I have imagined myself on an airplane a lot over the last 15 years – always against my will, flying back to Slovakia, never to come back.
Last week, for the first time since 2000, I boarded a plane. For the first time in my life, I was flying alone. My green card was tucked away inside my European Union passport in the overhead bin. No one at the airport asked for either of those documents. Yet, for so much of my life those pieces of paper – or rather absence of one of them – defined who I was.
Despite having all my papers in order for the last four years, I had to force myself to fly. The occasion was bittersweet: on one hand, it was a reminder of all those years that I had spent in the US, unable to leave. On the other, it was a milestone: here I was, flying, and it wasn’t because I was being deported.
Four days after my 13th birthday, in July 2000, my family flew to New York for a second time. While our green card application was pending, we came to visit with my grandmother, who was an American citizen. We never made the return trip.
We had applied for green card in 1999 and my parents figured we might as well wait for our case to be processed in the US instead of in Slovakia. My grandmother wasn’t getting any younger and we were getting older. The sooner we enrolled in US schools and learned English the better, my parents figured. What they didn’t figure is that it would take more than 10 years for our green card to come through.
Having overstayed our tourist visa by more than a year, if we returned to Slovakia we would have been barred from entering the US for the next 10 years. And so we were stuck.
We are not the only ones who have had to endure the long wait. In November 2012, of the 4.4m applications for legal US residency, 4.3m came from those related to a US citizen, like my grandmother. According to an NBC News analysis of data from the US Department of State, the applicants might have to wait anywhere between three and 20 years for their family-sponsored green card, depending on what category they fall into. Married sons and daughters of US citizens – a category that my family fell under – wait 11 years on average. Those from the Philippines and Mexico might have to wait as long as 20.
To say that I was not a fan of moving to America would be an understatement. Weeks before our first day of school, I locked myself and my brothers in a room and staged a day-long hunger strike. I wanted to go home.
Once I acclimated to my new life, my paranoia about being deported blossomed – which wasn’t helped by the cruel actions of those around me.
Continue in The Guardian here: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/30/undocumented-truth-about-why-im-afraid-to-fly
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