How does it feel? It feels like you’re a pardoned turkey. You are one of the fewest few, one of those who get to keep the life they have built. Look around at your life, at the scaffolding of routine, the gray couch that you saved for, the business you’re working to start, the living room you painted that precise shade of Sherwin-Williams yellow, the faces you kiss goodnight. It is that simplest luxury: You get to not be uprooted, at any moment, from all of that.
And after all these years of alternating between stoicism and hope, I am so angry. I’m grateful for my reprieve and for my family’s, but filled with a retroactive, reverberating fury at the broken system.
I’m furious because true justice is something greater than pardoning turkeys. It is more expansive than letting the odd exception pass through a thicket of expensive bureaucracy and codified racism, and hailing the lucky, made-it-with-an-inch-to-spare few as emblematic of the system working.
Sarah Mathews
Good story (in this case a happy end) about the struggles of immigrants and the unreasonably long waits to get a Green Card. It’s another example of failure in the American system, bogged down by bureaucracy, arcane rules and discrimination.
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