Immigration was overwhelmingly deemed the "most important issue facing the country" by those who voted for Donald Trump, according to exit polls conducted by CNN. This should come as no surprise, as Trump dedicated much of his presidential campaign to the issue, infamously announcing his candidacy with a speech describing Mexican immigrants as drug dealers, rapists and criminals. Yet while Trump spoke almost entirely about immigrant issues in terms of "Mexicans" (a xenophobic catch-all that would seem to include anyone from south of Texas), a significant number of undocumented immigrants currently residing in the United States were born in Europe.
The Pew Research Center estimates that there are 475,000 to 500,000 unauthorized immigrants from Europe in the United States, including around 50,000 in New York City. These New Yorkers don't fit the racialized stereotype of the undocumented, insulating them from the more extreme forms of harassment and targeting that immigrants (and native-born Americans) of color can face. They are also often unacknowledged by immigrants' rights advocates, even though they deal with many of the same challenges as the city's other undocumented immigrants. And with Trump's inauguration just weeks away, they face a similar future of uncertainty.
"It was very stressful," says Alex, an undocumented immigrant from Russia, of hearing the news that Trump had won the election. "Then news came that the majority of both the House and the Senate will be Republican. It was really scary." (The names of the undocumented immigrants interviewed in this article have been changed to protect their identities.)
Alex arrived in the United States five years ago on a visa for business and tourism. At the time, he held a job as the director of technology for a Russian cryogenics company. The first leg of his trip was in Fort Lauderdale, where he attended a business conference; he then came to New York. His visa allowed him to stay for six months, but when it expired, he decided to postpone his departure indefinitely. As an anti-Putin activist, he has no intention of returning to Russia. "Even if I got a green card or passport, I won't go to Russia because I see what's going on," he says. "It's enough for me to know what's there."
Alex's detachment from his life in Russia is something he feels differentiates him from many of his fellow undocumented compatriots. He recognizes their loneliness and longing for family, friends, and country, but says these aren't issues for him. "My mom calls me once a year maybe, my dad doesn't call me at all, and my ex-wife stopped calling me," he says with a laugh.
Alex has no pathway to citizenship, but he doesn't seem troubled by many of the challenges of being undocumented. He's still interested in cryogenics, but he does moving, computer repair, and IT networking to pay the bills. "I've figured out how to make decent money with nothing, just by having a van and doing moving jobs," he explains. Unable to obtain a driver's license, he makes driving his business partner's responsibility. Unable to fly, he keeps up with old friends online as well as in person if they pass through the United States, taking long bus rides when necessary.
"I'm not suffering because of my status," he says, matter-of-factly. He has found sympathetic (or indifferent) employers willing to pay cash, especially within the Russian community. He has an NYC ID, which has enabled him to open a bank account. He's had decent encounters with the NYPD, which he says took his report after he was assaulted without making him feel uneasy about his immigration status.
Along 13th Avenue in Borough Park, where Edina found work when she moved to New York. (Wikimedia Commons).
Alex says he's now more optimistic about his situation than he was immediately after the election. He was encouraged by public statements from Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo vowing to shield undocumented immigrants in the city and state, and he thinks Trump will find mass deportations more difficult to achieve than he's suggested. "There's the courts, there's the labor cost, there's the general feeling of human rights, there's democratic traditions," Alex says. "You're not just dealing with Trump."
Edina, a Hungarian immigrant who came to the United States in 2005 with her husband, echoes this perspective. "It's impossible, impossible that he's going to be able to deport 10, 12, 14 million people just like that," she says of Trump. (In a television interview shortly after the election, Trump said he would focus his deportation efforts on foreign individuals with criminal convictions, which would impact an estimated 2 to 3 million people.)
Edina and her husband originally came to the U.S. on a three-month tourist visa. Her mother had been working in the Hungarian Jewish community in Borough Park for the previous six months, and when Edina saw how much her mom was earning, she was intrigued. She and her husband thought they would work for the duration of their visas and save up some money. She landed a job helping out a jeweler; her husband got work installing flooring. The lifestyle they found they could afford in New York kept them here.
But Edina's immigration status circumscribes her opportunities. Her car is registered and insured, yet she must drive it without a license, the specter of being pulled over haunting her all the while. And although she and her husband make enough money to support themselves and their two American-born children, Edina's work opportunities are limited. Educated as an economist and an IT technician in Hungary, she now works cleaning homes. She also misses her family in Hungary terribly. This past summer, her maternal grandmother died, but Edina couldn't return home to attend the funeral.
So far, Edina isn't panicking about Trump, but she says her husband and many of her undocumented friends in the Hungarian community are deeply concerned.
"He's so unpredictable, you don't know what he's going to do," says Anna, a friend of Edina. If the situation in the U.S. worsens, she says, she may choose to return to Hungary with her husband and her two children, both of whom were born here. "I don't know how much longer I can take this," she says.
Anna came to New York City more than a decade ago, hoping to learn English and temporarily escape increasing economic and political turmoil back home. But after meeting the man who would become her husband, a fellow Hungarian who had overstayed his visa, she decided to stay. She tried unsuccessfully to renew her year-long tourist visa, which she felt left her with only two options. She could return to Hungary, apply for a new tourist visa, and come back, over and over, or she could overstay her visa and risk deportation as well as an up-to-10-year ban on returning to the United States if caught. She chose the latter. "The biggest mistake I made in my life" is how she describes it, acknowledging that, at the time, she had no idea how difficult life being undocumented would be.
Anna feels she has been paying for that mistake for 11 years and counting. An installation artist by trade, she has had to turn down multiple offers for work and residencies abroad because she would be unable to return to the United States. The same holds true for seeing family back home. Her parents and two sisters occasionally come to New York, but her six-year-old son is also hoping to visit Hungary. If the family moves back to Europe, he would get that opportunity, but Anna fears her children's lives would worsen, as conditions in Hungary have only deteriorated since she left.
Like Edina and Alex, Anna's prospects for permanent residency or citizenship are bleak. "I would do anything to prove that I'm not a criminal or whatever, but I just can't do anything," she says.
Though legally they are in the same boat, white Europeans have some significant advantages over undocumented immigrants of color. Most critically, they are safe from the racial profiling, discrimination, and vicious invective that other immigrant groups often experience.
Russian is a lingua franca in Brighton Beach, long a stronghold of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. (triebensee/Flickr)
Anna says she's able to go about her day-to-day life under the radar. "Being white makes it easier," she says. Although the ultranationalist far right has risen in Hungary (Anna compares the current Hungarian regime to Trump), she recognizes that if she is forced to return home, she will likely be safe. "We're fortunate enough that we came from Europe," she says. "If we have enough, we can just go back, but some people cannot."
On the other hand, the perceived ease of their plight—or ignorance of their existence—may be limiting the access undocumented Europeans have to resources available to other undocumented immigrants.
The trouble is apparent in immigration-related research, which typically lumps together the numbers of undocumented Europeans with those from Canada and sometimes those from Oceania as well. The Migration Policy Institute, a think tank that analyzes immigration trends worldwide, say those regions are grouped together by the Census Bureau, which analysts often rely on for data. This lack of population-specific data can contribute to a lack of funding for population-specific research, creating a vicious circle.
"We've collected plenty of anecdotal evidence about the plight of our undocumented (especially from Russians who in fact come here for political asylum but cannot obtain it legally and overstay their visas), even though no one currently funds data collection and research on Russian-speaking undocumented immigrants," explains Dmitri Daniel Glinski, president and chief executive officer of the Russian-speaking Community Council of Manhattan and the Bronx, an organization that connects undocumented Russian speakers with immigration services.
The catch-22 between data and funding also limits the resources dedicated to assisting undocumented Europeans. RCCMB is perhaps the only organization specifically focused on aiding undocumented Russian speakers in New York City, yet, according to Glinski, it lacks the funding necessary to hire staff (it's currently run by volunteers) and cover operating costs.
Without a targeted approach to outreach and aid, many qualified undocumented Europeans may be missing opportunities for relief. Indeed, of the dozen immigrants' rights organizations contacted for this article, only two acknowledged even having undocumented clients from Europe. That's not because Europeans aren't being deported. As Glinski notes, the Department of Homeland Security counts more than 48,000 individuals from the former Soviet Union alone who were deported to their countries of origin between 2009 and 2014.
Despite the relative ease of his time in the United States, Alex knows that he is not entirely safe. He relates the story of a sting that occurred in New Jersey in February of 2015. Orchestrated by federal immigration authorities in conjunction with local law enforcement, the operation was meant to crack down on unlicensed moving companies, but also led to the detention of seven undocumented immigrants working for the firms. Alex said he has friends who knew the individuals, so it hit close to home.
That fear—of entrapment, of being found out, of being hauled away from family, friends and a life painstakingly built over the years—binds all undocumented New Yorkers together. "I'm in the same situation as everybody else," says Anna. "It's no better or worse, it's just the same shit."
Arvind Dilawar is a Bushwick-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in Newsweek, The Guardian, Vice, and elsewhere. He was born and raised in Jackson Heights.
