18

And for a few seconds all that can be heard are the whisperings of the men and women crossing the borders.

—Emiliano Monge

For nearly three months after he was deported from the United States for the second time, Arnovis hardly left the family property. When he did venture out, he kept his gaze down, avoided contact with neighbors, and didn’t reach out to old friends, or to anybody else. By late August, he couldn’t handle the isolation and started sneaking out for a few hours of paid work: installing a barbed-wire fence with mongollano posts, clearing a plot of land, or harvesting cashews. By late September, after having burned through a number of long-term projects—he had even finished building his sister’s house—he was desperate for steady income. Despite the perceived danger, he went back to the ranch in Isla de Mendez, where he’d worked earlier in the year. His old boss gave him his job back, offering seven dollars a day for the same hot grunt work—harvesting corn for cattle feed, lugging around tubs and sacks, rolling out lines of barbed wire, hind-slapping cows into their corral, and shoveling manure.

Meybelín, meanwhile, still seemed touchy, not her old goofy self. She’d engage by kicking around her yellow soccer ball, disciplining the pig, or playing with the puppies, but she was quieter than before, would stare off into space, throw uncharacteristic tantrums, and turn nervous when Arnovis left her side. The whole family kept a close eye on her, and Arnovis worried that the effects of the separation and the journey were lying dormant, and would erupt at some point later in her life. Meybelín liked to remember the little babies she saw in the safe houses in Mexico, or the long, snake-like bridge they passed underneath at the US border, but what other details, he wondered, what other moments did she remember, or forget?

Arnovis wasn’t sure if the gang knew he was back. Probably they did, but what could he do? He started thinking about trying to head north a third time—a fourth if you count his first deportation from Mexico. He told me, repeatedly, that he was ready to leave—the next few days, the next week, the week after that—but plans never materialized. He waited for his pro bono attorneys, in Texas, to see if they could find a way to parole him into the United States, though the bar for being granted protection with a prior deportation would be significantly higher, and, even if he were allowed to remain in the US, he would not be eligible for citizenship and could never leave the country without losing his protected status. He waited for WhatsApp messages from his lawyers that came weeks late. Hang tight, they told him. We’re looking for options. Options never came.

One day, in October, picking up some gasoline for the chainsaw and the water pump—there’s no gas station in Corral, though a few families sell fuel in gallon-size water bottles—he saw two young men he didn’t recognize. Hey, vato, one of them called to him. Loan me two dollars.

It wasn’t a loan. It was a tax.

Sure, he said, and handed over a couple bills.

You from here?

Yeah, Arnovis said. The two gang members were both side-eyeing him as he turned and walked away, a bottle of light-yellow combustible fluid in each hand.

I asked if he was nervous during the interaction. He said he was. You get used to it, he told me, but not really. You expect it, he corrected himself, but you don’t get used to it.

~

Beto, my Mejicanos cicerone, told me about a tactic that’s sometimes used for tax collection in the capital city. A gang member sashays up to you in that smooth-limping, gangster walk, digs into his pocket, and then pulls out a single bullet.

You see this. See this bullet? The tax collector pinches it between thumb and forefinger, holding it up to the sky. The bullet only costs a dollar, he says, but will take you to a whole other world.

If you want to stay in this world, at least for today, you better fork over two dollars.

Arnovis wants to stay in this world. He needs to—for Meybelín. When the tax collectors come to collect, he pays.

~

In the evenings, at the Sudanese camp behind the supermarket of Calais, France, Daniel Trilling reports in Lights in the Distance, men would sit around the fire and burn their fingertips. “They were mutilating themselves to avoid detection by the Eurodac police database … ‘You put one end of a metal pole in the fire,’ [one of the men] said, ‘and wait for it to go red-hot. Then take it out and run your fingertips along the glowing end, one by one, for an hour or two, until they’re too blistered to be recognized by a scanning machine.”

Identity is as singular as a fingerprint, but harder to blister away. If you are persecuted because of an immutable characteristic, because of who you are, you may qualify for asylum. Asylum seekers looking for protection from the state are asking: Can I be? The answer comes back: Yes, but only if you cannot be. We can only grant you permission to be here if, because of who you are, you cannot be there.

What pieces of their identities—leaving their home, their culture, their language, their family—are asylum seekers willing to burn away to stay alive? What gauntlets of suffering are we forcing them to run before we are willing to bring them in under our roof?

In order to live, you must be unable to live.

~

In 1959 Otto Kirchheimer described the concept of asylum as “situated at the crossroads of national and international law, compassion and self-interest, raison d’état and human capacity for shame.” Nations may have pushed, twisted, and stretched their capacity for shame, but they seem less inclined to test the flexibility of their compassion. One of the principal underlying assumptions for border fortification, for asylum deterrence and denial, is that the survival of the state is threatened by extending the roof, by opening the gates. In Anna Seghers’s novel Transit, the unnamed narrator, a Jew trying to flee occupied France, asks, “And what if some of these poor souls, still bleeding physically and spiritually, had fled to this house, what harm could it do to a giant nation if a few of these saved souls, worthy, half-worthy, or unworthy, were to join them in their country—how could it possibly harm such a big country?”

For asylum seekers, raison d’état—the motivations of the state—impinges upon raison d’être, upon being itself.

~

The “border” is more than a physical obstruction—more than a wall or a fence—more than a line on a map, more than a political organizing tool. The border produces and maintains extreme levels of inequality—some live, and live comfortably, and some suffer, and suffer miserably. For asylum seekers, the border is the knife-edge of the crisis—the turning point, as Hippocrates defined crisis, toward either recovery or death. Some shall live, is what the border says.

Some.

~

It’s not possible for any one country to extend protection to everybody—a roof is only so large, can only be extended so far until it buckles and falls. But if we continue to organize the world according to nation-states—not by any means a given—we have to reassess refugee and asylum agreements. Otherwise, we have to be willing to consign millions upon millions of people to Untergang—to, in Adam Knowles’s words, the “perdition, downfall, doom, extinction, and ruin” that denied asylum seekers are subjected to. Who are today’s pirates for which we need agreements of asylos? Who is being plundered and dispossessed?

As hundreds of millions are left without homes, we must confront whether or not we are willing to live in an era of global apartheid—a world of comfort and wealth next to a world of fear and a constant clambering at the gates. We must decide if, as some hunker down and defend their privilege, we are willing to see more and more of humanity amassed along border walls into camps of squalor and desperation.

~

We’re often told that the only long-term approach to stabilizing the modern refugee crises is improving the conditions in sending countries. But, besides curing humanity of our penchant for war and plunder, and ending carbon emissions, we should also be wary of “development.” Honduras stands as a warning against careless injections of cash and arms. What was once pejoratively referred to as “USS Honduras” is, today, a high-crime paradise teetering on the verge of a failed state, annually expulsing tens of thousands of refugees. Injecting a country with US-style “aid” is not vaccinating it against a virus; it is, too often, injecting it with one.

“The extraction and looting of natural resources by war machines,” Achille Mbembe writes, “goes hand in hand with brutal attempts to immobilize and spatially fix whole categories of people.”

~

Practically, asylum policy is an exercise in triage, that “gentle violence” of deciding who is worthy of protection and who is not. But decisions issued by judges and asylum officers reflect on them as much as on the seekers. Asylum triage, that is, exposes the heart of a nation as much as the individual welcomed or refused. Philosopher Christopher Yates calls these decisions “moments at the doorstep of our identity.”

In their essay “The Truth from the Body: Medical Certificates as Ultimate Evidence for Asylum Seekers,” anthropologists Didier Fassin and Estelle D’Halluin write: “Asylum seekers are expected to unveil themselves, to recount their histories, and to exhibit their wounds.” And they do: that “moment at the doorstep” is a moment of unveiling as much as it is of arrival. But what about us—those doing the weighing, judging, and triaging? It would be naive to think that we remain unrevealed by the encounter. What about our history, our wounds, our veiled motivations?

What we ultimately fear, what we ultimately hate, is, so often, an outward manifestation of our own action or inaction. As Kristeva puts it, “The foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity … By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself.” Dispossessing and denying the stranger or refugee does not keep us safe or in possession. It exposes us.

Before letting him take refuge in Colonus, Theseus asks Oedipus, “What is your worst fear?” Oedipus might have responded: What’s yours?

~

“It is not we, as hosts, who are masters of the scene,” Yates writes, “but we who are very much in question in a provocative way.” The bravado of bordering is little more than exhibitionism, a manifestation of a nation’s internal conflict or malady. Researcher Nick Megoran, in analyzing the political dispute at the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan border, writes, “The state border, although physically at the extremities of the polity, can be at the heart of nationalist discourse about the meaning of the nation.” Greg Grandin, channeling Freud, writes that America’s “obsession with fortification against what’s outside is symptomatic of trouble that exists inside.”

Perhaps we can’t extend our roof because the foundation is in shambles.

~

But how? we must ask—how do we make this world more habitable? How do we invoke and uphold, for everyone, the “right to the earth’s surface,” as Kant once exhorted? Gibney answers that “humanitarianism is a modest, sober, and painstakingly realistic criterion.” Betts and Collier suggest turning refugee camps into “charter cities.” Dana Leigh Marks pushes for an independent immigration court—breaking it out from the Department of Justice. Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore promotes the paradigm of abolition geography, which “starts from the homely premise that freedom is a place.”

How do we arrive there?

~

It’s easy to be outraged; it’s hard to act, or even to come up with reasonable actions. Waiting for the government to offer to share its roof, or to implement any positive change, will be waiting too long. Meanwhile, instead of hoping for change or waiting for a radical rethink of refugee policies, we should open our churches, temples, mosques, schools, and homes. We should build communities that are willing and able to receive those in need, not merely incarcerate or expel them. Practically, this means boldly and emphatically resisting federal law. It means building on ICE-out-of-community efforts, and it means taking immediate, active steps toward offering sanctuary, offering love and welcome to people like Hilda and Ivan. It means fighting the transnational capitalists who are despoiling our planet, and building a more just and sustainable world.

The highest virtue, Emerson wrote, is always against the law. The highest virtue may also be impossible. Both should be spurs to action.

~

In Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Monseigneur Bienvenu (a Pecksniffian name if there ever was one) offers welcome to Jean Valjean: “This is not my house; it is Christ’s. It does not ask any guest his name but whether he has an affliction. You are suffering; you are hungry and thirsty; you are welcome. And don’t thank me; don’t tell me that I am taking you into my house. This is the home of no man, except the one who needs refuge. I tell you, a traveler, you are more at home here than I.”

Bienvenu’s speech recalls the Albanian proverb: Our home is first God’s house, second our guest’s house, and third our family’s house.

~

In 2018 in The Hague, a church began holding a round-the-clock religious service in order to protect an Armenian asylum-seeking family from deportation. Under a centuries-old tradition, Dutch authorities can’t enter a church while a service is underway, and so the church called out to religious leaders from around the country to come and hold mass. The continuous service lasted for ninety-six days, and only ended after the government agreed to review the case. One church member told a reporter, simply, “We have to be hosts.”

~

This reality is that the world is uninhabitable for some of us. Politics, colonialism and neocolonialism, heedless greed, obscene waste, the centuries-long extravagant eructation of carbon dioxide, and forever wars have dispossessed millions of people across the globe. The credo of contemporary politics embodies the logic of the border: some shall live.

“Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience,” Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others. But we are not just spectators. We—our way of life—are enactors of calamity.

If we are not actively working to curb the calamity, we are its participants, its instigators, its hellions.

What was unprecedented in the twentieth century’s refugee crises was “not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one,” Arendt wrote. Her former sweetheart, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, responded, in his way: “The real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses. The real plight of dwelling lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must learn to dwell.”

What is the nature of dwelling? How do we learn to dwell? We might strive, in German poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s words, to “dwell poetically on this earth.” But what does it mean to dwell poetically? Derrida offers that “an act of hospitality can only be poetic.”

Poetry—our stories, our shared narratives—is what ties the here to the hearth—is what forges a home. The root of the word poetry, poiesis, is to make. To dwell poetically is to make together, to raise a roof.

Empathy is not a passive act. It is listening to someone and then actively sharing in their story. The opposite of dispossession is a dwelling together.

~

Fifteen months after Meybelín and Arnovis were reunited, I went back to Corral de Mulas for another visit, to see how they were doing. Arnovis had gone back to his job—the same ranch, the same shitty pay, the same hot muck-buckets, and the same stubborn sun. He had been given a raise: eight dollars a day. He didn’t have any other options. His father was recently diagnosed with kidney cancer. Meybelín needed school supplies. They all needed to eat. In short, the family needed money.

~

A new president had taken office in El Salvador a few months earlier, and the national murder rate had dropped significantly. Homicides dipped in Usulután as well, but not as much. In the last six weeks before I showed up again, there had been two murders in Corral de Mulas—both gang-related. The most recent was one of Arnovis’s coworkers: shot to death after a cockfight at the nearby restaurant, El Delfín. The family had heard the gunshots. A few weeks before that, two of his other coworkers were driving their boss’s car on an errand and were shot at. They escaped unharmed.

It’s better than before, Arnovis told me, but it’s still bad. The fear is always there, he said. It’s constant.

Every time Mey hears someone mention the United States, Arnovis told me, she says, I was there! I was there but then they left me. They sent me back. They put me in prison. And, he said, to hear such a young child say that she was in prison, it’s …

He didn’t finish the sentence.

I feel ashamed, he said. For her, so young, to have that memory.

After talking for a while, I asked him if I could ask Meybelin some questions. We goofed around a lot together—played tic-tac-toe, drew, or kicked around a soccer ball—but I’d hardly asked her about the trip itself or the separation. He called her over and she plopped down in a plastic chair to my left. She was wearing a yellow Peppa Pig tank top, a small white bow on the breast, and short pink shorts. She had one outsize front tooth—broad toothless gaps on either side. There were little turtle earrings in her ears. Arnovis, shirtless, was in his hammock next to us.

I asked Meybelín if she sometimes thinks about the trip they took. She nodded. Arnovis told her to answer me out loud. Yes, she said. When do you think about it? I asked. She sighed … I remember, she said … crossing the river. I asked what sparks the memories, what she’s doing when she remembers. She thought about it for a few moments, and then said, It makes me want to cry.

It’s okay, I said, and asked if she wanted to talk to someone about it—her dad, or a friend, another adult. (Arnovis had told me he wanted her to see a psychologist, though accessing and paying for one was out of reach.) She didn’t answer. She hardly even moved. I thanked her, and then she shifted from the chair to the hammock, sinking in with her father.

Later that day she showed me a sketchbook she kept to draw in and practice writing. There were childish doodles: a house, a volcano, stick figures, scribbles. On almost every page, sometimes multiple times on the same page, she had written, Te amo Arnovis. Te amo Arnovis. Te amo Arnovis.

~

Arnovis and I were sitting under the single bare light bulb. There had been a storm that evening, and the air seemed scrubbed clean and redolent with life—bursting, damp, and green. There was a soft breeze, the quiet of roosting birds, the calm slap of distant water.

When I crossed the river into the US, Arnovis told me, I could feel it—I was less human.

He was talkative that night, but he was speaking quietly, almost whispering. I tried to hear every syllable.

It’s shitty, he said softly. Está perro. But it’s what I had to do. I felt an emptiness. It was like taking off in a plane, with nothing in your hands anymore, nothing in your control. My world was behind me. There was an emptiness. A separation.

Everybody else had gone to bed. I was leaving the next morning. It felt like he had something to say, and he was saying it, but there would always be something I wouldn’t understand. I asked him what he was after in life. What he wanted. My only dream, he told me, is to wake up and be able to smile at my daughter. That’s my dream.

Is that too much to ask?