"Strawberry Picking // Field workers in California are almost exclusively immigrants who work at back-breaking labor to support themselves and their families. Remember them with gratitude the next time you're buying produce.: Photo & caption by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
My sweaty palm pulled against the car’s leather interior, hot from the nearly 40c heat. Scooting out the rear side door of the car, I pulled my backpack tighter on to my small, childish frame and searched for the eyes of an adult for comfort, reassurance – an anchor in this sea of uncertainty. Just then, a policeman blew his whistle, “Move inside!” he shouted as I hurried to keep up with the adults, who were walking toward the cool air-conditioned air coming out of the airport. Quickening my pace, I stopped hard and abruptly at the stanchions, watching the adults talk to a local Emirati man in a white dishdasha, all three sharing a version of the same grimace. I had spent a lot of time in airports in my short ten or twelve years, but this felt decidedly different. My backpack that would have held a clue as to where we were flying to, instead simply held a rolled up towel and my water bottle. Our big black suitcases too, came out of the car too easily, as they too were mostly empty.
“Yalla, bye”, the man in the dishdasha said. As he turned to hurriedly leave the departures section of the airport, then just in its infancy, a mere shadow of what the city’s International Airport is today. His naal sandals slapped the cold hard granite as he walked away, looking down at his nokia cellphone, while his other hands parsed prayer beads. My thoughts drifted away to earlier that week, when I had attended my school’s weekly assembly, where a classmate who was always selected to recite the Quran chose Surah An-Nisa:
"Worship Allah and associate nothing with Him, and to parents do good, and to relatives, orphans, the needy, the near neighbor, the neighbor farther away, the companion at your side, the traveler, and those whom your right hands possess.”
Suddenly, I felt my arm being gently tugged toward the baggage and body scanners. The bored looking officer waved a baton at me, telling me with his gestures to put my bag through the scanner and go over to the women’s side to be frisked. I gulped. What clues would a towel and water bottle among haphazardly-packed but relatively empty luggage give away? Walking away, I saw him scan what looked to be our airline tickets.
Once every two years, we returned to India to visit family - always during the summer holidays, when the temperatures in Dubai would soar to 48 degree celsius, and the monsoon and the swarms of mosquitoes and fire ants settled like a heavy blanket on Southern India. Despite my hatred of those things, I was excited to see my cousins, to whom I’d tell tall tales of life in the Middle East to compensate for the envy I felt at their Konkani and Hindi skills. But no, I thought, we hadn’t performed the necessary rituals before a trip to India – shopping for gifts for every person we might come across – family or not, there was no way we would show up empty handed.
At the ticketing counter, we performed the delicate dance of explaining that no, we didn’t have any checked luggage, we would drag our laughably empty suitcases on as carry on baggage. The agent looked incredulous. In a time when every passenger got an allowance of 60 kilos each, hand baggage as well as a personal item, someone not using that allotment on their yearly visit home raised eyebrows. “We sent all our luggage earlier”, someone volunteered. The agent nodded, that was common enough. After allowing them to tag my backpack, we ventured onward through the Duty Free and customs, where our passports were exit stamped, and into the large departures hall to wait. And wait. And wait, as I drifted in and out of sleep.
What happened next is a blur: after waiting for hours in the airport for a flight we were supposedly meant to board, we were ushered through a back door and into a car that waited for us, now in the arrivals section of the airport, and rather unceremoniously back “home”. That night, I mercifully returned to sleep in my own bed, in a house, that remained largely untouched. And while a real explanation for the charade was never given to me, whispers around me help me piece it together: we had been deported.
The country has strict regulations on who can enter the country and for what purpose. Workers sign binding contracts that grant their employers and local “sponsors” control over their passports, which are only returned once a year during annual leave. Children of workers remain under their parents' sponsorship—women can stay on as dependents until their early twenties, while young men must secure a job or be sponsored by an institution like a university. If the family’s breadwinner is fired, the company shuts down, or the authorities decide they are no longer welcome—regardless of how long they’ve worked there—the employee and their dependents have just 21 days to leave the country. And one of those things had just happened to us.
It is not a unique story by any means. In any number of airports across the Gulf, this story plays out in a loop. From low-wage, blue collar workers who built the country’s skyscrapers to Europeans who chanced upon a high paying job offer during a gap year or a “lad’s trip”, the labor market and the people who pull the strings behind it are volatile. At school, I’d sometimes encounter girls crying about a mother that had to go back home to Pakistan, Nepal or the Philippines, a sibling that they would not see for a while, or a father who lost his visa and the family’s status because a relationship with a company or local sponsor had turned sour. Sometimes, even now, I see friends’ whose parents spent their entire lives in the Middle East being trapped in a system that unfairly tips against the worker, plead their case on facebook and ask for help through gofundme to labour the arduous process of court appeals, many of which are fruitless because the country’s small ethnic population controls most of the government and its functions.
I returned to school after that weekend, groggy and oddly jet-lagged for someone who hadn’t been on an airplane, nor travelled across time zones. I felt disoriented and confused, and despite being taught not to lie, a lie was required to keep this secret from any of the girls at school and anyone who might then inadvertently report us. Through whispers, I learned that a man, a good Samaritan, had heard our plight, that the company folded, our visas were canceled and took pity on a family with two small children. He offered to help us escape the damnation of deportation and through a real life loophole, helped us find a way to stay in the only home we ever knew. Though I can’t remember much about him, I have begun to think of him more as I watch a similar fate play out in Trump America to children as old as I was, and some even younger.
A decade after we were deported, I was living in Canada, navigating the seemingly endless maze of immigration and more than once falling short and getting ensnared in its bureaucratic web. One fateful trip to Cuba with the wrong paperwork left me scrambling for days, relying on the Canadian government to help me return to my life. It was Canada that saved me—it's Minister of Immigration personally contacting the embassy in Havana to ensure my safe passage "home," where I was met with yet another stack of paperwork to finally become a citizen –none of which could be submitted digitally—I finally felt a moment of relief. I had done everything right. But a month later, long past the expected deadline, I found my mailbox jammed with an oversized package. My application had been returned and rejected over a single missing signature. That was the final blow. I was now an illegal immigrant.
Living in the liminal space reserved for those who have lost their immigration status, I became paranoid, convinced that every cop was watching me, that any Customs and Border Services agent had me in their crosshairs. Without health insurance–revoked the moment I lost status—I moved through the world with heightened caution. On public transit, I covered my face. At home, I scrubbed my hands raw in every attempt to avoid illness. Every minor ailment was a stark reminder of the legal limbo I now inhabited. Then, COVID broke out and among all my paranoia and stressors, I joined the world in the fear that a single cough may prove to be my undoing.
It’s been years and a lot of paperwork since then, but I am now finally a Canadian citizen, fortunate to live in a country where health insurance, though flawed, isn’t tied to my job or, for the most part, my legal status. But having faced deportation, visa invalidity, and over a year without status, I feel a deep kinship with the undocumented. It pains me to see self-professed Christians leading the charge to separate families, abandon children, and vilify immigrants.
The right’s refrain is clear: “Don’t come here illegally, and you won’t be deported.” But what of the children brought as infants, for whom America is the only home they’ve ever known? What of parents fleeing poverty in lands shaped by colonialism and economic devastation? What of those escaping war, where violence shatters families and consumes entire communities? These are questions that demand mercy and humility—yet they fall on deaf ears, much like Bishop Budde’s sermon to Trump.
The irony is striking. Those who wield scripture against the vulnerable forget its most fundamental teachings. Long before borders, before papers determined worth, the bible made made many calls for justice, too many choose to ignore:
"Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt." (Exodus 22:21)
"The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God." (Leviticus 19:34)
"And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt. Fear the Lord your God and serve him. Hold fast to him and take your oaths in his name."
(Deuteronomy 10:19)
"Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this." (Deuteronomy 24:17-18)
"This is what the Lord Almighty said: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.’" (Zechariah 7:9-10)
"For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me... Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." (Matthew 25:35-40)
"Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it." (Hebrews 13:2)
I wonder how many leading the charge against immigrants have forgotten these words, or never learned them at all. If they had, they might see that borders do not define belonging, and that a nation’s true character is revealed in how it treats the most vulnerable. I was lucky—saved by a loophole, the kindness of strangers and a system that, despite its flaws, left a door open. Not everyone is as fortunate and while we can’t give people fortune, we can give them something that is in short supply in these divided times – compassion.
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