"I lived 20 for years in the US illegally": Russian confession from Brooklyn - ForumDaily
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Переклад цього матеріалу українською мовою з російської було автоматично здійснено сервісом Google Translate, без подальшого редагування тексту.
Bu məqalə Google Translate servisi vasitəsi ilə avtomatik olaraq rus dilindən azərbaycan dilinə tərcümə olunmuşdur. Bundan sonra mətn redaktə edilməmişdir.

“I lived 20 for years in the US illegally”: confession of a Russian from Brooklyn

Фото: Depositphotos

I met him by chance five years ago. And now we, no, no, intersect like neighbors. What strikes me about him is his sad resignation to fate and the complete monotony of his life - nothing changes for him chronically. His English after twenty years in the country is worse than mine after six - he believes there is no need for him to learn the language. His limited knowledge of the United States did not advance beyond New York. Only once in two decades did he leave the city - he went to Niagara Falls.

He is a resident of Brooklyn, Alexander, a Russian with a long-expired Russian passport, an experienced American illegal immigrant. He willingly told me the circumstances of his life with only one condition - not to disclose his last name. I easily agreed, because I never knew her.

This year I will be forty years old, almost twenty of them I lived as an illegal in the United States. Did I plan to live like this? Did you think that by the age of forty I would have no family, no home, no stable job? Not. Never.

I was born in a small Russian town, like Uryupinsk, but only worse. In Uryupinsk, by the way, there are about five factories and a railway station. But we have only hopelessness. My father drank himself to death, I grew up with my grandparents because my mother worked. Finished school. There was no money to go to study, I started working as a laborer, started drinking, tried drugs... It got to the point that my mother herself called the police to have me arrested - she couldn’t cope with me. Then the army. Served. I returned - my God, my God, how wretched everything is! Two friends are no longer there - drugs and alcohol... Hopelessness. And then my mother says - you need to go to the USA. Then it sounded something like this: Sasha, you urgently need to fly to the moon.

My grandmother borrowed money and bought me a suit. I remember how she and my mother looked at me in it and wailed: “Gorgeous!!! There’s no shame in wearing it to a White House reception, Sasha!” I treasure this suit as a memory, it’s almost never worn, it actually looks cheap and somehow miserable... Then they “married” me. Yes, according to documents, I am married and I even have a child - I adopted the daughter of my “wife”. I have no idea how they live today. In this suit and with my “family” I went for a tourist visa and received it very easily. Then I was sure that the most important thing was to enter the country.

I flew straight to New York. You could say I didn’t know other cities. Somehow all at once - New York and that’s it. I arrived and went straight to Brighton Beach. I don’t remember any special problems, because this was all before September 11. In general, I now consider the time before the “twins” to be the most relaxed in my life.

Brighton Beach. Photo: Pavel Terekhov

At first I tried not to become an illegal immigrant and applied for a student visa. But you had to study there, and I thought it was like in Russia - you pay on time and the grass doesn’t grow. I couldn’t study, I had to work - and that’s it, I gave up. But he managed to get an SSN, although without the right to work. My friend scanned it, then corrected it in Photoshop, I still use this document. I got a local license, got a job as a driver and soon bought my first car, rented a studio, and sent money to my mother. Then I didn’t even want to hear about work, for example, in Landry. Like, I didn’t find myself in a garbage dump to suffer there for pennies. The work, by the way, is hellish. And not so feminine. And not so bad when you're hungry.

Then September 11 happened. And I immediately realized that no one would ever legalize us, illegal immigrants. The terrorist attacks may not have been committed by illegal immigrants, but that's all. I just felt it. And a streak of bad luck began - I lost my job, couldn’t find anything for a long time, I already agreed to almost everything, and therefore I quickly turned to crime. Illegal immigrants are a whole community - one found it, told the other...

For all 20 years here I have been hearing cries that this community is a complete crime. I agree and disagree. Let's start with who we are. We are, in general, let’s say, a bastard in life. Over all these years, I have met only one illegal immigrant from St. Petersburg. And so the stories are like a carbon copy - a small town, everyone is drinking, and your parents are pushing you out to save you. The one from St. Petersburg is a different story. For him, we were dirt under our fingernails, and he himself was a snob to the tips of his ears - he came from some kind of family, either his grandmother was from the counts, or his grandfather was a lackey of the tsar, golden youth, an important dad in a prestigious cemetery... He By the way, he was legalized through marriage. Almost the only one I know. I met him the other day, he pretended not to recognize me. Count, motherfucker.

When you are an illegal immigrant, there is not much work, but you want to eat. And so it goes. For example, I worked for people who staged fake accidents. This was 2005-2006. How scared I was... I wasn’t scared from the accident itself - everything was under control, you were driving along the highway, and on command you slowed down, then another car drove into you from behind. The people who were in charge of all this were terrible. They beat two illegal immigrants, however, they were also homeless and completely lost themselves, to death with bats. Whether they threatened to go to the police, or whether a box of vodka was not enough for them for the “services” rendered, I don’t know. That business was all about blood, although the “victims” in the car never suffered seriously, they were always fastened and even grouped before the accident, ready. And on the blood...

One of my friends made fake cigarettes. In New York, smoking is incredibly expensive - $12 a pack. And in neighboring Virginia there are four or five... Smugglers don’t just go there for cigarettes. They then remove the old excise tax and stick on our New York excise tax. Now I see such a pack right away. But an ordinary person won’t even pay attention. Another cheated with checks for clothes - it was actually a gold mine, now you can’t make money like that anymore.

Does this mean that illegal immigrants are a total crime? No. Look around - the lion's share of nannies in Brooklyn are illegal immigrants. And those who do your repairs? I worked in a brigade with plummers for seven years. But are we more likely to agree to something illegal compared to legal residents of the country? Maybe yes. Are absolutely legal residents of the country hiring us for work outside the law? Yes. We are cogs in the criminal system, but it was all built by the hands of US citizens, not by us.

Фото: Depositphotos

Sometimes it seems to me that US citizens like to feel this position - I am on top, and you are below, I am the king and god, and you are nobody, a nonentity. Here I am driving a car, by the way, I drive a car very well - not everyone can say that about everyone. And here I am driving along the road. How am I different from the person in the next car? Nothing. I am the same. And then you come to his work, agree on certain conditions, work, the time comes to pay, and instead of cash and with such a nasty smile - I’ll write you a check, okay? And he’s waiting for you to start persuading him, like, what about the cash? What about the cache? We agreed. And then he immediately - bam! - and the price for the work is reduced almost twice.

Here's the horseradish. I have a bank account and I pay taxes. That's why I tell him - check, check. And to myself I add “bitch!!!” After all, if in my place there was someone without a bank account, and there are plenty of them - people are afraid to even go there, they think that they will be arrested right away, and he would be left without half of what he earned right away.

I do not undertake to argue whether we are bringing benefit to the United States or exclusively harm. I don’t know economic indicators - I hardly watch news in English, and the language is not of the same level, and I have nothing to pay for cable TV, and everything else is uninteresting. But I am firmly convinced that if we could work legally, the level of crime among us would be the same as among the locals, or even lower.

During the time I lived here, I still didn’t understand why we couldn’t be given permission to work. Honestly, there will be nothing more from this except benefit. People will stop looking for any kind of income, even outside the law, people will pay taxes better, again, many will be able to get legalized through marriage - when you can earn money, then women look at you differently.

Many illegal immigrants become antisocial precisely because they have no family. Without it, you very quickly and easily sink to the bottom. There is no need for benefits or anything else, give people the opportunity to earn money legally - nothing else will come from this other than benefiting the country.

It’s funny, but true - I, an illegal immigrant, am for Trump at heart and agree with his opinion about the wall, because we, those who stayed on a tourist visa, are usually not such lawless people as those who crossed the desert or sailed here in a trough . We are afraid, for example, that our fingerprints are in the system. They are not afraid of anything.

Is it bad for me? Well, looking to compare. If with the average American, then probably, yes. If with my classmates who stayed in my town, no. Many long gone. And I do not even drink, I have no time to drink, I have to work, or you will lie on the boardwalk with other homeless people.

Have you thought about returning? Where should we go? Everyone there died a long time ago, even my mother, who today wouldn’t even be 60—her heart... What was left was a tiny one-room apartment and the same hopelessness. I didn’t receive an education, I didn’t learn English - it’s in its infancy, so I understand it, but I don’t really speak it. True, I am much healthier than my Russian peers, almost all of them look like old people - they somehow drank themselves to death, shriveled up... Our girls are better preserved, many are divorced for the second time and everyone writes to me on Odnoklassniki about love and fidelity. They reason like this: Sasha doesn’t drink, lives in the USA, he has a car, which means he’s a good man! Naive. Send me there now and in a year I will also be a shriveled peasant, drunk, because of the environment and hopelessness. At the same time, I don’t feel the USA as my country. And Russia, yes. I go to the polls and vote. For whom? For Putin. I consider him one of the best presidents both in Russia and in the world.

During my first years here I played in the green card lottery. And, I don’t remember exactly, I think in 2011, I won it. I went to consult a lawyer. And he says - if you had won it before September 11, 2001, then yes, you could have said it. And now you go to Russia for an interview, and they won’t let you into the USA anymore. I decided not to risk it. And I stopped playing since then.

Фото: Depositphotos

What can help me today is a fake marriage, but I haven’t saved up the money for it. My grandmother sent me money from the sale of my mother’s house, and I somehow spent it all... Although I was going to postpone my marriage. But it’s not easy with money either - women prefer to get married for real. But no one will really go for me. America is a country where even the plainest woman has such an opinion about herself - you can’t ride a fucking goat. I often look at people like that and think: “Yes, in Russia I would walk past you and not notice you!” And look how spoiled you are!” Women consider Americans better husbands than Russians. And I don’t understand why - we are more hands-on, for example. But women reject me, and I feel it, as if all of America is rejecting me. In vain. I work, I pay taxes, I haven’t sunk to the bottom, all these years I slept on a clean bed in my home, I was shaved, I smelled and looked good, believe me, not even every legal person can boast of this, no matter how funny it may sound. I would like a work permit, so I would continue to work and pay taxes. And I would work better, and I would pay more, because I would not be looking for just something, I would be looking for something where I can gain a foothold and make a career. Here are the workers in the metro, or those who build roads, or high-rise installers. But there is no way for me to go there...

Now I have two jobs, I only sleep at home. There are almost no days off. In one place I am a loader, in another I dismantle cars. I've been renting the same studio in the basement for many years now. In the evenings I watch Russian television on the computer - I don’t have a TV, sometimes I sit on an American dating site, where for the most part people like me hang out.

By the way, girls need to be more careful on such sites - if a Russian-speaking man is looking for a Russian-speaking girl in the USA, supposedly because the mentality and “all American women are terrible, how scary” is closer, the probability that he is an illegal immigrant is 90%.

Do I have pessimistic thoughts? Yes, I’ve been living in them for a year now. If I didn’t come home to spend the night, no one would miss me. If I fell into a coma now, there would be no one to call the doctors from the hospital. Well, friends, yes, there are friends. But they are just like me. There is no extra penny. Many are so intimidated that they are even afraid to come to the hospital to visit - what if they arrest you? I sometimes think - am I really going to live my whole life as an illegal immigrant and die here as just a nobody? And I understand that probably yes. Twenty years have passed and nothing has changed. Why should anything change in the next twenty?

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