You Don't Know the Half of It

Short Story Long

ML Counseling Blog | Immigration Evaluations | Audience: Potential Clients

There's a story we tell ourselves about immigration in this country, and it's usually a short one. Someone married an American. Someone crossed a border. Case closed, motive assumed. But I've sat with enough people to know the short version rarely holds up once you hear the whole thing. It's a Westernized, American viewpoint. When someone marries a person from another country, the assumption is that it's transactional. When someone flees their home country, it's because they were living in poverty and came to the United States for the American Dream. This immigrant is just trying to get into the United States to benefit from someone else. And I won't pretend those cases don't exist. They do.

But what about the instances where someone actually did fall in love? What about the instances where someone suffered from political persecution? Or someone who was trafficked? Someone who was promised work, a fresh start, only to have their documents taken and their movement controlled the moment they arrived. Their labor, or worse, became someone else's profit, with the threat of exposure to immigration authorities used to keep them silent.

What happens to someone who is here and has little to no resources because they have no one they can turn to in this country, because all their potential support is connected to their abuser? Someone who has experienced physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. And the person who brought them here uses all of it, the lack of resources, the lack of a support system, to keep that abuse going. No financial means. No financial opportunities. I have nowhere else I can go. This is the sole person I have in this country. And now they're holding me hostage, using my immigration status and my financial limitations against me.

There's no dramatic music, no clear villain everyone can point to. Just someone slowly finding out they have no way out. I want to be clear that this isn't a one-sided experience. This happens to men and to women. It's fair game for everybody.

We also assume that someone who leaves their home country had nothing to lose there, that they were only ever running from something. That's not always true either. Sometimes that person had a job. A home. A family. A career. And they walked away from all of it because they wanted a life they couldn't have back home.

They left because they had no other choice. Political persecution. A threat to their safety from their own government, their own political leaders. I had no other choice. This was a matter of life or death. And sometimes staying alive doesn't even mean the danger is over, because if someone can't get to you, they may try to get to your family instead.

But add in the layer of no finances, no means, no resources in a country that isn't yours, and staying gets a lot more complicated than people assume. When people ask why someone would stay in a situation like this, why they wouldn't just leave, this is what it can look like. Sometimes it's fight. Sometimes it's flight. Sometimes it's fawn. Sometimes it's freeze. And people who were born and raised here, with family right down the street, still struggle to walk away from situations far less isolating than this one.

An immigration evaluation gives that person a chance to talk about what actually happened. Not what we assume happened. Not what it looked like from the outside. This is not what I planned for. This is not what I hoped for. But this is what this person did with my status, and this is what I lived through. That deserves to be heard, without any bias.

I think we lose sight of our shared humanity sometimes. When I see the comments, the assumptions people make about immigrants from different backgrounds, I know a lot of it comes from a lack of understanding rather than malice. And an evaluation gives someone the chance to speak into that gap. Let me shed some light here. You may not understand it, but I'm willing to have this conversation. That gets overlooked far too often.

I'm not here to sway anyone one way or another. I'm here to give someone's experience a voice, in hopes that they get met with a little more understanding about how they ended up where they are.

Because it's not always so black and white.