Dear Immigrant: What the Visa Does Not Give You

Letter 03

Re: What the Visa Does Not Give You

Dear Immigrant,

The visa gives you permission to be present. It does not give you belonging, safety, stability, or the right to be treated with dignity. Those things are separate from the visa and some of them are not guaranteed by anything.

I want to be precise about what legal status gives you and what it does not, because the conflation of the two — the assumption that the visa solves the problem rather than simply opening a door — is one of the most common and most damaging misunderstandings I have seen immigrants carry.

Legal status means the government has agreed to let you be here under certain conditions. It does not mean the society has agreed to welcome you. It does not mean your employer will treat you fairly, your landlord will maintain your apartment, your colleagues will include you, your neighbors will acknowledge you. These things happen or they do not happen based on the specific people involved and the specific conditions of the place you have arrived in. The visa is not a guarantee of any of them.

The gap between legal permission to be present and actual belonging is the gap you will spend years trying to close. Some immigrants close it. Some do not, and not because they failed but because the society they arrived in was not structured to receive them fully. Both outcomes are possible. The visa does not determine which one.

Know what you have when you have the visa. Know what you still need to build. The visa is the beginning of the work, not the completion of it.

The door is open. What is behind it is still to be determined.

From the other side of several doors,
A former immigrant

dearimmigrant.com