Written by Sherry Zhang
Last November, I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a policy conference. My colleague, a Korean-American woman, and I decided to rent a car and drive South to the White Sands National Monument after our conference presentations, about 100 miles north of the border of Mexico. Before arriving to the National Park, we were stopped at a border patrol checkpoint. Border patrol checkpoints require motor vehicle drivers to stop and verify their U.S. citizenship statuses. Growing up, I would make a yearly trip to the U.S.-Canadian border with my parents to renew our TN Visa. My parents and I had never gone through an internal border control on our way to the border. Currently, there are very few border patrol checkpoints near the border of Canada. Most of these checkpoints are located in Southwestern states. This reflects the history of border control in the United States and Mexico – racial boundaries to separate whites from Mexicans [1].
Having not encountered anything like this before, I had no idea what to expect. I pulled up to the border patrol agent, with my colleague on my side, and was asked where I was going. Then I was asked whether I was a U.S. citizen, and where I was born. The border patrol agent assumed that my colleague and I were sisters, and after my colleague replied her birth place, the agent asked, “you too?” I nodded yes, out of fear. I had not brought any documentation (green card and passport) with me other than my drivers’ license.
After being let through the border patrol checkpoint, my colleague and I breathed a huge sigh of relief for not being pulled over for further inspection like we had seen other cars in front of us had. I thought about my own status as a Chinese-Canadian, green-card holder at the time. What privileges did I have being born in Canada, not having an “accent,” and being identified as part of the “model minority?” How would my treatment from the border patrol agent change if my mother, with limited English proficiency, or father went through? What if I were Latina? Would I be asked about my birthplace if I were white?
During my citizenship oath ceremony in February of this year, a white woman came up to me and congratulated me on becoming a new citizen. “Welcome to America,” she exclaimed, although I had been living in the United States for 14 years at the time. I thanked her, and she told me my English was very good. “Which country are you from?” I told her that I grew up in Canada. I thought about Grace Lee Boggs, who described a similar experience in her autobiography. After being asked her nationality several times, the person who asked would often say “But you speak English so well” [2]. Boggs remarked, “But the message behind the sweetness was that being Chinese and speaking English well were just as incompatible as being Chinese and American” [2]. Boggs wrote about her experiences in the 1930s, and I was not surprised that these microaggressions still occur today. Historically, Asian immigrants were always seen as “foreigners” [3].
What does assimilation mean? Sociologist Milton Gordon described different stages of assimilation, including adopting the language and customs of the majority group, intermarrying, identifying with the majority group [4]. However, assimilation is described as what the immigrant can do to “incorporate” into U.S. society. What is not included is how others respond to assimilation – what does assimilation mean if we are constantly seen as alien?
References
[1] Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
[2] Boggs, Grace Lee. Living for Change: An Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. P. 10.
[3] Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. P.5.
[4] Gordon, Milton. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.