Introduction

Immigration is one of the most hotly contested electoral issues, but the discourses of migration politics often invisibilize the personal experiences of those navigating its complexities. In this personal narrative, I hope to shed some light on what it means to be moved during the COVID-19 outbreak when you do not want to go without those you love. While the world has swiftly moved on from even talking about the pandemic, revisiting different experiences during this time has vital lessons to teach us now. For me and my spouse—privileged, citizened, cis-gendered bodies—migration policies continue to hang heavy on every one of our decisions from when we began our story in 2014, through the pandemic, and still today.

Migration and Love: A Personal Journey

The pandemic occurred after I had been living in Kolkata for a year as a Fulbright scholar. I had applied, and was lucky enough to be selected, partially to finally bring my life and my spouse’s life, an Indian national, together. We met as undergraduates in Montana, where he came to study because he said it “reminded me of a Himalayan hill station.” As each of us moved around the world in pursuit of our careers and education, we stayed together, growing closer rather than further. Finally, in 2017, he proposed to me, in part because we were soul mates and in part because we knew that he could be accused of visa fraud when coming to the US on his existing student visa. We married, once in the US and once when we arrived in India, and we lodged our permanent residence application with the Delhi Embassy. I still remember my family, confused, asking me why we were marrying when we were, taking so many photos, and saving our funds for a lawyer. When we decided to process our green card application in India in 2019, everyone brushed off my anxiety that something could go wrong. Even when travel advisories started to be issued when reports of the virus began circulating, causing visa processing pauses, friends and family still kept insisting that “surely there must be something they can do?”

When the pandemic broke out full force in March 2020, we began to realize that our togetherness could not last long, but all of us had bigger things to worry about and grieve for, such as the unknown number of workers who died walking over one thousand miles to get home after a hasty lockdown and the many souls around the world were succumbing to the virus every day. As we watched death tolls start to rise around the world, the US Embassy cancelled the Fulbright program, began pushing students onto flights and only citizens were allowed to return, including me. The Embassy also officially closed the office that processes visa applications with no advice on what to expect. As we battled the pandemic, we also battled to stay together and the fear that we would be pulled apart.

After months of emails, phone calls, and deliberation, we finally failed and I was booked on a flight to depart by the end of the year. Each day that passed, I felt increasing dread as I was pushed back to my “rightful place”, the place where I was said to “belong”, leaving my spouse where he was also said to “belong” in India. I found myself noticing the tenderness of the love that comprises daily life with a spouse or a partner. The small acts become routinized, creating an environment of care unlike anything else. The warm morning coffee brought gently set by your desk and made just the way you like it, the hand casually squeezing yours as the plane takes off, the inquiring and familiar glance up when you call their name. It caused me to ask myself a question that, as a scholar of gender and forced migration, I have asked myself many times: What is life if we cannot be with those that we love?

Meaning

Scholars and ethicists considering the meaning of lives lived in exile perhaps do not dwell on this question enough and when they do, the answers are dissatisfactory. For example, in Michael Blake’s (2020) book, Justice, Migration, and Mercy, Blake argues that the spouses of citizens should not have a more justifiable right to migrate than another potential migrant whose protection needs are greater. In Blake’s metrics, “affection” should not trump international duties. Certainly, the international refugee and migration regimes problematically exclude those who are more deserving by different metrics based solely on relationality, or in effect “knowing someone”. Building on this, scholars of LGBTQ+ forced migration have recently illuminated the many ways that the dearest and most meaningful relationships of queer refugees are ignored and invisibilized by a heteronormative refugee system that only recognizes married cis-gendered spouses and children (Ritholtz and Buxton 2021). The fragmented immigration and refugee systems overlook the meaning and the care that being together with our relations, our spouses, our parents, our kin, and our friends, adds to life overall. In effect, what these relationships do is push back against the ordering of nation-state-based life, with some “belonging” over here and others over there and instead theorising that there is a dimension of life that extends beyond the boundaries of the nation-state.

We lived these dynamics in a pronounced state during the pandemic and we were forced to leave one another. Forced because we, as a global community, ascribe nationality to belonging in part due to colonial forces that drew the world in a specific way to bestow a right to be on certain bodies and not on others. While a necessary key to post-colonial liberation movements, who argued that Indians only had a right to rule India, these ideas have become less salient, and less liberatory today. How can I belong in a country where I had not lived for most of my adult life? In a place where I had no healthcare, no residence, and no employment during a global catastrophe? In a place where my life partner could not come?

Privilege and Injustice

At the heart of why he could not come is an embedded aspect of global migration wherein some migrants are desirable and welcomed and others are abhorred and violated. For us, moving within this system, one passport was deemed “strong” and one passport was deemed “weak”. As sociologists know, these are misnomers for racism, injustice, colonial ways of dividing the world into worthy and unworthy, rich and poor, backwards and modern, developed and developing.

When I was forced to board my flight in January 2021, I did so not knowing if I would ever see my spouse or my in-laws ever again given the high death rates from COVID-19 around the world then. Talking to our lawyer before the flight, he emphasized, “You should know…should one of you fall ill, you will not be able to travel to be by one another’s sides.” While I watched the runway peel away, all I could do was weep.

These tears are nothing in comparison with what many of the people experiencing forced migration are forced to endure by a broken refugee and immigration system comprised of states, IOs, and country offices. Those whom I work with in my research have wept countless times as we have discussed how they were not permitted to travel to their mother’s bedside when she died, had never met their children as adults after being separated for 12 years, their children had never met their aunts and uncles after living in exile for 9 years. These stories are not anomalies but are the norm. The existing migration and refugee regimes provide few solutions or pathways. The normalization of forcing others to live a life without those who give meaning should haunt us all.

References:

Blake, M. (2020). Justice, Migration, and Mercy. Oxford University Press. Oxford, UK.

Ritholtz, S., & Buxton, R. (2021). Queer Kinship and the Rights of Refugee Families. Migration Studies, 9(3), 1075-1095. https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnab007.

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Sarah Nandi is a doctoral candidate at McGill University in Political Science, specializing in Gender and Women’s Studies, which is informed by her MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford. Her research examines sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) prevention and treatment in forced migration, exploring the dynamics of expertise and the standardization of localized experiences in humanitarian contexts.