This is Cruel
The way these goons treated a Pakistani student.
Please read in its entirety.
In N.C., Anxiety and Animosity Put an Edge on an Old Dream
By Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 25, 2001; Page A01
This is the first of a series of occasional articles that will examine the impact of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on American life and institutions.
GREENSBORO, N.C. -- Every flag, every "God Bless America" sign flashing at every barbecue joint reminds Alma Chavez that she is suddenly on the outside. Again.
"Something weird is going on," she says, gunning her Chevy Silverado to work one November morning.
Chavez recently started a $9-an-hour job as a receptionist at a storefront law office in an industrial section of Greensboro. The lawyer wanted to tap into Guilford County's exploding Hispanic population, so he hired Chavez, and one of her first duties was to make a sign for the window: "HABLAMOS ESPANOL."
Now the Spanish-speaking men in cowboy boots and feed caps stack up in the lobby, pouring out their woes to the lipsticked 23-year-old behind the counter.
"Mr. Spaulding," Chavez says, calling for her boss, "we got a client with a situation."
No more factory work. Her English is as perfect as her blizzard-white Payless sneakers under the desk.
But her immigrant dreams lost their altitude when foreign terrorists struck America. After a decade of historic immigration, the United States slammed the gates on outsiders and began to reconsider those within its borders. No one knows how long these anxieties will last, nor the restrictions that have followed, but Chavez can feel the new chill in the air.
So she's lying low, going straight home from work to eat eggs and tortillas with her family. They don't venture out after dark, afraid that someone will mistake them for Arabs. Chavez is a legal resident, but her fiance is undocumented and, to make matters worse, out of work. Jobs were getting scarce before Sept. 11, and now the bosses want workers with papers. At 21, strong and ready to sweat, he stays home with the baby, his silent cell phone hooked to his baggy khakis. They've canceled a Christmas trip home to Mexico; he would almost certainly get caught trying to sneak back across the newly tightened U.S. border.
"I didn't know who or what the World Trade Center was," Chavez says. "Now I know."
She knows, too, who was responsible. And when she sees Middle Eastern immigrants around Greensboro, her resentment rises.
"They messed it up for us," Chavez says.
'Am I Welcome Here?'
When Yasir Hassan arrived last summer to attend the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, his mother and sister accompanied him from Pakistan, filling his cupboard with spices from home, labeled in Urdu in their delicate script. Greensboro was a strange land indeed. He noticed the wooden signs nailed to the hickories and oaks and wondered, "Why are all the trees named Jesus?"
Within a month, though, Hassan was living on Cocoa Puffs and watching Montel Williams before classes. On Fridays, he and his Pakistani roommate would cruise the strip between Wal-Mart and RaceTrac, "hollering at girls, just freaking out; it's very luminous at night."
But like Chavez, Hassan felt his place in America change after Sept. 11. He was no longer an international student in a FUBU sweat shirt who contemplated the benefits of titanium wire over gold in computers; he was dark and Muslim and studying in the United States on a visitor's visa -- and in possession of a Pakistani passport that spelled his name Yasir, Yasser and Yassir.
"You cannot imagine the trouble this has caused," he says.
Because one of the terrorist hijackers had entered the United States on a student visa, Hassan suspected that his file would be reviewed by school officials, and he was right. Of the 13,000 students on campus, 500 were foreign, with 24 from so-called terrorist-sponsoring countries. An FBI agent called to check in with the international student program director.
"Am I welcome here?" Hassan asked his student adviser. The answer was yes, of course. Campus leaders beefed up security and held forums on Islam, co-sponsored by the 20-member Muslim Student Association. Hassan didn't belong to the group but took comfort in its presence. The campus became his haven.
Beyond the university gates is where his real troubles started.
Late one Friday night, Hassan and his roommate, Kashif Khan, were visiting with two American women in the front yard of their house. Two trucks and two cars pulled up and several men unloaded. They asked where one of their friends was. He has already left, Hassan answered. The next thing he knew, he was surrounded and heard the words, "You dirty Pakistani bastards." He looked over and saw Khan on the hood of a car, being beaten. Hassan was on the ground when a beer bottle crashed into the side of his skull.
Khan was still coughing blood the next day when a friend urged them to report the incident to the police.
"I covered my head and several guys kept beating for 2 minutes until the dad of my friend came out when they ran," Hassan wrote in a criminal complaint Oct. 6. The two women identified one of the attackers; a magistrate executed an arrest warrant for him. A police officer advised Hassan to buy a cell phone for security.
A month later, Hassan still has the faintest mark on the right side of his forehead from the beer bottle. He is sitting in the scrappy apartment he shares with Khan, with computer parts stacked along a wall. One of the things he loved about Greensboro when he first arrived was the way strangers greeted him for no apparent reason.
"Now the only people who speak to us think we are Mexican," he says.
'I Don't Like It'
Greensboro, population 224,000, is in the central piedmont of North Carolina, where candidates for office hold "pig pickin's" and screen doors slam in the waning days of fall. The Shriners recently decided not to wear their turbans and blousy pants at the upcoming Jaycees Holiday Parade out of respect for the victims of Sept. 11.
But beneath the Andy Griffith Americana is a mini-Ellis Island with more than 120 nations and 75 languages represented in the Guilford County schools.
If any place was vulnerable to the aftershocks of September's terrorism, this was it. Porous borders, student visas and refugee resettlement programs had brought the whole world here.
Of Guilford County's 420,000 residents, between 30,000 and 40,000 are first-generation immigrants or their children, according to the UNCG Center for New North Carolinians. A flourishing economy and Greensboro's progressive streak -- with five colleges in the area and a Quaker mayor -- helped light a fire under the melting pot.
And then Sept. 11 happened, creating an instant forum for anti-immigrant voices.
Outside the library on the UNCG campus, a Lebanese business major was assaulted by two white men shouting, "Go home, terrorist!" He withdrew from school and returned to the Middle East.
If Hassan's only security was in being mistaken for Mexican, at least he had plenty of cover, thanks to the wave of immigration Chavez belonged to. No state in the country has gone through a faster Hispanic immersion than North Carolina, with a 655 percent increase in the past decade. Half of the state's quarter-million Hispanics are undocumented, a distinction that mattered little in the low-wage, labor-guzzling economy of the 1990s.
But after Sept. 11, a résumé built on sweat was no longer good enough.
"There's a broad public consensus that immigration is about more than plucking chickens and picking melons," says Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington-based anti-immigration group. "It's about protecting communities . . . knowing who's who in America."
After Sept. 11, President Bush stopped talking about granting amnesty to 3 million Mexicans living illegally in the United States. Because of the weakening economy, U.S. employers lost interest in expanding the foreign guest worker program. In South Carolina, the state attorney general was suggesting that the Immigration and Naturalization Service should deputize local law enforcement to round up the undocumented.
"No one wanted to listen to Pat Buchanan in 1996 when he called for a moratorium on immigration," says Charles Davenport Jr., an op-ed columnist for the Greensboro News & Record."Now, people are willing to think about it."
Davenport says he had watched his town transform overnight with immigrants, many of whom refused to assimilate. He wants Marines stationed every 20 feet along the U.S. borders.
"If you walk into Food Lion at 8 at night, you may well be the only English speaker in the whole place," Davenport says. "I don't like it. I feel like I'm in another nation. It's not hostility; it's a sorrow for the culture that I know."
Bad Timing
That Food Lion is where Chavez often shops. On a Sunday morning in November, Chavez and her family are gathered around the kitchen table, eating bowls of menudo and folding together tacos and washing it all down with Cokes. Half the house is hung over from late-shift factory work. Chavez's sister fills comforters with stuffing at an assembly plant; her mother wraps holiday gift sets at another. The family has come a long way since crossing into the United States at an unguarded border checkpoint in 1991, heads ducked low and bodies scrunched on the van floorboards.
In 2000, after years in Chicago and getting their legal resident cards, they moved to Greensboro, where they bought a $57,000 house in a racially mixed neighborhood. Now they're practically home-grown, right down to the pacing Rottweiler.
But Chavez's boyfriend, who asked not to be named, had the bad timing to arrive in the United States 18 months ago, paying a "coyote"$1,600 to guide him across the desert. In Greensboro, he got a $600-a-week construction job and met Chavez. She liked the spray of freckles across his nose and his hair, black as motor oil, which she cut in the bathroom with a towel over his strong shoulders. They exchanged rings and had a baby this year, cramming into a front bedroom in the Chavez house, where they live now, their door still taped with the pink ribbon that announces, "It's a Girl."
And yet there is the feeling that a moment has ended.
Until Sept. 11, the state Department of Motor Vehicles had one of the most lax residency requirements in the country. Illegal immigrants from around the Southeast would drive to North Carolina to get their prized piece of documentation. With a driver's license, they could cash a check or open a charge account. It legitimized them beyond their under-the-table wages.
But with the discovery that at least seven of the terrorist hijackers had obtained identification cards through the Virginia DMV, North Carolina quickly passed a law requiring proof of residence, effective Nov. 1.
Unfortunately, Chavez's boyfriend has neither a taxpayer ID number nor a Social Security card.
"He never got it; now he can't," says Chavez, frustrated by his procrastination.
But unemployment is his bigger concern. When Chavez meets a woman whose husband works construction, she asks about a job for her boyfriend. Is he legal? the woman asks.
When the Sunday dishes are cleared away, Chavez and her boyfriend go out for baby formula. They drive to the newly developed part of Greensboro, a concrete hatchery of Petsmart and Super K and Service Merchandise. "You can tell which stores have the best prices," Chavez says, looking out the window. "The empty parking lots mean prices are too high."
In Kmart, they pick up a flier, studying a 40-piece dinnerware set in Summer Harvest for $19.99. "We love coming over here and checking things out for our new home," Chavez says. But who are they kidding? On the drive home, they pass the China King buffet, where they used to go on Sundays when her boyfriend had a job. The parking lot is packed.
'This Is Their Life Savings'
Hassan has still not told his family in Pakistan about the beating. Attending university in America is his father's dream. A middle-class Pakistani annual income is the equivalent of $10,000. The University of North Carolina charges international students $5,500 a semester, more than three times the in-state tuition of $1,700. Last year, foreign students accounted for 3.4 percent of total enrollment in U.S. colleges and universities, but they paid nearly 8 percent of tuition and fees, according to the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.
"This is their life savings we blow away in two semesters," Hassan says one November morning. He had stayed up very late with his roommate the night before, drinking black tea and eating boiled eggs, scheming how to get rich enough someday to repay their fathers.
But the mood is subdued. After the assault, Khan has asked his adviser if he could take a semester off, but the adviser warned that his student visa might not be renewed in this unpredictable climate.
With lawmakers talking about a moratorium on student visas, Hassan and Khan, like Chavez and her boyfriend, have scratched their plans to go home for Christmas. What if the United States won't let them back in?
They are fighting homesickness and an end-of-semester shortage of funds. Their cable service has been stopped for nonpayment. "This is the darkness before dawn," Hassan says.
The cell phone they bought after the assault makes them feel safe. One school night, they leave campus and drive to the Four Seasons Towne Center mall with another student of Pakistani descent. It's wonderful being out, away from the library. They wander through Abercrombie & Fitch, beneath the posters of shirtless blond heros in football pads. At American Eagle Outfitters, one of them holds up a T-shirt with the word SOBER. "You should get this," Khan teases Hassan, one alcohol-abstaining Muslim to another. At Dillard's, they study a 10-inch Calphalon omelet pan. Eggs are all they know how to cook.
The next morning, on the way to campus, they pass the High Point Dinner Bell and its "God Bless America" sign and the Country Bar-B-Q with its "America Home of the Free and the Brave" sign. Flags were everywhere, red, white and blue against the Carolina fall.
"It induces the patriotic adrenaline; that's great, every nation should come together like this," Hassan says philosophically, taking in the landscape. "What I fear is they are all going to get together and beat us again. The worst part is they would be singing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' while they are beating us."
'Just a Fight Between Boys'
It was all a miscommunication, says the 18-year-old man whose name appears on the criminal complaint signed by Hassan and Khan.
Curtis Bridgman is sitting on his parents' porch one sunny afternoon, holding a guitar in his lap. He wears a sleeveless T-shirt, a joker tattooed onto his right biceps and a silver ring in his eyebrow.
"This was just a fight between boys," Bridgman says. "It wasn't no hate crime."
Furthermore, he says, "it wasn't no seven, eight or nine people. Only four of us." He says no one used a beer bottle as a weapon, and no one used a racial epithet.
His mother comes out on the porch. "We come from a multicultural family," she says, citing a black and Hispanic who've married into their family. "So how could we be racialist?"
Then his father steps outside. "What'd you do, call someone a [racial epithet]?"
"No," Bridgman says. "It's about some Pakistans."
"Some Hispanics?" his father asks.
"No, some Afghans," Bridgman says.
Two High Point Police Department officers finally serve the arrest warrant on Bridgman, charging him with assault with a deadly weapon. He's scheduled for a January court hearing.
'Will They Know?'
If some members of Congress have their way, Hassan may soon be carrying a card that includes his fingerprints, retinal scan or facial biometrics. The INS will start more closely tracking all of the country's 550,000 foreign students.
"Will they know when I am at the Krispy Kreme?" Hassan asks.
On the same evening Bridgman is arrested, Hassan is leaning against the fountain on campus. The night is gentle. He has studied and e-mailed half of Pakistan from the computer lab. Still no word on whether he will be issued the student visa he applied for in September. He's sure the school will come through, but less sure about the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan.
Even with the restrictions, and all that has happened to him, Hassan still wants to study here. "An American education is highly respected in Pakistan," he says. He would go back home and work in technology.
But America itself, that's a different dilemma. When Hassan was a boy in Pakistan, he read Archie comics and imagined America as a magical place. "Later on is when the reality dawns on you," he says. "The chances of meeting Betty Cooper are very remote."
He pauses. "Sometimes life is so bad here that you only wish for an egomaniacal, cheating, low person like Veronica Lodge."
'All Because of Them'
"Good morning. Attorney Spaulding's office," says Chavez, deftly juggling the phones in the law office the next morning. She punches another line. "Anthony, thank you for holding."
A potential client hovers at the counter, filling out a narrative of his legal troubles. "How do you spell 'revoked'?" he asks.
Chavez leans forward. "R-E-V-O-K-E-D."
In a week, her mother will be laid off from her $9-an-hour third-shift factory job, making Chavez the biggest breadwinner in the house. Her boyfriend is still out of work. With winter coming, construction is slowing. Some of their friends have pulled up stakes and returned to Mexico.
Her brother was detained and searched at the airport recently. "All because of them," he came home muttering.
The dream doesn't feel so fresh anymore. Chavez leafs through a Harry and David gourmet Christmas catalogue that arrived in the office mail. She eyes the boxes of Royal Riviera pears. "You come over thinking you will just stay a while," she says. "You get caught up in the American dream, which is expensive, and now all messed up." |
