On Jan. 1, 2015, I self-deported from the United States, my home of more than 22 years, to return to the Philippines, where I was born and lived until the age of 9. At takeoff, sorrow overtook the terror I felt at check-in. The T.S.A. agent had scanned my passport — renewed in 2002, devoid of a visa — and waved me through. I froze in place: Where were the ICE agents?
That day, I found out that no one cares if an undocumented immigrant leaves America. Only my husband, waving from beyond the gate, cared. He would eventually meet me in London; I was to go to Manila first to apply for a British spouse visa, which I couldn’t do in the United States because I was an undocumented person.
America is home; it raised me. I came in 1992, the daughter of Filipinos who left their homeland — an economy drained by dictatorship — in search of a better life. I left in 2015 as a broken adult of 31, still in search of that better life. When I returned last month, I found a different country.
My decision to leave the United States seemed crazy, the resulting bar on returning for 10 years a self-inflicted wound. This view requires the belief that America is exceptional, the only nation capable of caring for its people and helping them achieve their potential. After a near-lifetime of being undocumented, I had stopped believing this.
In my experience, America had become a place to flee from, not to. At the time I lived in New York without papers, I couldn’t secure a license to drive, afford to go to college, start a career, get health care, vote, open a bank account or travel freely. My life was a struggle with domestic and sexual violence, financial hardship and suicide attempts. By self-deporting, I ended my American life to save what remained of my actual life.
In the years before I left New York City, in my 20s and early 30s, I worked, hoping to save for a bachelor’s degree I would never earn. On Craigslist, I found temp jobs that didn’t require proof of legality: street fund-raiser, receptionist, assistant, office manager. The city’s buoying energy saved me in those years. I convinced myself that hiding and surviving was enough, that I didn’t need papers.
For many undocumented immigrants, the only path to papers and citizenship is through marriage to an American citizen. I avoided this, even when romantic partners and friends offered. I believe in love. In 2012, two years after meeting one night on the Lower East Side, my now-husband and I married: me a Filipino and American at heart; he a white, working-class-raised British man on an H-1 visa.
Two years into married life in New York City, my undocumented status complicated everything — an apartment under both our names, a joint bank account, the thought of children. We decided to move to Britain, his homeland. The privilege of this choice wrenched me with guilt: Most undocumented immigrants, including my family, couldn’t do what I was doing, couldn’t go where I was going.
Acquiring a British spouse visa was straightforward, in my experience smoother than America’s processes. My new start in London was suffused with unfamiliar optimism. Freed from being undocumented, and even without a bachelor’s degree, I graduated with two master’s degrees, one from Cambridge University in creative writing.
In my decade of becoming British, I found self-fulfillment, leavened by ambivalence: Britain is far from good to refugees and migrants, to its working-class people and people of color. In late 2023, I became a British citizen. My certificate of naturalization and British passport are locked in a safe with other pieces of paper that also make me legible: my Philippine birth certificate, our New York City marriage license, my British voter registration.
The decision to return to America was possible because of the privilege of my husband’s career in international finance. As a natural-born British citizen, he has the freedom to readily meet his ambitions and his career’s demands.
At the American Embassy in London, we applied for my L-2 visa, attached to his L-1 employment visa. Vulnerable to the whims of the consulate employee that day, I was swiftly denied. I had to serve out the last three months of the immigration ban that began when I self-deported in 2015 — no exception granted despite my British citizenship and the career I built as a filmmaker and later a writer with a book deal.
On Jan. 1, 2025, the 10-year ban expired; on Jan. 6, I was approved for the L-2 visa. My husband and I could go to San Francisco. I was going home.
But first, a short stay in Manhattan, which felt to me less like where I once lived — a place of bodega owners, mom-and-pop shops and the kind neighbors who’ve lived next door since the ’60s. It now feels like a clenched fist. In tears of guilt, I remembered my parents, struggling in the ’90s to be legalized, fleeced by unscrupulous immigration lawyers until time ran out on their tourist visas.
I wished I could go to New Jersey to see my parents for dinner and join my sister for wine at her Hell’s Kitchen apartment. But my dad died of a heart attack in 2022, while preparing to self-deport with my mother. Mom self-deported to Manila just before the 2024 election, after 32 years away. My sister, who left in 2017, is now Dutch, a neuroscience Ph.D. living just outside Amsterdam.
My survival does not make me exceptional — undocumented people survive every day under worse circumstances. “All you did was marry a white British guy,” someone said to me last week. Relative to other undocumented immigrants, I am lucky: I grew up with good teachers who provided the care and encouragement I needed; my mother was accidentally given a Social Security card permitting her to work. No deportation, ICE or cages for my family.
My experience shows that undocumented immigrants are not a monolith: We are a patchwork of different oppressions and privileges, coming to America to escape economic depression, poverty, war, trafficking, persecution, famine.
Why was the luck of falling in love and my proximity to white and white-collar privilege required to lift me out of my struggle with undocumentation in the first place? Shouldn’t the United States, a country of immigrants that sees itself as a bastion of democracy, do more for immigrants like my family, who lived here for decades?
I’m probably expected to feel grateful to return to America. Instead, I feel survivor’s guilt and a sense of love for the place where I grew up, the kind that recognizes its flaws and strengths, but loves anyway. There is still work I want to do now that my time is no longer spent just surviving.
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