As the March 21 INS registration deadline for Pakistanis living in the United States looms, hundreds of Pakistanis are rushing to Canada, fearing detainment or deportation should they stay in the U.S. PNS Associate Editor Sandip Roy looks at the breakup of one Pakistani family and the trials of a young man who longs for his life in New Jersey as he starts anew up north.
When Usman Ghani looks around his empty apartment in Montreal, he can hardly believe that less than eight weeks ago he was just another college student in New Jersey, worrying about grades and baseball. Seven courses away from graduating from Kean University, named Rookie of the Year by his fraternity, volunteering to paint houses in his free time – his life was full.
Now, the 24-year-old Pakistani from New Jersey is waiting to see if Canada will grant him asylum.
“I used to be so popular – now I look at the four walls in my room and weep,” Ghani says on the phone from Montreal. Even though he left family behind in New Jersey, Ghani would rather take his chances in Canada than register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) by March 21, as many Pakistani men in the United States are now required to do.
He is not alone. “Turnout at registration has been low,” says Faiz Rehman, president of the Washington, D.C.-based National Council of Pakistani Americans. “The INS expected about 25,000 would show up. It’s been more like 3,000 to 5,000.” Instead of registering, many Pakistani immigrants have been fleeing to Canada, where many have relatives and friends.
The Karachi-based newspaper Dawn reports that more than 2,000 Pakistanis have flooded across the Canadian border. The Barre Montpelier Times Argus reported that from Jan. 1 to Feb. 11, 2003, 521 of 714 asylum claims at one border crossing at Lacolle were from Pakistanis.
Canadian immigration officials in Toronto have seen a marked increase in asylum applications, particularly from Pakistanis.
“People just don’t want to risk going before the INS,” says Saad Ahmad, an immigration attorney in San Jose, Calif. “They think Canada is a more welcoming country.”
When Ghani reached Canada on Dec. 30, he found more than 70 other Pakistanis camped out in the immigration facilities. Entire families had come, though INS rules require only men to register. “If you detain the bread earner, the whole family is destroyed. A cab driver can’t just leave his family behind in New York,” Rehman says.
But when Ghani left, he didn’t call his parents until he was already in Canada. “I didn’t want anyone to try and stop me,” he says.
His father, Zahid Ghani, a reporter covering the United Nations for Pakistani news service News Network International, was upset but not surprised. 9/11 was coming back to haunt their family yet again. Almost as soon as the World Trade Center fell, the FBI showed up at Zahid Ghani’s door, quizzing him about everything from Kashmiri fighters to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Barely 24 hours later, he learned that his brother-in-law in Dallas had been killed – a victim of a self-described white supremacist who said he acted in revenge for the Sept. 11 attacks.
All this weighed heavily on Usman Ghani’s mind. He had shouldered his own share of trouble. He remembers a man making a slit-your-throat sign as Usman drove with his mother, who was wearing a hijab. At a halal Chinese restaurant popular with Muslims, law enforcement officials pulled him aside and asked his name and nationality. When he asked why they were questioning him, they said, “Your people attacked our country.”
When the U.S. government announced the new registration procedures, Usman was terrified. Adding to his fear, his father denounced the registration and questioned the U.S.-Pakistan friendship at a Pakistani community press conference. “True friends don’t raid their friends’ homes and businesses and deport hundreds like the U.S. has been doing,” Zahid Ghani said. Soon the elder Ghani got a call from angry government officials in Pakistan warning him to watch what he said.
Usman Ghani, who came to the United States when he was 14, says New Jersey is everything to him. “That’s where I went to high school, where I learned to play football. I didn’t even want to take a job outside New Jersey.”
But he was afraid that once he went to register, he would be framed because of his father’s public comments. Furthermore, the family’s green card process was stalled at the INS because the agency incorrectly believed their sponsor, Usman Ghani’s grandmother, was dead.
So he decided to take the chances on Canada.
“I had a feeling that I would at least be treated fairly at my asylum hearing,” he says. “In the U.S. they would look at me first as a Muslim.”
Back in New Jersey, Zahid Ghani tries to comfort his devastated wife. Within weeks of Usman’s move, his younger son joined his brother in Canada, leaving one sister at home.
Zahid Ghani says he doesn’t worry about going back to Pakistan. “I want to see what they would do to me,” he says defiantly. But he worries about his wife, whom he brought to the United States on their honeymoon in 1978. She lost both her legs in Pakistan due to a botched operation and needs to stay in the United States for continued pyysical therapy and adjustments to her artificial legs, which have greatly improved her life.
“I thought this was a peaceful country, a fair, civilized, law-abiding place,” he says bitterly.
Usman, meanwhile, has moved out of the YMCA where the refugees were housed, enrolled in French classes and is waiting for a work permit. The one-time finance major is eyeing a $10-an-hour job at a university gym. When he is alone, he still has nightmares of being sent back to Pakistan, of being tortured. But mostly he says he misses the United States.
“I love the U.S. I will love it for the rest of my life. But just because I love it doesn’t mean I feel safe in it anymore.”
Roy ([email protected]) is host of “Upfront” – the Pacific News Service weekly radio program on KALW-FM, San Francisco.