Twencennial American

What my two-decade journey as a Canadian living in the United States says about this year’s election

Twenty years ago this month, I stepped up to a U.S. Immigration podium at Montreal airport, Canadian passport and plane ticket in hand, bound for Los Angeles.

My trip lasted exactly an hour.

American Immigration officials had me all figured out. I triggered what’s known as a pattern of preconceived intent: all that luggage, a desktop Mac from those pre-smartphone days, plus some correspondence I’d packed with me from movie producers, short-term apartment rentals, and family relations—noob mistake. Oh, I wasn’t actually trying to settle in L.A., at least not yet. Unlike many would-be immigrants, I could reasonably go home, albeit tail between my legs, Joe Gillis-in-Sunset-Boulevard style. I was giving myself four months to see how things would work out, much like any other Hollywood-bound dreamer from podunks near and far. Only difference was, my not-so-podunk happened to be north of an important imaginary line.

“You can’t just go and move to the United States,” growled one of those officials as he made some entries into his computer, handing me back my passport after a seeming eternity of police-style intimidation questions. I didn’t realize what was going on at first: I was being refused entry to America. I was in the INS’s system, the Mark of Cain upon me for all time, for all I knew.

Americans have this weird relationship with their neighbor to the north. Too many of them don’t even realize Canada actually is a separate country (to our constant exasperation, and no doubt to Ted Cruz’s benefit.) For the most part, Canadians are subject to the same immigration laws as our European, and Asian, and Latino counterparts—though our proximity to the U.S. and our near-identical culture and speech patterns obviously gives us a leg up.

Unlike our southern neighbors, however, for whom el norte can be an enigmatic, tantalizing prize (or so politicians want you to think), for Canucks, America’s mostly just a convenient place to visit for cheap gas and factory outlet shops, and—for the better-heeled—sun-dappled vacations with the kids at Disney resorts in the wintertime. When those well-off children grow up, their parents do the same thing their American counterparts do: send them to elite colleges with the aim of getting them hired by top-flight U.S. legal or consulting or investment banking firms. Those lucky Canadians then often have their immigration paperwork handled as part of their employment package. Heck, if they’re high up enough on the totem pole, a Green Card usually follows not too long after. And don’t even get me started on Justin Bieber.

For those not quite so well placed, things can get dicier. Canadian-ness mitigates some, but not all, of the obstacles we face as would-be migrants. In my case, a bit more initiative was all it took: a week after my initial refusal, with rearranged plane tickets and a few letters of explanation, Immigration officials did let me in. On arrival in L.A. I enrolled in a night school screenwriting class at UCLA, went to some LGBTQ coming out groups, and worked to kindle a life in a new land.

In case you’re wondering why they did they let me in: Well, you’re technically allowed to decide to try setting up shop in America once you’re in the country, as long as you go home once your legal time as a visitor in the country is up if things don’t work out (a very loosely enforced six months for Canadians pre-9/11). You’re just not allowed to intend to do that at the instant you cross the border. Capiche? Me neither.

Lost in all the rhetoric about immigrants and open borders these days is the big question: why come here? Why uproot ourselves—or, sometimes, flee in fear and desperation—from homelands, crossing deserts hidden in false bottoms of trucks, or boarding planes to California with three month’s savings and only the vaguest of invitations to pitch stories to off-Hollywood kids’ TV shows… all to live in a land it’s now claimed needs to be made Great Again?

I can only begin to imagine the urgent and heart-rending needs of migrants and refugees both political and economic, and the concomitant will and desire migrants share to better their lot, and in so doing, their new homelands. The overwhelming number of us don’t come to the Land of the Free to lead a life of depravity and crime. We live in a peculiar time, an era of declining illegal immigration amid hot-button election-year immigration stances. But then, this stuff was big news when I first arrived as well, and has been so many times in the past when politicians wanted to fear-monger. But others are better qualified to report on all that. What I have to offer is my own perspective: twenty years as an immigrant in this country.

Let’s start with the “why leave” question, and my answer to it.

I was no refugee or victim of global poverty. I was, rather, a closeted gay nerd of moderate means growing up in a quasi-traditional, cosmopolitan, eastern-Canadian community in an age before Canada surged ahead of its southern neighbor on same-sex legislation. America, particularly California with its movies and technology and LBGT meccas, beckoned from an early age. “Go West,” sang the Village People, and I heeded the call, the strains of that seventies disco tune playing as I packed up my life of temp jobs and spec scripts and nascent gay identity. The fact that many of my cohorts viewed America with disdain, even suspicion, only whetted my appetite further.

“The asshole of America in Gucci loafers,” sneered one colleague as he characterized Los Angeles. Hollow rhetoric, I thought, as I beheld the grandeur of the city at night from the Hollywood Bowl Overlook off Mulholland Drive, or took in sunset vistas of the Pacific from grassy clifftops above Santa Monica beach. Oh, it wasn’t easy at first; I ended my first year in L.A. twenty grand in debt and survivor of more than a few clumsy first dates. But those early, painful months as a new arrival gave way to a gig as a technical writer and my first work visa, a product of NAFTA, turns out. Politicos, please note: I was indeed paid the prevailing wage for that position, and for every other I held during my time as a non-American. While I have no illusions about the shenanigans many companies pull on this front, I’m happy to report my citizenship status was never used to deny me or any native-born American or citizen of any nation any employment right or benefit or means of advancement.

A job may bring you somewhere, but a life is what’ll keep you there. For me, two fantastic bosses at that first job saw potential (and needed a new database) and sent me back to night school at UCLA—this time for a vocation I’d long neglected, computer programming. With the dot-com boom raging, I again packed up my life and headed north, to San Francisco. I watched the millennium turn, filed an application for a Green Card, and met my first American boyfriend in those Red Bull and (for some) MDMA-fueled late nights of the early Internet age.

But the story didn’t end there.

As boom turned to bust and airplanes exploded into the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, I got laid off with my immigration petition still pending. Some new laws allowed me to keep the application alive, but only if I uprooted my life yet again. So I did some soft time, in Lansing, Michigan, working a tech job for an insurance provider while nervously awaiting final approval. When that finally happened, a year later (and almost six after that initial arrival in L.A.), I wanted to put down roots. Good thing about a big, diverse country like America: it gives you options. In my case, a friendly, welcoming, urbane yet surprisingly affordable spot lay right across the lake: Chicago. I bought a condo in East Lake View and entered a four-year relationship with a native-born Wisconsinite and (yes, really) became his living liver donor after a congenital childhood illness threatened his life. I did it all proudly and willingly, of course, but score one for immigrants giving back.

Oh, but the story didn’t end there either.

The relationship, in spite of all that, didn’t quite work out. So I packed up my life yet again and returned to the West Coast. Not long after, I took the oath of U.S. citizenship, renouncing allegiances to other princes and potentates. Some years later, with America joining a growing chorus of nations (including that of my birth) in making same-sex marriage the law of the land, I met and married my love and life partner here in San Francisco, where we are now in the process of remodeling a home amid the city’s hurly-burly property market.

It seems every group, every religion, every nation in its most fevered imaginings thinks it’s got things figured out. America sure does: I mean, part of the country’s origin story’s got city upon a hill on the marquee. My native homeland professes a greater modesty, but don’t let that fool you either: Canadians sometimes think they’re America done right, Yankeedom with the rough edges smoothed out. In truth, my becoming a Twencennial American has taught me that both places, indeed all places, have so much to learn from one another—which is the best argument for a more open world I can possibly imagine. For me, the true essence of globalization is found not in the market-driven calculus of corporations but in the wanderings and discoveries of inveterately curious people.

And so, too, the American Dream, or whatever you want to call it. Just as the world is shaped by its wanderers, its misfits, its personalities unsatisfied with the status quo; so, too, America, a nation of nomads going back to the Pleistocene. It is this very melding of peoples and cultures that has made the nation a place grand, creative, and wondrous. Politicians and polity alike would be wise to remember that this election season.

Because that’s what one scared, closeted twenty-six year-old stepped up to an Immigration podium, twenty years and half a lifetime ago, to come to America to find.