Fools Russian

Once the mise-en-scène of the American immigrant story entailed Ellis Island and Lady Liberty, but by the second half of the twentieth century, the popular romance of second sons leaving Ireland, Italy, and Germany for the prosperous American frontier was dead on arrival. No longer a new beginning, it was more like a last resort; for those arriving from the Global South today, the promised land is paved with strip mall massage parlors while air-sealed U-Hauls clear the southern border on a byzantine quest for official permanence. The children of immigrants, meanwhile, are obliged to strike a balance between traditional expectation and assimilation, existing in a constant schizophrenic state of shapeshifting to adapt to their immediate surroundings. Even before ICE agents were lying in wait at citizenship ceremonies or in restaurant parking lots, the barriers presented by America’s immigration process—the application costs, legal fees, onerous documentation, and coercive employment tactics that keep immigrants working long hours for little pay—hampered any meaningful sense of belonging. The children of these immigrants are raised in an environment of rising commodification where the individual is only as valuable as they are productive. America is a culture of monetization and any tradition that fails to meet that pro forma is deemed unworthy. As novelist Gary Shteyngart once quipped, “It’s my great misfortune to have left one dying empire for another.”