Undocumented - illegal immigration in NYC

Undocumented Fear

They made it to America, and now they have to stay low, pretend to be someone else and deal with oppressive employers.

Hally Hall-I Chu

In a room no larger than a typical New York City one-bedroom apartment, about 500 square feet, 30 Chinese immigrants sit in rows of metal folding chairs that fill the front section of the room. All 30 pairs of eyes gaze intently at a string of coded symbols written on a dry-erase board at the front of the room: the Chinese character for “father,” pronounced “ba”; the Chinese suffix character, pronounced “la”; the English letter “N”; and the Chinese character for “kitchen” or “chef,” pronounced “chu.”

Thirty voices vocalized the encryption on the board as the teacher, a middle-aged man with a round face, yelled instructions in a mixture of Cantonese and Mandarin, both Chinese dialects: “Read them together, ba-la-N-chu! Read them together quickly, balaNchu! balaNchu… blaNchu… blaNch…”

The word is “branch,” one of today’s 10 vocabulary words. The class is Chinese Christian Herald Crusade’s (CCHC) Morning Restaurant English Class, a free one-hour English lesson held four days a week. Everyone in the class is an immigrant, and many of the waiters and kitchen staff in attendance have entered the United States illegally, some living in houses supplied by their employers, all earning meager income at or below the federal minimum wage. Their desire to learn English is sometimes an expression of forbidden hope that, someday, they would break from the microcosm of Chinatown.

“You know why I give up an hour everyday to come to class, unlike some people who only come once in a while?” Mr. Chen asks in Mandarin. “It’s motivation, will power. If I don’t come, I’ll never be able to learn how to talk in English.”

A restaurant worker in his late 40s, Mr. Chen is cautious to not give away too many details about himself. He is brief and seems insecure, save for a friendly smile.

Mr. Chen has been in the U.S. for a few years, long enough to be working a steady job in a restaurant on Bayard Street, but too short to learn more than the basic greetings in English. He never has the chance to practice. Working 10 to 12 hours a day in an environment surrounded by other Chinese workers, Mr. Chen has no opportunity to use his English. Reaching conversational level in English is his goal.

Not that he believes it will actually help him get different work, he says, offering a slew of reasons: He’s too old; he’s worked in the restaurant too long; Chinese people will never be equal with white folks; all the younger kids will take the white collar jobs… But at the top of his list, after some prodding, is the fact that Mr. Chen is undocumented and fears discovery by immigration officials. To him, it is better to be stuck discretely in a thankless job (“The restaurant is just a job, a bite of rice to feed the stomach.”) than to risk deportation.

Fear is one of the major psychological shadows constantly haunting undocumented immigrants. There are different degrees of fear and not everyone feels the same way—illegal immigrants who are white, for example, tend to face a lower risk of discovery—but fear, even when manifested in the limited form of social uneasiness, is real and present.

Dr. Carola E. Suarez-Orozco, Applied Psychology Department Chair of New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education, has observed fear over the years through her work with immigrant youth. Illegal immigration as an applied psychology specialization is relatively unstudied, but Suarez-Orozco is an expert in her field work with immigrants, some of whom are undocumented.

Fear, is a loved one arrested and deported. “If you are an undocumented child in an undocumented family, you have these fears that you go to school, and you come back, and your mother won’t be there when you come home,” Suarez-Orozco says.

Fear, is also self-restraint on fulfilling one’s potential. For the undocumented, it is near impossible to have a normal life, to live the American Dream that so many crossed the ocean to experience. For Mr. Chen, the constraints placed on him by his status, coupled with fear, limit his job prospective. He is likely to remain a restaurant worker indefinitely.

For some, fear is also isolation and deception. “Yuan” is one of the better English speakers in the class. After only a quick glance at the board, he was able to pronounce not only “blaNch,” but “blaNch offisee,” with confidence in his gravely, nasal voice. Yuan is in his late 60s and does not need English to improve his future. He attends the English class to socialize.

Yuan spent most of his over 30 years in America in isolation. In 1968, he arrived New York’s Kennedy International Airport as someone who only hours ago was known as Mr. Eng. Yuan was a paper son, the term for a person who purchased a fake indentity in order to immigrate to the United States, pretending to be the biological son of an ethnically Chinese American resident or citizen.

Being a paper son filled Yuan’s first years in New York with uncertainty. A paper son is caught between the legal and the illegal—his assumed identity is legal, but he is not. Thus a paper son must always be careful to use his assumed name, become versed in even the most trivial facts about his “parents,” and when interacting with others, be constantly alert not to give away too much information that would let slip his paper son status.

“Most of the Chinese aren’t going to turn you in, but I had to be careful,” said Yuan. But as he became more established as “Mr. Yuan” in the community, Yuan was able to let go of some of his fears and begin a normal life. After Yuan used his assumed identity to bring his wife to America, he started a laundry business just outside of the Chinatown area, catering mostly to African-American customers. When the kids were born, all three of them took on the paper son’s last name.

Now, retired for almost a decade, Yuan has fully internalized his alternate identity and uses his free time to participate in community programs such as the Morning Restaurant English Class. “I know Eng-a-lish too,” he says. “I’m Amelican.”

Perhaps the most common fear among the students in the Morning Restaurant English Class is the fear of speaking up. The students are not a reticent bunch—they shout answers from their seats, disregarding any and all mispronunciation. But for the many restaurant workers in the class, they never openly oppose their bosses.

Xiao Li, or “Little Li,” has a round face and wears his white baseball cap backwards. He’s in his 30s but looks 20. Xiao Li is prone to ejecting bouts of profanities, inside a church-sponsored English class not withstanding. But his verbal attacks on his boss—Xiao Li works as a busboy and takeout carrier at a restaurant in Chinatown—is confined only to outside the boss’s hearing range. Otherwise, he would not only lose his job, but would risk his illegal status being found out. His boss, a Chinese American, knows that Xiao Li is undocumented.

Restaurant exploitation by the legal against the illegal within the same ethnic community is quite common. On June 17, 2005, the ACLU posted on its Web site a court decision that allowed a previously halted sex discrimination and labor exploitation case “brought by two immigrant waitresses against a New Jersey Chinese restaurant” to resume its hearing. According to the article, the plaintiffs claimed that they were “paid no wages for their work, had to pay a daily kickback out of their tips to the restaurant owners, faced gender and ethnicity discrimination, were housed in an overcrowded, vermin-filled apartment and were threatened with death when they stopped working at the restaurant.” While the ACLU article did not mention whether the case, Liu v. Oriental Buffet Inc., dealt specifically with two undocumented immigrant workers, the content of the case was representative of quite a few Chinatown restaurant workers’ experience.

Xiao Li, for one, is unhappy about his low-paying, over-working job. His employment includes housing with other restaurant workers—good for not needing to look for his own shelter, but bad for his work schedule, since he must work for as long as the restaurant is open. But Li says he cannot complain. “Two people you don’t offend in the restaurant,” he says. “The customers, and the boss.”

While offending the customer means less tip, offending the boss might—though Xiao Li doesn’t know of anyone personally—get a worker’s undocumented status revealed. For some workers, discovery and deportation by immigration authorities may even be preferred. Since many undocumented workers in Chinatown came to the United States with the assistance of Snakeheads, or people smugglers, to whom they still owe a hefty sum of “transport fee,” the prospect of losing their jobs and being branded as incapable of working off their debts creates enough of a threat to keep disgruntled workers such as Xiao Li quiet before the boss.

A full ten minutes passed before the English teacher moved on from “branch office” to the next vocabulary word: postage. The consensus of the class seemed to have allocated the word with a new pronunciation, something akin to “Paul-si-dage.” The English teacher was insistent on his method of word parsing: “Three syllables! Po-si-tage. Say pos-tage only when you’re speaking quickly. Po-si-tage…”

The restaurant workers continue going to English class, attending four days a week until graduation. Though few of them will become conversant in English, and even fewer still will pursue new occupations, the laughter and enthusiasm of the students shows they want to be there, that for one hour four days a week, these people can shrug off their fear to learn English.