lagoons, and emerald-shimmering seas to live in an earthquake zone where it is cold most of the summer? And without a plan to ensure that I could go to college and not spend the rest my life struggling?
Granted, I could have died in Fiji. I was a little queer kid, and I was never good at hiding it. My classmates were mostly Christian zealots. My high school principal would have loved nothing more than to expel me for being gay. And my best gal pal at the time was as powerless as I was to do anything about it, even though we did our best to protect one another. In my father’s head, the Bay Area was the only safe place, and many years later, I realized that my parents had made the best choice they could with the information they had at the time.
I took pieces of my home with me—photos of me with my best friends, a Fijian baseball cap, a keychain with a map of the islands, a small desk flag, my favorite tattered green bath towel, and my childhood pillow and blanket.
More vivid than those things, I also carried memories with me. In the weeks before we left, I promised myself that I would imprint in my memory everything about my home, so that it would never be lost to me, and that in my moments of trial, I could use these memories to ground myself, and to seek strength from them. Sometimes I can recall conversations from childhood more easily than the ones I had yesterday.
Immigrants are often told to get in line, and I did. However, a complex tapestry of immigration laws rendered me without status shortly after we arrived in the United States. My US citizen grandmother had filed paperwork to sponsor my mother (and by extension also me as her child) but that paperwork also established that we had intent to immigrate permanently to the United States. Therefore, when I applied for a student visa to continue my studies, the United States government denied it because my grandmother’s petition served as evidence that I had intent to reside here permanently. I was eighteen when I lost status.
As the youngest child and the only one without papers, sending me back to Fiji was not an option for my parents. But it did mean having to live without status in the United States for an indeterminate period.
For a long time, I lived in fear for my life. I was afraid to go to the hospital when I broke my hand, afraid to report violence at home, afraid to ask for help even when I was the victim of a crime, afraid to tell teachers and friends in college that I needed financial support, afraid to apply for jobs or seek scholarships—all out of fear that someone would find out I was undocumented and report me to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). I feared that I would never be able to graduate from college and live to my full potential.
To pay my way through college and graduate school, I worked as a janitor, cleaning homes and office buildings. When I turned twenty-four, my parents finally received lawful permanent residency (popularly known as “Green Cards”). However, since I was no longer a child, the Obama administration sought to remove me from my home and separate me from my family. By this point, all my family had legal status except for me. My only papers were the couple of degrees under my belt, and I was hungrily trying to get more. I was almost done with law school—as if anyone who wanted me deported ever cared about my academic credentials or achievements.
More importantly, I became a target for removal from the United States because I had become part of a mini-movement of undocumented rabble-rousers who were finished with hiding in the shadows, and instead were organizing to prevent the deportation of thousands of other undocumented people. We blogged, wrote letters, marched, met with politicians, testified before congressional members, occupied buildings and streets, chained ourselves to things, and even infiltrated immigrant detention facilities. Many of these stories are profiled in this book. Many more are likely lost because of a history that marginalizes subaltern voices.
I still clung to half-remembered, half-forgotten memories of Fiji. I never went to a beach, because I feared that it would remind me of all that I had lost. I stopped doing things that I had loved. I stopped living. I did not make any friends. I did not want to form any ties. I did not want to ever love and lose again.
So I devoted myself to accumulating something I would never lose: knowledge. An old Indian parable taught me that knowledge was something that thieves could not steal. In college, Michel Foucault, who ironically was also banned from the United States, taught me that knowledge was power. So when the Notice to Appear for removal proceedings came, I was prepared.
I did not fight deportation because I wanted to. There was nothing I wanted more than to go home. I fought because I would only go home on my own terms. I was going to go back to Fiji with a Green Card in my hand, to sip fresh coconut water from the husk, and enjoy the land’s surreal beauty like an American tourist.
It took a historic Supreme Court decision for me to finally gain lawful status. On June 26, 2013, the US Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and my same-sex US citizen partner could finally sponsor me as her spouse. I became a lawful permanent resident on August 1, 2014.
The next week, I found myself in Canada, and two weeks later, I was back in Fiji, catching up on fifteen years of my life.
I was thirty-four when I finally became a United States citizen and voted in my first election. By this time, I had learned to survive without papers as an undocumented, unapologetic, unafraid, queer, and unashamed person. I had also learned that home was not a place, but one that I instead built based on friendships, community, and with my supportive and loving partner.
Now I could go from surviving to thriving. I started living again, opened up my own law practice, and became the parent of a rescue pup, Rosie. She likes to eat, sleep, run, and hopes to one day catch a duck. More than anything, she makes me want to keep things simple, too. I obsess about making sure that she has all her papers, even as I help other immigrants live the same complete life that I am now living.
I share my story only to illustrate how we as immigrants come in all shapes and sizes from all over the world. We have many stories to tell—of escaping persecution in our homelands, of arriving as employees and overstaying our visas, of surviving unscrupulous employers, and terrible immigration attorneys mishandling our cases. And no matter what our status, color, creed, or tongue, we are no less deserving of civil and human rights.
We are drawn to America’s promise and protection, and betrayed by its peril. We are part of families who were exiled, siblings who were separated, and grandparents who never knew us. We are sad, angry, scared, but also funny, joyful, and grateful for a second chance at building a new home and life. The stories prove that we, like you, are worth fighting for and fighting over.
In the coming chapters, you will be introduced to many pioneers who fought hard to ensure the freedoms that we take for granted as immigrants. You will learn about the laws that were created just to deport us and about how we have responded. You will learn about our struggle, our mistakes, and our humanity. And hopefully, by the end, you will identify with us as we continue to fight to live where we belong.
The Promise and Peril of Citizenship
It’s a grave oversight to talk about immigration without first focusing on the history of African Americans and Asian Americans. Even before the existence of the United States, the Atlantic Slave Trade separated millions of Africans from their families, forcibly removed them from their homes, and set them on a dangerous journey to the Americas to meet the demand for enslaved labor in the new colonies. Millions died, and millions were forever separated from their homes and loved ones. Even though Africans who were enslaved did not come to this country as immigrants, the history of immigration policy in the United States is inextricably bound up in their experiences and the fight for freedom that they and their descendants undertook.
In the United States, the institution of chattel slavery reduced African persons to property that could be bought
