The Hispanic population with its spiralling 30 million has swept aside all other minorities to become the largest in the US. It hates anyone who ‘usurps’ its jobs and steps on its turf, specially the immigrants from South Asia
IN the employment parched landscape where the jobless, a burgeoning 8.8 million, still surf the Internet and scour the ‘Help wanted’ signs while despairingly clinging to hope, it has been a year of disaster and decline. The Bush White House with Iraq as its white elephant has driven the lifestyle further down south.
Was it for this that I left my land and my people? I was a respected doctor back in Pakistan, luck brought me here and I went through the grind to clear the American medical exam — still no job for me!
A sad refrain, as this heard, over and over again from so many, begins to sound like a bore.
At Barnes & Noble, the aristocratic highbrow bookstore chain, a huge sign screams out “Help Wanted”. I go in cocksure and announce to the 20-something (white with tons of attitude) seated at his throne, the customer relations counter, that I am the person they have been waiting for and should therefore remove the help wanted sign.
For a minute, he stares unbelievingly, then sizes me from my wind-cheater down to my joggers, taking in my brown face sporting a stubble — all the rage nowadays.
Unimpressed and without further ado, the fellow declares that all the vacancies are filled up. Get lost, he implies.
When I visit B&N a few days later, they are still hiring. But not desis — they are bad for their business. Where does one file a complaint against discrimination that America touts in its Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal with certain inalienable rights”. The aliens’ rights are violated day and night in this great country, but the lawsuits are missing — who entertains the poor who come to live here?
This is a tale told by a young man — an immigrant, who else — roaming the roads, covering the length and breadth of shopping malls and franchises bursting through the stratosphere, but each time he gets turned away.
Today, even minimum-wage jobs for immigrants are not available. “I hate this country that pretends it does not discriminate against race, colour and creed, yet, from top to bottom, America is nothing but a monolith of the whites, by the whites and for the whites.”
The Hispanic population with its spiralling 30 million has swept aside all other minorities to become the largest in the US. It hates anyone who usurps its jobs and steps on its turf, specially the immigrants from South Asia.
Last month, another ugly hate crime was witnessed against two Pakistani brothers in Corona Queens. Two Latino teenagers yelled “You’re Taliban,” at Javad, 17 and Junaid, 16, as they came out of the mosque. Later, they called in five more of their gangsters and pummelled the Pakistani youth with severe blows on their eyes and heads. The police called it the worst instance of bias-related violence in that area. Said Javad: “We’re taught to respect other religions and other types of people.” The US-born simply could not understand why this ugly incident had occurred two years after 9/11.
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With mirrors on the wall bouncing back the shiny spaghetti tape embellishing the ceiling of the small restaurant in uptown Manhattan, Zulfiqar, the owner of Mumtaz, left Bangladesh so long ago that he doesn’t care to remember. We strike a conversation the minute Zulfiqar is done serving his clients. “My 16-year-old daughter used to wear a hijab — it was of her own choice. Her mother and sisters have never worn the head scarf.”
It was three weeks before 9/11. One late afternoon, as the young schoolgirl crossed the road, a car with Latino lads brushed against her so bad that she ran home for her life. “For days she didn’t tell us and then September 11 happened and she got really scared. Since then, I have been driving her to school, while my wife picks her up after school.”
Life for the couple has changed. He is suddenly too scared of his neighbours — the Latino gangs of New York who harass Muslims as a pastime.
He looks so beaten and really not interested in continuing the conversation. The only three words writ large on his face are dejection, hopelessness and despair. His face only brightens up when he talks shop: “I have single-handedly built this business,” as he casts a proud look around his ‘empire’ and takes in the pride of serving the goras his loyal customers of yore. “There’s competition, it’s healthy, I welcome it because I don’t shirk from hard work.”
Will he return home?
“This is my home,” he say, “I will never go back.”
Hundreds of miles away, at New Haven in Connecticut, bang in the middle of a very busy street cutting across the Tudor-style stone archways of Yale University, is a deli owned by a Lebanese. Yusuf is his name.
Sullen and tired (maybe because Iftar time is near) he attends to his customers with a casual disdain. A student wants to buy a cigarette lighter and wonders if Yusuf has more at the back.
“No,” says he gruffly.
Where are you from? He turns to me.
The portly middle-aged man discards his roughness and even manages a smile. Now when people ask me this question, first I flinch, then say East Hanover, only to be difficult — at times a tease, because, I know what the loaded question is leading towards. Often they leave it at that, but a few persevere, I relent and say Pakistan.
“I am from Pakistan,” Yusuf is duly told and for that alone I am offered a chair to sit. And then begins his tale.
“I am just waiting to make enough money and then (with his right hand making a take-off sign as if to fly away) I will leave.” Oddly enough, he has lived here for 17 years and still has not assimilated in the American system. “Last Saturday, my wife and I went to the home of an American family to attend a birthday party — the boy is friends with my son — we felt so alone, so left out, we could not mix with the rest...or maybe they didn’t want to talk to us either. Believe me, it was no good.”
He and his wife will leave one day, but the children, he says, will stay here “because they were born here and it’s unfair for us to take them along.”
As I walk among the leaf-laden avenue and feel the loneliness of the fall close around me, I recall the words of Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian who writes on immigrants. “America,” she says, “is home to me, but I feel an outsider too. I have observed a sense of exile in my parents...that can never go. We are still going through life-long trans-cultural voyages.”
Even with the generations to come, will this journey ever end, I ask myself.
This year too will pass, like the rest, but the heartache for the millions who miss home will linger on.
The Hispanic population with its spiralling 30 million has swept aside all other minorities to become the largest in the US. It hates anyone who ‘usurps’ its jobs and steps on its turf, specially the immigrants from South Asia 
