ALAN KARAM - 17 FEBRUARY 2011

 
Many of my friends began to hate me, the faces of people who looked at me differently at airports and other public places, even my co-workers; making derogatory comments. I apologized to many people over the years, even people that I didn't know. All I wanted to do was to tell the world that I am not a "terrorist."

My family and I fled Iraq with no choice. Saddam Hussein personally organized a team of men in a plot to bury my family alive. The reason for killing my family was vague, it was only understood that my father worked as an informant for the CIA to oust Saddam Hussein in the 80s and 90s.

My family lived in a dangerous world, moving from town to town in fear. While my father's work was classified and dangerous, my family of 7 managed to survive.  In 1988, Saddam Hussein put an open contract out on my father's head and the heads of my entire family. Several times, we were shot at and faced the very real threat of being buried alive. Although life was rough and dangerous, my father continued with his job until suspicion was aroused among the Iraqis that my father was working with the U.S. He always supported America in removing Saddam Hussein. And that alone was the Iraqi’s dream.

In November 1996, president Clinton ordered my family to leave Iraq immediately. It was great to see that president Clinton intervened and helped my family! In February 1997, we arrived in the United States, in the state of Utah. Ecstatic and extremely lucky to have survived that tyranny, my family and I were no longer in fear.

It was snowing and freezing when we were dropped off at a one-bedroom house on the evening of February 25, 1997. The electricity wasn't functioning properly and the heater wasn't turned on. At that moment, I thought I was in the freezing dark mountains of Kurdistan, once again. Except, of course without the fear of being killed. Our rent was only half paid, even though the initial agreement, from the Rescue Committee, stated the first three months rent were paid. We needed to find jobs – and soon!

I desperately went on a job hunt. Luckily, I found a job at a nearby college, working in its library. My English was terrible. I was hired to reshelf library books so I didn’t really need to communicate. That job earned me enough money so I could pay the other half of the rent. The landlord seemed to have no patience; he warned us that if this happened again, we could be  faced with eviction. In Iraq we would have faced execution.

By mid March of 1997, my father also found a job doing carpentry work. Meanwhile, I wrote numerous letters to our congressman and the state senator about our situation. No response from either.

The immigration department labeled my family as illegal, despite our initial status of “Political Asylum.” In 1998, we applied for our status change to get our Green Cards. Eight months later, they had lost our forms. It didn't make sense! We tried fighting for our rights, but nothing could be done without a good attorney, but we didn’t have the money to spend on high priced lawyers. I wrote several letters to Homeland Security as well as the director of Immigration. I also sent a letter to the Bush Administration. Again, no response!

Shortly after 9/11/2001, my family and I decided to move to Detroit, Michigan to avoid any discriminatory backlash. The reason for our move was simple: Detroit offered "more diversity."

One early afternoon my father and I went for a drive in and around downtown Detroit. It had been a while since we had a father-son talk and one of the topics we discussed was my father’s wish to stay in Michigan and apply for our Green Cards because the Salt Lake office had lost our applications.

While driving on I-75 North, I wanted to exit the highway and go towards downtown when, suddenly, I lost track and took a different exit which led me on I-94 towards Canada. The 8 lane road bedlam was jammed with small vehicles, SUVs and Semi trailers. The only thing I could do was to go straight toward the border. As we approached the border checkpoint, I simply told the man that I had taken a wrong exit. Suspicion sparked when I told him I was from Iraq. He had us wait there for a few minutes while he made his phone calls, and told us to go straight and to make a sharp U-Turn. I was ecstatic!

I drove away as instructed, but more than fifteen border patrol officers with their rifles pointed were waiting for us ahead. This was embarrassing! They had us get out of the car with our hands above our heads. They searched for “bombs” as they combed through the car. Then the K-9 unit arrived and they also searched us. After forty-five minutes in the freezing temperature, we were taken into an office on the border, still handcuffed.

Three Federal Agents awaited our arrival. The agents had photos of alleged terrorists and asked whether we knew any of them. Then my father told the agents, he worked for the CIA before in Iraq. The agents seemed to have no interest about my father's work as an informant. The interrogation went on for 4 hours that evening until they realized we were clean.

It wasn't long before my family moved back to Utah, where the employment rate was very low.

The examples of being treated unfairly abound. In one instance, I was removed from a plane because I sat in the exit row. Another time, my luggage was lost for 8 days. Then, I was nearly attacked by a U.S. Marshal for having a fishing pole on board of the plane. They thought I had snuck a rifle onto the plane!

The Immigration Department as well as the Obama Administration should really focus on those that are legal in the U.S. today and process their documents before moving on to those who are illegal. There are so many refugees and immigrants here in the U.S. legally who are awaiting their status change. I am eager to see some major changes within the Immigration’s processing lines.

Today, my family and I are still fighting with Immigration for denying and delaying our documents. As for my father, he still lives with that disappointment and is determined that some day, he will find justice.

 

Alan Karam attends the University of Utah and volunteers his time to teach English at The Refugee and Immigrant Center at the Asian Association of Utah. He is currently working on a memoir about his experiences as an “unwanted” Iraqi immigrant during the post 9/11 era.

ALLISON HIGHT - 16 November 2011

Called “the toughest immigration law on the books in any American state” by the New York Daily News, Alabama’s House Bill 56 has managed to keep a relatively low profile since its passage on June 2nd, 2011, despite the fact that its effects throughout the state have been widespread.  Though lengthy and complex, the most hotly debated section of the legislation is its call to make a valid birth certificate part of the enrollment process for K-12 education and to further collect proof of citizenship from already enrolled students.  This move has left as many vacancies in public schools as it has in Alabama’s fields, as workers and families flee the state for fear of deportation, or simply in response to the resultant increased racial profiling.

Though the media attention to HB56 has been sporadic, the attention of one grassroots organization has not wavered in the last five months since the bill’s passage: DreamActivist.org, an alliance composed of six core individuals committed to the cause of immigration reform with a specific concentration on the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, has for the last month been steadily planning a rally against the components of Alabama’s new bill.  This Tuesday, those plans culminated in Montgomery in a full-scale protest.

Composed of activists from over twenty states, some coming from even as far as California, youth and parents alike recently arrived in Alabama, ready to actively reject the blatant profiling HB56 encourages.  Quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s words that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” the hundred-some protesters circled the state’s capitol building armed with only their picket signs and their courage to stand up for justice.  As many of the gatherers were undocumented themselves, they risked both arrest and deportation at the hands of ICE officials.

Despite the relatively small size of the protest, media forums have covered the day’s events extensively, demonstrating that although the effects of HB56 have not recently been prevalent in people’s minds outside of Alabama, people’s outrage at the audacity of the bill resides close to the surface.  One hundred DREAMers, then, were all that were needed to reignite the flame of activism.

During the protest, thirteen were arrested, two for declining to leave a state office building, and eleven for forming a picket line across a capitol street.  Dreamactivist.org, which anticipated such a response based on the results of their past rallies, is already in the process of raising money for their bail.  For the first time, the DREAMers arrested were composed not only of youth, but of parents as well, such as fifty-five year old Martin Unzueta and thirty-nine year old Belen Rebelledo.  The fight, then, is no longer limited to college-age youth and DREAM Act qualifiers, but has spread to encompass people of all ages, and is showing no sign of backing down.

So tense is the current situation in Alabama, that this small-scale protest inspired even President Barack Obama to take a stand on HB56.  For the first time, he publicly opposed the legislation, bluntly stating that “[i]t’s a bad law. The idea that we have children afraid to go to school, because they feel afraid that their immigration status will lead to being detained…It’s wrong…. This makes the law, not just anti-immigrant, but I believe it doesn’t match our essential values as a country.”  Because he made the comment to a Spanish newspaper, some have criticized his words, claiming that he should have made a stronger demonstration of his support by professing it in English; others are touched by the fact that he specifically reached out first to the Latino community, the obvious targets and victims of HB56.

Regardless of context, his words have been translated and quoted enough to make his position on the issue well-known.  Further, he has promised to make the DREAM Act and immigration reform a key part of his campaign platform over the next year.  Whether Obama’s actions will be enough to cancel out people’s deeply-running hurt from the record number of deportations over his presidency thus far, many of them of youth with no criminal record, remains to be seen.

Members of Congress, too, are actively demonstrating further support for the DREAMers and their opposition to Alabama’s bill by scheduling their own campaign to deal with its effects.  Eleven Democratic congress members, including Silvestre Reyes of Texas and Raul Grijalva of Arizona, plan to stand in solidarity in November 21st in front of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church.  This church, appropriately, is the same one at which the 1963 racial bombing occurred that resulted in the deaths of four young girls.  The congress members’ decision to meet at this significant site, then, marks not only their unity against racial hatred, but serves to designate DreamActivist.org, DREAMers, President Obama, and the congress members themselves as integral parts of the civil rights’ movement of the twenty-first century: the fight for immigrants’ rights, legal or illegal.

To the relief of many, official legal complaints have been filed against HB56 to the Civil Rights Division, from which a decision is still pending.  The U.S. Justice Department has also taken action to challenge the law.  In the meantime, though, officials are still stopping Latinos on the basis of appearance alone, and children continue to be absent from school.

It is the illegality of denying education to schoolchildren, whether in the country legally or illegally, around which many arguments center, a stance cemented by the 1982 Supreme Court case Plyler v Doe.  Though technically HB56 does not directly deny Alabama’s children access to the school system, instead claiming that the data being collected is for purely analytical purposes, for most, the line between collection and deportation is far too fine.  Since the bill’s passage, thousands have poured out of the state for fear of harassment, racial profiling, and deportation.  The subsequent devastating effects that this mass emigration has had on the state’s economy and commerce has caused even more people to protest the bill than under ordinary circumstances.

For one especially, Alabama has gone too far.  Mohammad Abdollahi, undocumented since he and his mother moved to the United States from Iran when he was a child, now co-founder of DreamActivist.org, professes that “[Alabama] is ground zero for hatred and discrimination” and that “now more than ever” is the time to join the fight to end the injustice that is plaguing the state.  Abdollahi, a DREAMer who has had his ambition and his future plans put on hold multiple times from the end of high school onward, has dedicated his time to leading the undocumented youth faction in the charge for immigration reform in the hopes that future generations will not have to endure the hardship and frustration of he and his family.

Encouraging people to be “undocumented and unafraid,” his efforts result in rallies like the one held in Montgomery this Tuesday.  With the movement behind him growing constantly, there is little doubt that his courageous future actions, and the actions of DreamActivist.org, President Obama, and his fellow DREAMers, will snowball into a movement that will leave both immigrants and the immigration system of the United States completely transformed.

(You can read more about Abdollahi and his work at http://www.dreamactivist.org.)