After his arrest, Cardenas was plucked from the county jail by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, who drove him to a Tacoma detention center. He didn’t get to say goodbye to his parents, siblings, or friends. He never got to see a lawyer—detainees have no right to representation—and after six weeks in a federal detention cell, he was loaded on a plane and flown to Arizona and then bused to the border.
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The Deported
What happens the day you’re deported? In the first article from GOOD 027: The Migration Issue, writer Seth Freed Wessler takes a look at the lives on the other side of the border, where recent deportees are often strangers in the country they came from.
Introducing GOOD 027: The Migration Issue
Welcome to GOOD 027: The Migration Issue! In it, we go from point A to B to back again. We don’t just travel, we shift our perspective. We relocate. We migrate.
Since starting with Lucha Libre USA when it was founded in 2010, RJ Brewer has become infamous as the company’s resident asshole. He is intimidatingly muscular and marked by a glaring, pushy demeanor, but he’s notorious because he’s made it his goal to degrade Lucha Libre USA’s predominantly Latino audience. It is not uncommon for Brewer to stare down an audience of thousands of Mexican-Americans and tell them he thinks they all need to go back to Mexico.
The point of the Brewer storyline is “to keep the show relevant to U.S. Hispanic culture,” says Lucha Libre CEO Steve Ship. “RJ is a phenomenal wrestler, he’s certainly entitled to his opinion, and I think a wrestling ring is the perfect place to shine light on the topic.”
From our Migration Issue: Let the Right Ones In
New Orleans is transforming from a stagnant backwater struggling with white flight, brain drain, and urban blight—not to mention two hurricanes, an oil spill, and a recession—into a city where the number of people starting businesses is 28 percent higher than the national average. Tax credits have brought in video game, bioscience, and tech companies, diversifying an economy long dependent on tourism, shipping, and oil. The city’s $600 million film scene ranks right behind Los Angeles and New York City. Business leaders and economic developers are hustling to rebrand New Orleans as a destination for the young and creative, talking up its reputation for small business, great food, and unique music.
From our Migration Issue: You Can Take the Girl out of Iowa
My dad grew up in the town where I was raised, a place that’s 94 percent white and 83 percent Catholic. My mom grew up in a slightly smaller town three hours down the Mississippi. They like Iowa. They never yearned for anywhere else. Certainly not for the city.
Among those of us who grew up where the tallest building tops out at three stories, there are the people who left and the people who stayed. Let’s talk about those of us who decamp to the sparkle of the coasts, of the cities. Those of us who decide to seek our fortunes among other people who vote for Democrats and eat sushi and don’t want to get married until we’re juuuust about ready to start having kids.
An old college roommate, the kind of globe-trotting girl who styled herself a “citizen of the world,” had once told me that “the most significant part of travel is the return,” and I hoped if I left honestly—with a one-way ticket, return date unknown—that when I came back I would see my home more clearly, with some of the perspective of a stranger.
From our Migration Issue: One journalist’s attempt to get to know South Africa
From our Migration Issue: Pure Imagination
Who is David Edwards? In a photo on his site, he appears seated at a table in front of a kind of culinary bong. His mass of wavy inventor hair is glossy brown, his stubble silver, his spectacles round, lips turned down, eyes smiling. A drinking glass with a gray fog curling out of it is tipped delicately between three fingers in his right hand.
Edwards, who is 51, has been called a Willy Wonka, a mad scientist, a Nutty Professor. He has the eccentricity of these characters, coupled with the institutional support of Harvard and his own deep pockets. Like them, he’s found a way to pursue his most outlandish ideas.
From our Migration Issue: The Left Hook
Besides being a professional boxer, Manny Pacquiao is a Philippine congressman. He used his international fame to win elective office in one of the country’s poorest regions, where he was born and raised, then began to fight for economic justice, health care, and education.
Sports, meet the political left; the left, meet sports. You used to know one another so well. Half a century ago, on April 16, 1947, Jackie Robinson desegregated baseball and never stopped fighting for civil rights. The greatest boxer in history fought racism and the Vietnam War. Tommie Smith and John Carlos celebrated their medals in the 200-meter dash at the 1968 Olympics by giving the black-power salute in a silent protest for human rights.
Sports is one of the great pleasures of civilization, one that naturally inclines enthusiasts to impose grand narratives on simple physical contests. Yet its political consciousness is AWOL during the greatest economic upheaval in almost a century.
From our Migration Issue: The Financial Exiles
Molly McCloskey is weighing her options for chipping away at $20,000 of student loan debt. The way she sees it, she can put her degree to use (easier said than done), apply to grad school, or wait tables—the kind of gig many of her former classmates have. Others don’t have a job at all. Nationwide last year, more than half of bachelor’s degree holders under 25 were jobless or underemployed, the highest rate for young college graduates in more than a decade.
As they’re confronted with crushing debt and few job prospects, many young Americans like McCloskey have suspended their plans to succeed in their own backyards. Instead, they’re biding their time abroad, working in countries where decent pay, a prestigious title, a pension, and affordable health care aren’t just wistful aspirations. Often, there’s no experience needed.
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