This Is What It's Like to Come to the United States as a Refugee

One story of coming to America from the Soviet Union

This is what it’s like to be a refugee.
Thousands of miles away, people haggle over policy details, about whether you are a risk and a burden, or an asset full of potential, a victim, or a potential tool of foreign policy, but really they are talking about you, and the days of your life and how you will live them. They don’t know you. They don’t know the days of your life that you have already lived, and the stuff of your mind and the strength in your hands. To them, you are an abstraction, colored by their fear and their hate, or by their heartrending idealism. They do not see your parents, waiting in line for hours at the American embassy in Moscow, stamping their feet in the cold, holding their documents, practicing for their interview. They do not know that your mother never wanted to leave this city, because she was born here and bore children here, and has friends and family here, and has removed the tonsils of hundreds of children. She has performed delicate surgeries that have made the deaf hear again, and she knows she could have restored Beethoven’s hearing in half an hour, a thought that brings her the kind of satisfaction that can only come to someone who knows what symphonies and concertos her children heard when they swam in her belly as she sat swimming in the sound spilling from the walls of the grand old hall of the Moscow Conservatory.

They don’t know that she was happy here, even though she had never wanted to be a doctor. Even though her red diploma, the mark of a perfectionist student, even her flawless French couldn’t get her into the university that trained translators, because her papers and her face said she was Jewish, even though her grandparents had Russified their Jewish last name, and her parents gave her the name of an old Russian princess who was the first Russian saint. These people knew that Jews were being persecuted in the Soviet Union, kept out of schools and jobs for a religion most of them had abandoned generations ago but that had become a blood type that resigned you to second-class status.