In the course of her work, Luiselli’s young daughter has heard about some of the children’s stories, and she repeatedly asks, as children do, “Tell me how it ends, Mamma.” Luiselli has no answers for her. There are, as yet, no happy endings, but toward the end of the book she offers a small hint of promise. It comes in the form of a decision by ten young Americans, just a few years older than the children of the intake questionnaires, to form a group that will help teenage refugees who have made it to the United States and managed to stay.
This is a profoundly moving book, one that, with its modest hundred pages and simple, teasing title, presents itself as a mere story guided by forty questions. But appearances are, after all, beguiling, and this is a most powerful story, beautifully told by Valeria Luiselli. I feel sure that whoever reads it will not regret it, nor easily forget it.
Jon Lee Anderson
Dorset, England
January 14, 2017
“Why did you come to the United States?” That’s the first question on the intake questionnaire for unaccompanied child migrants. The questionnaire is used in the federal immigration court in New York City where I started working as a volunteer interpreter in 2015. My task there is a simple one: I interview children, following the intake questionnaire, and then translate their stories from Spanish to English.
But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.
When the intake interview with a child is over, I meet with lawyers to deliver and explain my transcription and occasional notes. The lawyers then analyze the child’s responses, trying to come up with options for a viable defense against a child’s deportation and the “potential relief” he or she is likely to get. The next step is to find legal representation. Once an attorney has agreed to take on a case, the real legal battle begins. If that battle is won, the child will obtain some form of immigration relief. If it is lost, they will receive a deportation order from a judge.
I watch our own children sleep in the back seat of the car as we cross the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. I glance back now and then from the copilot’s seat at my ten-year-old stepson, visiting us from Mexico, and my five-year-old daughter. Behind the wheel, my husband concentrates on the road ahead.
It is the summer of 2014. We are waiting for our green cards to be either granted or denied and, in the meantime, we decide to go on a family road trip. We will drive from Harlem, New York, to a town in Cochise County, Arizona, near the U.S.-Mexico border.
According to the slightly offensive parlance of U.S. immigration law, for the three years or so that we had lived in New York we had been “nonresident aliens.” That’s the term used to describe anyone from outside the United States—“alien”—whether or not they are residents. There are “nonresident aliens,” “resident aliens,” and even “removable aliens”—that I know of. We wanted to become “resident aliens,” even though we knew what applying for green cards implied: the lawyers, the expenses, the many vaccinations and medical exams, the months of sustained uncertainty, the rather humiliating intermediate steps, such as having to wait for an “advance parole” document in order to be able to leave the country and be paroled back in, like a criminal, as well as the legal prohibition against traveling abroad, without losing immigration status, before being granted advance parole. Despite all that, we decided to apply.
When we finally sent out our applications, a few weeks before leaving for our road trip, we started feeling strange, somewhat out of place, a little circumspect—as if throwing that envelope in the blue mailbox on our street corner had changed something in us. We joked, somewhat frivolously, about the possible definitions of our new, now pending, migratory status. Were we “pending aliens,” or “writers seeking status,” or “alien writers,” or maybe “pending Mexicans”? I suppose, deeper down, we were simply asking ourselves, perhaps for the first time, that same question I now ask children at the beginning of each intake interview: “Why did you come to the United States?”
We didn’t have a clear answer. No one ever does. But the deed was done, we had filed our applications, and while we waited for an answer we were not allowed to leave the country. So, when summer arrived, we bought maps, rented a car, packed a few basics, made playlists, and left New York.
The green card application is nothing like the intake questionnaire for undocumented minors. When you apply for a green card you have to answer things like “Do you intend to practice polygamy?” and “Are you a member of the Communist Party?” and “Have you ever knowingly committed a crime of moral turpitude?” And although nothing can or should be taken lightly when you are in the fragile situation of asking for permission to live in a country that is not your own, there is something almost innocent in the green card application’s preoccupations with and visions of the future and its possible threats: polyamorous debauchery, communism, weak morals! The green card questionnaire has a retro kind of candor, like the grainy Cold War films we watched on VHS. The intake questionnaire for undocumented children, on the other hand, reveals a colder, more cynical and brutal reality. It reads as if it were written in high definition, and as you make your way down its forty questions it’s impossible not to feel that the world has become a much more fucked-up place than anyone could have ever imagined.
The process by which a child is asked questions during the intake interview is called screening, a term that is as cynical as it is appropriate: the child a reel of footage, the translator-interpreter an obsolete apparatus used to channel that footage, the legal system a screen, itself too worn out, too filthy and tattered to allow any clarity, any attention to detail. Stories often become generalized, distorted, appear out of focus.
Before the formal screening begins, the person conducting it has to fill in basic biographical information: the child’s name, age, and country of birth, the name of a sponsor in the United States, the people with whom he or she is living at the time, and a contact number and address. All these details have to be written down at the very top of the questionnaire.
A few spaces down, right before the first formal interview question, a line floats across the page like an uncomfortable silence:
Where is the child’s mother?_________father?_________
The interviewer has to write down whatever information the child can or will give to fill in those blanks—those two empty spaces that look a bit like badly stitched wounds. Too often, the spaces remain blank: all the children come without their fathers and mothers. And many of them do not even know where their parents are.
We are driving across Oklahoma in early July when we first hear about the wave of children arriving, alone and undocumented, at the border. On our long westbound drives we begin to follow the story on the radio. It’s a sad story that hits so close to home and yet seems completely unimaginable, almost unreal: tens of thousands of children from Mexico and Central America have been detained at the border. Nothing is clear in the initial coverage of the situation—which soon becomes known, more widely, as an immigration crisis, though others will advocate for the more accurate term “refugee crisis.”
Questions,