Category: immigrant

despair

In the wake of the election, during protests and in discussions about the new political landscape, you often hear the notion that “we don’t have the luxury of despair”. This means that only those who aren’t affected by the new immigration laws, or lessened legal protection of diverse groups, can afford to despair. Despair becomes a sign of privilege. Those truly affected, on the other hand, know they will have to fight. No time to rest, no time to despair.

I experience despair.

You can argue that it’s because I am privileged. I am white, heterosexual, employed. I have a roof over my head, a car to drive, two passports. I can use gender neutral or gender designated bathrooms, no problem.

Or, I can tell you this:

I have two passports because I am a dual citizen. I am Swedish by birth, and American by choice. I became a US citizen in 2010. I received a certificate, a little flag, and a form letter signed by Barack Obama. For the past 6 and a half years I have felt increasingly American. I have become more and more comfortable thinking about myself as an American. I use “we” when I teach. I eat Peeps for Easter and I kind of like baseball.

I worked at a polling place on election day last year. The precinct where I worked voted around 70% democratic. The precinct where I live voted 80% democratic. But, we all know how it ended. Donald Trump was elected president.

And I find myself in a new situation. I don’t know where to turn. I see white friends in pictures from protests, defending “their” America. But I don’t identify with their America. Their America existed while I was still living in Sweden. Their high school memories live in a place I never knew. If we travel far enough back into their America we end up in a place where all I knew of America was negative: The Vietnam war, Nixon, and Harrisburg.

My America had a black president, and a black first lady. As a white immigrant I could fit into their definition of America, because their definition of America was an expanding, evolving, one. If I am to be defined by my skin color only I cannot be an American. I am lost.

elna georgina nilsson kratz, b. 1875

This is the ship manifest listing the names of those traveling from Göteborg to New York on June 23, 1896 on the S/S Island. One of the passengers was Elna Nilson, my grandfather’s younger sister. They reached New York on July 13, but after that I have no idea what happened to Elna. Unlike her brother she didn’t use their stepfather’s last name (Kratz). Elna Nilson is a very common name, making it impossible to trace her. Family history aside, tho, look how young these emigrants were: 16, 23, 17, 18. Elna was 21.

welcome to sweden

I’ve watched the first few episodes of this series, Welcome to Sweden. It’s a romantic comedy about a guy who moves from New York to Stockholm to be with his Swedish girlfriend. There are cultural clashes of course, and language problems. And it’s pretty funny, to me, to see what Swedish culture looks like through American eyes, and exaggerated for effect. There are lots of details, like the omnipresent Dala Horses. Swedes may think that’s a stereotype, but let’s be honest. We spread those things like wildfire. I have two in my house in California, plus a rarity: a Dala Rooster given to me on my first Easter. At work I have a Dala horse ornament. I don’t remember how it ended up there, but there it is.

All women in the series, except for Lena Olin, are blonde. As a non-blonde Swede all my life I’m slightly miffed, but I also know that the impression anyone traveling to Scandinavia gets is that everyone is blonde. That includes myself, after 20 years in the US, by the way.

Welcome to Sweden will air on NBC this summer. It’s on TV4 in Sweden right now.

why twinkies? we thought it was funny.

John Oliver is a British comedian working on The Daily Show. This summer he is filling in as host while regular host Jon Stewart is away. For this reason the NPR show Fresh Air recently broadcast an interview they did with John Oliver a couple of years ago.

The last couple of minutes of that interview John Oliver tells host Terri Gross about working in the US, on The Daily Show, before he had a green card. Terri Gross assumes that means he had been working on TV, right under everyone’s noses, illegally.

So, John Oliver explains to Terri Gross the difference between a working visa and a green card.

In my experience, however many views Americans have on immigration, very few understand what visas (the right to cross a border during a certain time period, sometimes also the right to work in the foreign country), green cards (the right to live and work permanently in the US), and citizenship (the right to vote, and various duties to serve), really mean.

One of my colleagues became an American citizen a few years ago, and to celebrate there was a little lunch-time party for him. Everyone was asked to bring a small “typical American” gift. My friend and I wrapped a box of Twinkies since the new American was something of a food snob. Someone else gave away one of his own pay stubs, adding, “Well, I guess it’s time for you to start paying taxes!”.

Really? You think people who are not citizens pay no tax, when they have regular jobs? If that were the case there would be fewer new citizens, I’d imagine.

In the radio interview John Oliver talks about traveling to London to renew his visa at the American embassy every year. One year the person interviewing him made a joke, stone faced, asking him for one reason why he should be let back into the US if all he was going to do was continuing criticizing the country?

The point of this entire story is that at that moment, John Oliver said, his blood froze.

As an immigrant, or a foreigner, you are incredibly vulnerable. Even if you crack jokes for a living, there are times you’ll find jokes highly inappropriate, and your fear takes over. Even if you are highly educated, or highly successful, you are still vulnerable. Someone gets to make the decision whether or not to stamp your passport, and there is very little you can do about it.

I did my interview for my green card at the American embassy in Stockholm. When I was done I was going to meet a friend for lunch. My sense of direction is poor under any circumstances, but even I know the difference between walking towards the city center, and walking away from the city, out onto a picturesque island. I had walked a mile in the wrong direction before I realized my mistake.

how much do you know about your colon?

I had a colonoscopy in December*. It’s a standard cancer screening procedure in the United States once you’ve turned 50. They didn’t find any cancer, but both the doctor and the paperwork I was given (the paperwork included fresh pictures of my insides; one showing my intact appendix) stated that I have a “grossly redundant colon”.

In plain language that means that my colon is several times the length of a normal person’s. It’s a nuisance for a doc trying to navigate a tiny camera, but it’s not dangerous, and has no symptoms.

A grossly redundant colon is a hereditary condition, though.

So at one point I asked my parents about it, to learn which one of them had given me my extra-long intestines. My parents are both in their 80s, and have lived their whole lives in Sweden, a country with national health care and some of the best research hospitals in the world.

Neither of my parents knew anything about the length of their colons, because neither of them had ever had a colonoscopy.

According to an article in the New York Times today Americans pay more for medical procedures than people in any other well developed country. In the case of colonoscopies, American medical centers bill insurance companies $7-8000 for a screening procedure that would cost $650 in another country, if it’s even performed. Only in the US are colonoscopies the go-to screening test for colon cancer, because there aren’t, actually, any data to support that colonoscopies are better than less expensive screening methods. Another example: A nasal spray that costs $108 in the United States will run you $21 in Spain.

“The United States spends about 18 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, nearly twice as much as most other developed countries.”, the NYT article states. Winners? Health care providers, manufacturers, drug companies, all working together to drive up costs. Losers? Whoever pays the insurance premiums.

* Also known as the day when Dan wasn’t white enough to drive me home.