I came to America in 1994 on a first class Swiss Air flight after my first semester in boarding school in St. Gallen, Switzerland. My mum had been living in Florida while my brother and sister and I were in school. She had chosen Florida because she wanted us to visit Disney World during our summer vacation. Little did we know that our summer vacation would turn into an indefinite stay in the United States.
Being quite young while I was in boarding school, I always missed my mum and hated the idea of going back to school. My brother, sister and I campaigned to my dad, who was in Nigeria, to let us stay in America and not go back to Switzerland. Our campaigning worked. My dad would arrange for us to go to private school in Palm Beach, which was significantly cheaper than the school in Switzerland.
All this might sound like a not-so-humble brag, but I’m sharing it to make a point that some may have already surmised: moving to America the “right way” takes a certain amount of resources. At minimum, if you’re coming from anywhere not in the Americas, you need to be able to purchase a plane ticket.
It’s funny to hear people discuss undocumented immigrants coming to America and stealing jobs from Americans or driving up healthcare costs because they use hospitals and are unable to pay. I know I can’t speak for everyone, and everyone’s experience is different. But I can say that there’s VERY LITTLE that you can do or take from America without a social security number. It took my family years to get a green card. It cost money that we didn’t have and we couldn’t get money because we couldn’t work. I remember so badly wanting to get a job at Publix, a grocery store chain, when I turned 14. I wanted so badly to do the shit jobs that no one else would do, but I couldn’t because we didn’t have papers. I wanted so badly for my family to be able to help ourselves. But there was literally nothing we could do… until a friend of friend who had a small business helped. He offered to let my mum help him out here and there for a little cash. What she was earning was in no way a full income for one person, let alone a mother of three. But it was enough for us to get by and to save. My mum was an asset to the business owner, who couldn’t necessarily afford to hire a full-time employee, even at minimum wage. During this time, visiting a hospital or seeing a doctor wasn’t ever something we had the luxury of even thinking about. Our only form of health insurance was simply being careful—not doing anything that would result in broken bones or worse. I think it took about a year for my mum to save enough to pay the fees associated with getting green cards. And even with that, the process, which I won’t go into here, wasn’t easy. Finish reading the story on my blog Un-ruly.