NOTES FROM A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY (2013)
First World *** Second World *** Third World *** Fourth World *** Cyber World
Before departing for Costa Rica in 2009 I gave my son something that I hoped would help him understand my decision to leave the United States. It was a book about the predicament of illegal immigrants. (Note: I wrote this in 2013. Now, 2024, the immigration crisis has become a catastrophe.)
In our first conversation via Skype after I had settled into my new home, my son told me that he had read the book and it had given him a new sympathy for people who live in different worlds. He was on the way to recognizing his own first-world privilege.
The book, Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle, is a story about two Mexican immigrants in California and their struggle to survive in the first world. Only later did I learn the term for this type of struggle: fourth world. This term has so far been used to define micro nations such as indigenous nations, or an Islamic or Jewish community in the United States. But I think fourth world also describes immigrants and refugees living in the United States and Costa Rica, illegal or otherwise. Costa Rica has an immigration problem very similar to the United States; because it has the highest standard of living in Central America, it is flooded with immigrants from Nicaragua, Honduras, and Panama.
In 2009, I was sharing my home with a young woman who was (unbeknownst to me) living illegally in the U.S. because she was undocumented; that is, her tourist visa had expired and the embassy had refused to renew it. So she’d stayed anyway, living hopefully and invisibly in the shadow world that illegal immigrants inhabit. But immigration officers asked for her documentation when she was on vacation in Florida—her first vacation in three years—and suddenly she was slapped into jail to await the humiliating deportation process. Paty first came to the United States from Peru because a missionary nun had invited her. During the four years she lived in the U.S. she was actively involved in her church and would have made a wonderful US citizen, if only someone could have advocated for her. I did not know that Paty was staying illegally until one of her friends called to tell me what had happened and why.
Until that moment, I had been somewhat blissfully ignorant of the injustice of our immigration system.
Paty’s deportation created a domino effect in my own life, one that forced me to take stock of my own position as a native-born U.S. citizen. I had been living precariously for years; that is why I was happy to share my home with her, accept her modest rent money, and coach her in the transition to independent living. When I lost her companionship, along with her small contribution to my household income, I was thrown back into a dismal routine of solo survival: too many bills and not enough income, even though I had a Masters’ degree, and a professional job that did not meet my expenses. An adjunct teaching job.
In an “aha!” moment, it suddenly dawned on me that my standard of living had been sliding steadily downhill ever since my divorce, eight years before. (And only later did I have another “aha!” moment: no fault divorce was just one of a growing number of unjust social policies that was designing a new world of inequality.)
In the early spring of 2009, after the Obama election and the bank bailout fiasco, it finally occurred to me that the American Dream, for me, had been deferred indefinitely. Unjust social policies and inequality in the work place had changed my country to the point where I awakened one morning and no longer recognized it.
I awakened to realize that the American dream was never going to happen for me and I decided then that I did not want to live in an America without a dream. It wasn’t my America anymore. I am not talking about America being over-run with illegal immigrants: I am talking about the sinister antagonism of a political system that appears to be rigged by the ruling class. My meager life was not ever going to stand up to the federal government; I knew this because of my attempts to find justice in my own county. Yes: COUNTY.
Waking reality was so dismal that I caught myself dreaming not the American dream, but about ending my life because of the hopelessness of my economic situation. Is this the new American dream, hopelessness? South Korea is seeing a startling rise in their suicide rate because so many people have lost their hope in a bad economy; is this going to happen in my own country?
So, I decided to choose hope by doing something about my situation: I decided not to spend another winter huddled around my space heater because I couldn’t afford to pay the heating bill. After my roommate was deported, I left my country voluntarily. I went to a third world country, Costa Rica.
After living in Costa Rica for a while, I stopped considering it a third world country. Though Costa Rica has its own set of problems, more and more Americans are choosing Costa Rica over their homeland because it offers a more reasonable life than the existence many of us accept as normal back in the States.
