The hangar door was open. The plane landed in Ohio. You passed the rule that broke their legs. Eight hours of lesson. Twenty-four hours of classroom. Fifty hours behind the wheel. Nine months for the paper. Five hundred dollars for the privilege. You told them to come. You told them to walk. You removed the wheels.
The White House announced a refugee resettlement program for white South Africans in February of last year. It cited an emergency. Six thousand three hundred people have arrived, a number they plan to increase by ten thousand this year. Two hundred six settled in Ohio. Last June, the state legislature passed new driving license rules for lawful residents who are not citizens or green card holders. The rules require eight hours of driving school, twenty-four hours of classroom instruction, and fifty hours of supervised driving. The course costs five hundred dollars. It takes nine months. The federal refugee cash assistance program was reduced from twelve months to four. Almost all of the refugees admitted since October are South African. Resettlement agencies estimate about half have already left the state. The International Welcome Center in Akron reports arrivals leaving because they cannot secure transportation. A crowdfunding campaign hosted on a Christian platform asks for five hundred dollars per person to pay for the license and rent. The Episcopal church ended its relationship with the program over it.
Mike, the mother cannot feed her children without the food bank. The food bank is in Akron. The apartment is not. The bus does not run to the apartment. The car is not there. The car cannot be there because the license cannot be there because the law you signed is there, and the law you signed is there because you put it there, and the federal cash assistance that was twelve months is now four because your party’s administration cut it, and the mother you welcomed with speeches about religious liberty and the defense of persecuted Christians is checking the distance to the food bank on a phone she cannot charge because the electricity bill came before the rent.
Your coffee is warm, Mike. The morning meeting is at nine. Your car is in the garage. Your wallet has a driver’s license in it, and the license did not cost five hundred dollars, and it did not require nine months, and it was not preceded by a law the Governor signed making sure someone like him could obtain it while someone unlike him could not.
Your throat tightens. The five-hundred-dollar stone rises in your gullet. You try to swallow. The stone will not go down. It tastes of the hangar speech. Your chest goes cold. The Akron wind wraps around your ribs. You try to draw the breath the refugee draws at the bus stop. The air will not enter. Your knees lock up. The cold moves into your joints.
The woman whose name is not in this column because her family is still in South Africa and she fears what will reach them arrived in March. She left a country where she says the police force cannot protect her, where she took turns staying awake at night with her family, where the fear of what might happen in the dark was the last thing she felt before sleep and the first thing she felt upon waking. She admitted she had not experienced any specific attack; the ambient terror was enough to keep her family awake in shifts. She arrived in Ohio to a rent of nineteen hundred and fifty dollars a month and a federal cash assistance program that had been twelve months and would now be four and a driving law that said she could not legally transport her children to a grocery store without passing through a nine-month gauntlet she could not afford to enter. The welcome was the speech. The machine was the rest.
The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services told the Guardian it “has not received any direct reports from these refugees indicating they are experiencing financial hardship or planning to return to their home country and therefore cannot speculate.” The spokesperson’s throat did not tighten around the sentence. The spokesperson’s diaphragm did not drop. The words left the mouth at the same temperature and the same speed as the words before them and the words after them, and the mouth closed, and the day continued, and no one in the department registered what the sentence had done, which was to announce that the absence of a report was the same thing as the absence of a harm and to rest the apparatus on that announcement and call it a response.
Some Afrikaners have launched a crowdfunding campaign. One effort raised more than ten thousand dollars. The campaign description names the architecture: “Donations will be applied for helping refugees pay for rent when government funding stops after three months as well as financial assistance towards obtaining drivers licenses ($500/person), transportation to and from clothing and food banks.” The campaign is hosted on GiveSendGo, a platform that has courted controversy for hosting hundreds of extremist campaigns, while the Episcopal church has withdrawn from resettlement over what it calls its “steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation.” The architecture is legible to the people inside it. They understand that the rent stops being paid when the assistance stops arriving. They understand that the license costs more than a month of groceries. They understand that the clothing and food banks require transportation and that transportation requires the license and that the license requires money and that the money has been cut. The machine is a sequence of blocked doors, and each door has a sign, and each sign says WELCOME in a language the people reading it cannot eat.
The twelve-year-old boy walking to the food bank is the same boy the administration cited as a persecuted minority requiring American protection. The protection was the plane ticket. The machine is the rest of it. His vertebrae are accruing the walk from the apartment to the food bank. The compression will arrive later, not as a single injury but as a lower-back ache at twenty-five that doctors will attribute to posture or stress or the ordinary wear of a body that has worked. No one will connect the ache to the year the boy spent walking four miles to the food bank in Ohio because the legislature had passed a driving law and the administration had cut the cash assistance and the resettlement agency had no car to lend and the church had withdrawn and the mother could not drive and the food bank would not come to the apartment and the boy was twelve and the food bank was the difference between eating and not eating. The ache will be the bill. The bill will not arrive in the mailbox. It will arrive in the body, which is where costs land when the apparatus has organized them out of the budget.
I see the pavement in the gray light. I see the five hundred dollars the man does not have. Half of them have packed their bags and left. The ones who stay ask strangers on a Christian website to buy their license. The Episcopal church walks away from the program. You invited them. You chained them. You leave them to the cold.
Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it not to me. Matthew 25:45