In 1999, on my birthday, I was hauled to the Human Resources at my first non-academic employer in this country and was fired – my legal papers were taking too long to arrive in some bureaucratic logjam; I was reminded that I had thirty days to leave the country. [In a sheer stroke of luck, papers arrived the very same day, and I was reinstated the following Monday]. For ten months starting in 2006, I was forced to leave the country, ‘self-deported,’ because of an emerging complication with the legality of my stay; the fault this time was mine. I left my newborn son and wife in New York, and, God as my witness, it was traumatic for all of us. In February 2018, twenty-two and a half long years of first entering the country in August of 1995 – maintaining legal status consistently if I was staying, staying out of trouble, paying taxes and all that jazz – I was naturalized.
