is flimsy and covers me snugly. There is no room to conceal anything. Why am I being searched again? I stand off to one side as people enter the air bridge to the plane. My two sons wait close by, one small and dark like me, the other sturdy and fair. We are on our way to join their father, my husband, in Europe where he is teaching a film class for the summer of 2009. All four of us are American permanent residents and citizens of New Zealand—home of cinematic hobbits, champion sailors, a teen pop star and a Man Booker prizewinner. Except I feel as if I am an enemy. My legs are parted, my arms askew, my long brown hair now sticking to my neck, my clavicle, my damp cheeks—my borderlands exposed. Most of the travelers embarking look the other way, or narrow their eyes to take in the general tableau without making eye contact, avoiding the specific, the individual, me. I feel shame, but I’m not sure why. This is security. It’s nothing personal, really.
Eight hours of air space, of no man’s land, of gazing out into interminable silver, pale horizons that belong to no one, of time limning imaginary divides, cloud drift, the rush of freezing air beyond the windows, and a glimmering sense of freedom. An unwarranted sense of freedom.
A German immigration officer calls me out of line. My boys are buoyed along ahead by the stream of disembarking passengers ahead of me. She motions me into a cubicle. “But wait, my boys . . . Boys! Boys! Wait! Wait!” They turn, alarmed, brows lifted, mouths ajar, the little one clutching for his brother. “My boys, my boys, please . . .” But she has her wand at the ready, intruding, invading—the third time this trip. There is no point in resistance. My tawny skin could be, what, Palestinian, Afghani, Pakistani, Iraqi? Enemy-colored, regardless.
I used to love travel, the idea of being a global citizen. I grew up in the relative wealth of New Zealand believing it was my right, a necessity to face outward and embrace the world. Now that I live and work in the United States, I find myself questioning the ease of crossing borders, of the legitimacy of the traveler and the relevance of the boundaries, the power of bureaucracies, the dangers of borderland scrutiny, and the insecurities bred by security and surveillance. Wherever I travel, it seems that something about me invites scrutiny, official inspection. Something about us, the few that are flagged, shuffled into cubicles for an extra pat down, a secondary interview, for the snap of a rubber glove, to have our luggage and our bodies rifled through.
I AM AN Alien. I am A54**32. For a time I was a Non-Resident Alien, then I was an Alien on Advanced Parole. I am now a Resident Alien. The language is peculiar, drumming up recollections of 1950s comics, creatures from the swamp, pods of extra-terrestrials, unidentified flying objects, reds under the bed, and sci-fi evildoers. Some countries do not use this lexicon at all, instead using neutral terms such as applicant, overseas citizen, visitor, passenger returning and resident. The alien terminology leaves me high and dry, on a continent that feels hostile and prickly.
I am permitted to live in the United States. I am permitted to work and pay income taxes, to pay private insurance for health care, to own a house and pay high property taxes that fund local schools. I am not allowed to vote, a fact unusual to me because New Zealand, along with Great Britain, the Netherlands, Chile, and many countries in between, allows universal suffrage for all residents. I have been obliged to offer up pieces of myself—my eyeballs, my thumbprints, my history, my blood, some of my freedoms, here in the land of the free.
My iris is captured in a biometrics file with the U.S. Immigration Service, photographed by a high-quality digital camera in a Homeland Security outpost in a room with grey vinyl flooring and grey plastic chairs, in a strip mall in Norridge, Illinois. My eyes were filtered and mapped into phasors or vectors. My eyes became a series of successful algorithms. My deep brown eyes, the eyes that have held the gaze of my beloved, that are the color and shape of my mother’s, that my newborn sons searched for and struggled to focus on, are now U.S territory.
The iris scan was first used by law enforcement agencies to identify prisoners, but the fingerprint was the earliest forensic biometric record. Loops and spirals were caught in clay in ancient Babylon and China, to keep track of business deals. Prints have been identifying criminals, real and suspected, since the late nineteenth century. In 1924, during the first Red Scare in the U.S., the identification division of the FBI was set up. By the time a second such scare was underway in the forties, the FBI had one hundred million cards blacked with whorls and spirals, lined up in tall filing cabinets. By 1970, two hundred million people had their two prints inked, rolled, and stamped. Now Homeland Security stores more than one hundred and twenty million people’s prints, and the FBI has sixty million computerized records, both criminal and civil. All are available to Interpol’s network.
My own prints, with my furrows, ridges and valleys, were harvested five or six times. How many times do American authorities need fingerprints? Do they change over time? Do the bad guys change their prints? Sometimes. The 1930s bank robber John Dillinger burned his off with acid and today’s criminals alter theirs surgically. My fingers pluck mint from my garden, knead fresh bread, stroke my sons’ hair, lace themselves between my husband’s—I have not altered them.
IT SEEMS INCONGRUOUS to mention the assault on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon as background to this, to group my own potential criminality with those other swarthy invaders, the ones who pierced airspace, buildings, and human lives. To say it was bad timing to move to the United States weeks before, though, seems callous. I don’t want to trivialize the horror of that day. Nonetheless, it locked me into eight years of cyclic fingerprinting, assignations in federal buildings shielded by concrete barriers and teeming with holstered security guards, appointments in strip malls, searches in airports, and a lag of five years between my husband and children getting permanent residency and me finally being able to use the same line in the airport as my family. This altered my perception of myself to a woman vulnerable to the hands of airport authorities, to a person of color profiled as a possible enemy, to a foreigner with ambiguous status. The “security” of the greater good has become my shaky insecurity.
Being viewed as a potential threat fractures you, diminishes you. You begin to suspect your own legitimacy, your place in the long, snaking lines of mainly brown people waiting for their numbers to come up. Are you trying to sneak into a society that doesn’t want you? Are you in the shadows of illegality? Could they deport you? Could they separate you from your children? Could they make you disappear?
If you’ve ever been in a secondary interrogation room in an American port of entry, you will recognize this fear. The large room is walled off from the main passport control hall that travelers snake through after disembarking. Uniformed border officers perch up behind a high counter looking down at rows of weary arrivals slouched in plastic chairs. There are a few citizens, but most are tourists or expatriates or immigrants. There is no privacy. Yelling, crying, pleading, and sometimes urinating take place in full view and earshot of those waiting for their passport to come to the top of the pile. It’s a morality play in the public square, except we are an unwilling and undemonstrative audience.
There’s the vacationing Italian whose travel agent has not informed him that even though Italy is a friendly nation with a visa waiver, he should have a passport with an electronic chip or a current visa. When the officers finally dismiss him, he protests their treatment and tries to argue. “Do you want to leave, or shall we put you on the next plane back to Italy?” He leaves.
There’s the English student planning a Transamerica road trip for six weeks, but he’s visibly of Asian heritage, so they hector him about why he’s on vacation for so long, and how did he get that time off work? He explains that he has left his job, because he’s a student, and besides, in the U.K. most workers get six weeks paid leave, but they don’t believe him. They harangue him for forty-five minutes before letting him go.
There’s the Fijian-born Indian New Zealander with a U.S. green card who says she was in New Zealand for six months because her brother was killed in a motorbike crash and she stayed longer to help her aging mother. She quietly weeps, laying out her grief before a room of witnesses uncomfortable with this uninvited
