I have worked with Newcomers to the United States for over 30 years. The term Newcomers reflects our (colleagues here in New Mexico) chosen language to offer respect to the variety of experiences, often traumatizing and always life-altering, that immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, asylees, and others endure. I have witnessed many changes in the U.S.’s policies towards Newcomers, including some that were very painful to all communities involved in resettlement. To write that what’s going on today is the most painful, frightening and shocking time I’ve experienced is an understatement. Words don’t exist.
There are many threads to this complex issue. I live some of them. I am a descendant of both Native American and settler Ancestors. I know both lineages in my bones. I have learned very little about my Indigenous Ancestry because it was intentionally silenced and erased by two generations of settler Ancestors. That’s for another time. I have been told many stories of the challenges my settler Ancestors faced, propelling them to immigrate. I feel compassion, always, for their painful decision to leave their homeland. None of them was forced out, as refugees, asylum seekers and asylees are. These three “categories” of immigration describe a rigorous and intense legal process that thoroughly vets every aspect of the persons’ lives to ensure they are truly able to prove a well founded fear of persecution that threatens their very existence. None of them choose to have to flee home.
I have met thousands of Newcomers and thousands more still living in limbo in camps, detention centers, and foreign countries. I have heard just as many stories. This month, I am sharing one, sans identifying information other than the country he came from.
“Mo” came from Vietnam around the 1980’s. Many people are surprised to learn we still settle refugees from that war that was a formative experience of my childhood. Today, on “Black April”, 50 years to the day after the fall of Saigon, this is Mo’s story:
Mo was born several years before the war began to a Vietnamese mother and a European Father. When the war started, he was often called “ child of a whore”, so his mother made the excruciating decision to take him to a distant relative in another community when he was only 3. By 7, he had been abused enough that he fled, and spent 7 years living between the jungle and the streets. Finding himself in Saigon at the age of 14, he survived as he could and while helping in a local restaurant, met a service member from the United States. They struck up a friendship and 4 years later, with this chosen father’s help, Mo relocated to the US via another country where he underwent the rigorous legal process to become a refugee.
Arriving here on the cusp of adulthood, his new family helped him get his GED and consider many possible careers. I will never forget the light and the water in his eyes when he sat up a bit taller and told me: “I chose to join the Marines because I wanted to serve the country that welcomed me home.”
Mo served for thirty years. In that time, he served six tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was shot three times and the bullet that entered his back is what ended his military career. In his service he met a US president who knew his name and his story, and who awarded him a purple heart. The pride as he shared this was palpable; I felt as if I could breathe it in.
Mo had married and had 4 children. All were tragically lost in a car accident. After years of utter bereftness, and an inner commitment to healing and living the dreams he still had and attributed to living in a country where “dreams come true,” he began dating and fell in love with a Vietnamese woman who was visiting the U.S. They plan to marry, and she had hoped to move here. Together, they recently decided that his remaining in the US was not an option, because he would likely be forced to live without her. He, like I imagine many of us would, does not want to continue living and feeling alone. Within the year, Mo is leaving the United States, a country he loves, has served, and wishes to call home, to return to Vietnam. Mo, a naturalized US citizen, is making this heartbreaking decision because the current socio-political environment around immigration is a cascade of ever-changing, unsettling policies that make it feel too unsafe and unpredictable for him to bring his beloved here.
I asked Mo if he would share his story publicly someday. He looked at me through teary eyes, laughed, and simply said “I just did. Now, it’s your turn. Please share it so people understand the love I – all of us who come here as refugees – have for this country.”