Editor’s note: These comments were transcribed from a panel discussion that took place at The Scholar & Feminist Conference XXXII, “Fashioning Citizenship: Gender and Immigration,” held on March 24, 2007 at Barnard College.
Malik Ahmed: I wanted also to tell a story, an incident that happened in New York, six months after 9/11. I had a very good Pakistani friend named Abbas. He was actually undocumented, but I had no idea, since you just don’t ask people that kind of a question. I had met him at a gay club in New York soon after I arrived here.
He had a boyfriend with whom he lived for ten years, who had grown up in the States, but was from Trinidad. So one evening, soon after I met him, I got a call from my friend’s partner, telling me that his boyfriend, Abbas, had been deported. Unexpectedly, Abbas called him from Pakistan, saying that he wasn’t just being deported, he was already there.
And he couldn’t do anything about it. As I mentioned, I had no idea that Abbas was actually undocumented. I knew he had lived in the United States for almost 20 years and I had no idea that there was something that could have been done. Apparently the boyfriend tried to do everything.
Even though they had been living together for ten years and the boyfriend was a U.S. citizen, he was not allowed to meet him since he was not family. He was not even allowed to bring a change of clothing. And he told him, on the phone from Pakistan, “I tried to call you and tell you what was happening.”
His boyfriend had actually reported him missing. Abbas was a cabdriver and that’s how they arrested him. According to the cops, he jumped a red light, which is unbelievable because he had been driving a cab for 15 years. Yeah, actually, he might have jumped it.
But his I.D., a driver’s license, was forged, which is how you make ends meet sometimes in this underground economy around undocumented immigrants. So he still has not been able to return. They have tried to write to Senators and they’ve even thought about moving to Canada. Abbas’s boyfriend could move to Canada and then bring him over to marry him, but he would have to be a Canadian citizen first before he could actually invite his partner over.
So the stories are many.
