Life under ‘extreme hardship’

From New York Magazine, a very well-told story of the family trauma inflicted by our irrational immigration laws.

This is a story about how we came to understand and experience immigration law — what it’s like to feel the awful weight of the state in your daily life, pressing suddenly on the most intimate of choices. Though the details are personal, this is not really a story about me or my husband. Untold numbers with fewer means and in tighter straits have suffered more than we did, and they often ended up with permanent family separations. But our decade-long experience under this law, with its absurd hoops and cruel trials and capricious bureaucracy, was enough to make plain the morality of the law itself. Stories about immigrants so often invite judgment, offering a sympathetic character who in the end is deemed worthy of entry to this country. Indeed, as we learned, the law is based on this premise, that some families “deserve” to stay together, as if others do not. So it is the law, not immigrants’ lives, that demands our scrutiny.

The full story is here.