- IAN ALLEN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Some deportees join the ranks of the homeless.
Bernard Headley, Contributor
EARLY INTO the preliminary stages of police investigation into the brutal slaying earlier this month of two brothers in Montego Bay, Superintendent John Morris, Area One crime officer, dismissed the murders with typical offhand commentary, quoted in The Gleaner, Saturday, February 11.
"They were both deportees," the senior lawman said derisively of the two victims. "They were no angels."
INGRAINED PREJUDICES
Official comments like Superintendent Morris' not only biases a homicide investigation, it also shows how far-flung are our ingrained cultural prejudices.
If it is not against deportees, it is against people whose sexual orientation is by nature and biology determined; or against others who speak a certain way, do not have a Ph.D. and yet want to become Prime Minister.
But, as white America was to learn from the civil rights movement about race, knowledge and information are like laser beams penetrating darkness and ignorance. So perhaps Superintendent Morris will allow me to bring a bit of knowledge to him relative to his "no angel" deportees.
I was a 21-year-old foreign student in the United Sates in 1967. I had a short time to go towards completing an undergraduate degree in sociology at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan.
VISIT FROM INS OFFICER
Late one wintry December evening, a United States Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) agent confronted me in the doorway of the house I was staying, displaying into my face his terrifying, nerve-shattering INS badge; his stern demeanour and hulking white frame blocking any egress I might possibly have been envisioning.
He had spent the better part of the day roaming the hundred or so mile radius of Berrien County looking for me, he said, exasperated but obviously relieved that he had, like Vice-President Dick Chaney, now bagged his quarry. INS had "wanted me", the agent said, because I was in violation of the terms and condition of my student visa.
After taking me downtown in the back seat of his dark-blue government sedan, to the village police station for further interrogation, fingerprinting and mug shots, he gave me two options.
I could, in a matter of days, voluntarily remove myself from the United States. Or, if I decided against that option, that very night federal marshals would 'escort' me out of town from nearby Chicago.
And what was my 'crime'? I had dropped out of school for a semester and was working full-time on the assembly line of a Benton Harbour, Michigan, factory floor, trying to earn enough money to re-register the following term.
I was also steadily doing so to help struggling parents, back in rural Jamaica, pay the awesome costs of my university education. My father was then a lowly paid McCauley's bus driver and my mother a homemaker, an enormously resourceful countrywoman who could successfully 'turn her hand' at most anything.
VOLUNTARY DEPORTATION
I exercised my sword of Damocles 'option': I removed myself, somehow finding the US$32.00 Air Jamaica fare for the one-way ticket out of Miami. (God bless Air Jamaica!)
I had chosen a way out of America that amounted to 'voluntary deportation', Superintendent Morris.
Back home at Hillside, Manchester, ingenious parents rallied other family, village and church folk to find a financial way to get their son back to America, and back in school, before expiration of his short-lived student visa.
I trembled like a leaf on re-entering the States at the Miami port of entry that January in 1968. What would the immigration man say? Worse, what would he do to me? He would at the very least want to know what I was doing back in his country.
Thank God he never asked. I hastened out of his presence and eventually marched myself on to a Greyhound bus back to Michigan, where I completed my undergraduate degree.
I would go on to complete post-graduate degrees at Howard University, while hiding from the immigration man until I could 'get straight'. I'd frequently get off and change trains at sundry subway stops in New York, if a white man in pin-striped suit and dark glasses inexplicably fixed his gaze in my direction.
As time went by, and I did indeed 'get straight' with the U.S. authorities, the Americans would recruit me into their highest academic rank, at one of their large state universities, and in the same city from which the dreadful INS agent had threatened to ride me out of town. And when I chose to take early retirement a few years ago, to return home to Jamaica where I'd be close to my aged parents, the university honoured me with their highest tribute: professor emeritus, an honorary professor of theirs for life.
Had my immigration offence taken place in more recent times, specifically after 1996, after the U. S. Congress had enacted a series of immigration 'reforms', I would likely not have been given the option that allowed me to voluntarily take temporary exit. Instead, I would have been deported forthwith, the legal prospect of returning to 'make good' closed. Worse, I would have been branded with, as you have so amply demonstrated, Superintendent, the mark of the damned: 'deportee'. No angel!
Next week, we will examine even more closely, and within extended socio-political context, another case of a de facto deportee.
Bernard Headley is a professor of criminology in the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work, University of the West Indies, Mona, and lead author of the recent book, 'Deported, Volume I'.
