What makes a person illegal?

Instead of talking about words, we should talk about passports and papers, how they change your experience of the world—and what we need to do to so that we can all be free.

During the State of the Union, Biden made a politically incorrect gaff heard ‘round the world.

“Laken Riley—an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal,” he said, emphasizing the politically-charged term as he addressed those who were blaming the recent murder of 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley on Biden’s “lax” immigration policies at the border, given that the suspected killer is an undocumented man from Venezuela.

“But how many thousands of people are killed by legals?” he continued. “To her parents, I say, my heart goes out to you—having lost children myself, I understand.”

I wrote about this on Friday and The Daily Beast published my article just in time to be a part of the outrage machine, the “discourse” surrounding the State of the Union, including but not limited to: expressing undying support for Israel and Ukraine and building floating barges to deliver aid to Gaza, when they could simply open the Rafah crossing and allow humanitarian aid organizations to do their jobs.

But today I want to write about the way that our country—and frankly many others—has criminalized immigration to the point that simply existing as an immigrant feels illegal—and what we can be doing differently.

If you are lucky enough to have been born with the kind of passport that unlocks the world around you, it is possible that you do not understand this feeling. I didn’t—it wasn’t until I was living in the Middle East, first in Palestine, and later in Lebanon that I started meeting Palestinians and Syrians who were exactly my age—and in many ways, exactly like me—whose passports wouldn’t allow them to cross checkpoints and board planes that I realized how much the documents that someone is born with could constrict their lives. Here I was travelling the world and building my career as a journalist, while friends of mine were selling their possessions to board rickety boats to Greek islands, a trip that would have cost me 25 euro on a forgettable ferry.

My heart broke for them, for us, for the injustice of the world that we live in—again, and again, and again.  

Around that time, I met Salem—I had just traveled to Istanbul for a conference, and was sleeping on the rooftop of a backpacker’s hostel in Sultanahmet, surrounded by the grandiosity of the Blue Mosque on one side and Sultanahmet on the other, but I was not surrounded by the backpackers that I was expecting to find. Instead, I was surrounded by Syrian men who were staying a few nights in Istanbul before going on towards Izmir, a coastal city, to board similar rickety boats—and I stayed up with them at night, listening to their stories.

When I met Salem a few days later, it felt almost ordinary, predictable, even that he didn’t have papers. Unlike the other people that I had been meeting, Salem had no interest in traveling to Europe, no interest in “being a refugee,” but a life without papers in Istanbul still meant that he had to rent an apartment from a landlord who looked the other way and be paid under the table.

It also meant that he could technically be deported to Syria at any time.