. Never understood what ‘extra virgin’ means. You’re a virgin or you’re not—how can you be extra?!”) They invited me to their homes; I invited them to mine and fed them spicy bhelpuri for breakfast. Chris introduced us to the Italian American terms “Fugeddaboutit!” and “Bada bing, bada boom” long before we heard the cast of The Sopranos say them.
We would go on weekend trips into the countryside together (“do Sylvan”) to Massachusetts, upstate New York—places where everyone was white, and not white like Chris either. I remember, coming back after one of those trips, that we drove straight to Veniero’s Pasticceria in the East Village to eat their ricotta cheesecake. Sitting in the packed room, with the transgender people, the blacks, the punks, the Italian families, I felt a tremendous sense of … safety. Belonging. Here, nobody was turning their heads around to look at our unlikely group. We were different, just as everyone else was different in their own way. As an Indian, I was the least strange person here.
I have close friends in Bombay too, but they’re all Indian. They are diverse in the Indian way: Farrokh is Zoroastrian, Naresh is Catholic, Manjeet is Hindu. They speak different languages. But they are all Indian. They’re the same color.
In Bombay, I can travel to the different states of India; in New York, the different countries of the planet. In New York now I can eat at a restaurant from a different region of the world every day for a year and not repeat. It’s not about the food; I’m vegetarian and there’s very little for me in a Nigerian or Moldovan restaurant. But it’s the sense that I can go abroad at home, travel all the world for the price of a MetroCard. It expands my sense of myself. When I feel sad or lonely, I get on the subway and take it to the end of the line, walk in the lanes of a neighborhood that is the representation or simulacrum of a faraway land, with its grocery stores, its drinking dens and eateries, and temporarily forget my dolor, which is overwhelmed by curiosity, and a healthy hunger. For that is the beginning of the end of sadness: when you are hungry again.
This is the American exceptionalism: it’s a country made up of all the other countries. This is why I’m proud to call it my country. It may not be the reason I came, but it is the reason I stay. Today’s immigrants might have come as the creditors, but they have become a credit to the country.
* * *
In spite of Trump, Americans, and their northern neighbors, are still the most welcoming people in the world for immigrants. According to a 2018 Ipsos poll of twenty thousand people in twenty-seven countries, Canadians and Americans were first and second in the world, respectively, in believing that an immigrant could be a “real Canadian” or “real American.” Only four non-Muslim countries surveyed by the poll had majorities who thought that a Muslim could be a real national of the country: South Africa, France, the United States, and Canada.
America has been good to my family. And we have been good to America. In my extended family, we are engineers, writers, doctors, businessmen, prosecutors, infantrymen, teachers; and as of 2017, unexpectedly, a state senator.
My sister Sejal met her future husband, Jay, while they were campaigning for a half-Japanese, half-Indian candidate for Congress in rural Tennessee in 1994. The campaign, unsurprisingly, went nowhere (my recollection is that he came in fifth of four candidates) but led to their marriage ten years later, and two lovely children. They settled in a nice block close to downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, of single-family houses quite close together, where the neighbors can see what you’re cooking as they walk by, and often invite themselves over.
In 2016, Jay called me to say he was giving up his safe government job to run for state senate.
“How are you going to support my sister?” I demanded. Jay is Indian—subcategory: Bengali—and was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He’d never held elected office before and wanted to run against a gentleman by the fine old Southern name of Ellis Hankins, who was the executive director of the North Carolina League of Municipalities. It seemed an impossible endeavor—most of Jay’s constituents couldn’t even pronounce his last name. In Fayetteville, his father’s patients called him “Dr. Chadhoori” because they couldn’t pronounce “Chaudhuri.”
But, since we are family, my sons and I went down to Raleigh to campaign for Jay. We knocked on doors, hundreds of them. Most people were friendly, in the Southern way. Most of them. One man pulled his gun on my son and told him to get out of his yard. I had a dog run at me. (All right, it was a small dog, a vicious poodle named Chewy. “Chewy! Chewy!” I could hear his owner, a blowsy African American woman in a housecoat smoking a cigarette, calling while standing next to a pile of butts. “You get back here, Chewy!”)
And all the neighbors on Jay’s block—Laurent from Martinique, Suzanne from Massachusetts, Bill from right here in Raleigh—rallied to support Jay, handed out flyers, put up yard signs, knocked on doors. Jay is a progressive Democrat, against the “bathroom bill,” which officially discriminated against the LGBTQ community, and for gun control. I wondered about what this meant for his chances in a state like North Carolina, which Trump carried in 2016.
Jay won his senate seat, in a landslide: by twenty-seven points in the Democratic primary and by thirty-one points in the general election.
“Seventy percent of them voted for a candidate that’s not of their own race,” Jay reflected, in wonderment. They didn’t care about Jay’s race; they didn’t care that he would become the first Indian American state senator in North Carolina history. They just liked what he had to say: that teachers’ salaries, decimated by the Republicans, need to be raised. They liked that he came to their door, again and again, through blizzards and rainstorms, to ask for their vote, while his opponent seemed to take their vote for granted. One of them posted a picture on Instagram, of Jay making his way to her doorstep in a blizzard, to ask for her vote. He knocked on ten thousand doors; all told, his campaign knocked on fourteen thousand. All politics is local.
After the election, Gautama and I and my sister and Jay are invited for dinner at Suzanne’s house; she is celebrating the marriage of Fran, who was married to Bill, a carpenter who lives down the block, and is now remarried to Henry, an amiable accountant. Afterward, we sit around the living room. I see a couple of guitars propped up against the wall, and I ask Gautama to play. He begins, with a Caetano song in Portuguese, which he learned in his gap year in Brazil. Then Suzanne’s son Matt follows, and Laurent from Martinique’s son Noah.
Then the master takes the stage: Suzanne’s husband, Rod, who is a very well preserved rock musician approaching sixty, who has had to raise a family and so makes music for video games, and sometimes plays with a band in the Raleigh bars, but now these are his closest friends and his wife and his son, and he has had quite a bit of whiskey. So he picks up the guitar and fixes a harmonica around his neck, and sings a song for two women named Frances, one of them his mother-in-law. As he plays, he coaxes an intricate web of sound out of this ancient contraption of wood and strings, and we are transfixed. There, in that room with the good modernist furniture, after we’ve all eaten our fill of pie, with the newlyweds on their second or third marriage, with the boys I’ve known since they were children, now approaching full-grown manhood, this community of people on Graham Street in Raleigh, who’ve rallied to help their Bengali American neighbor get elected because they believe in his politics, and becau
se he is their neighbor and they know he is a good and honest man, wherever he may be from. He is now family, and his family is their family. This is my America. It is my land—and our land.
NOTES ON SOURCES
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1. A PLANET ON THE MOVE
I am now among the quarter billion people: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2017 Revision. United Nations Database (December 2017), p. 1. http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/publications/populationfacts/docs/MigrationPopFacts20175.pdf.
in surveys, nearly three-quarters of a billion people want: Neli Espova, Julie Ray, and Anita Pugliese, “Number of Potential Migrants Worldwide Tops 700 Million.” Gallup (June 8, 2017). https://news.gallup.com/poll/211883/number-potential-migrants-worldwide-tops-700-million.aspx.
Nine years earlier, Parliament had passed: Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, National Archives Legislative Record (1968, ch. 9). https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/9/pdfs/ukpga_19680009_en.pdf. Restrictions then further codified by Immigration Act 1971, National Archives Legislative Record (1971, ch. 77). http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1971/77/pdfs/ukpga_19710077_en.pdf.