A View from a Returning Expatriate

When during a phone interview connecting me to my potential colleagues in South Africa nine years ago, I stated that I had no passport, they just about gasped in astonishment. Such a thing is impossible for an academic in that and in most other countries. But it’s emblematic of life in these United States. The US is mired in a blinkered insularity that makes it and its people something of the village idiots to other folk around the planet. The perception that nothing that really counts happens outside the US is so pervasive that anyone who has seen first-hand the falsity of that perception, and experienced the consequences of it upon trying to re-integrate into America, may be forgiven for succumbing to a feeling of hopeless, helpless, frustration and rage.

            God help the immigrants.

            It’s pretty well accepted that the average American’s knowledge of geography is, well; let’s be blunt: piss-poor (When we told a waiter that we were from South Africa, East London to be precise, he enthusiastically bonded with us by telling us he had a friend in Djbouti, which was ‘near there, near Madagascar’.). But the problem ramifies into many levels of what should be routine, or at least humane, administrative tasks.

            Here are a couple of examples.

            There are any number of reasons to fill out online forms – job applications, credit applications, cell phone applications – you name it. Doing this for a US entity is often an exercise in futility if your current or last employer or place of residence is outside the US. The option to select such an outlandish reality simply does not exist. It is not provided for, as if such people do not exist. There are ways around this, of course, but more than once I have been thwarted in completing an application or some other form because my details were not accepted. I didn’t exist. My reality was not provided for.

            This may seem trivial, this business of thwarted form-filling, but I see it as being symbolic.

            Upon returning to the US after 8 years in South Africa I tried to open up a credit card account with a major bank. My application was denied because my credit history was deemed to be too sparse. I was advised to open up credit lines from one money lender or the other. In South Africa I had bought and sold a house and paid off the loan, had a continuous 5 year history of paying rent in full and on time, had paid off a car, had a credit card paid in full – all evidence of good credit. None of it counted. This history didn’t exist to the US bank. It’s as if the globe consists of the wide and bustling US with the rest of the landmasses blanked out, as if nothing ever happens in them, at least that matters to the commerce of individuals in the US.

            It’s interesting to watch tv news here, interesting because it’s so boring - in a fascinating world - but interesting to observe how little news from around the world is reported – except where the US is involved. What’s happening in other countries simply doesn’t matter to the American people, and the powers that be would rather keep it that way. It’s useful to have the people happy in their own little playpen and not looking outside at what the other kiddies are doing - or having done to them - in their name.

            My South African wife has been in the US for a month and said the other day that she felt isolated. By that she meant: isolated from the rest of the world. 

            This insularity of life in the US is almost understandable. In explaining why I didn’t have a passport to my South African colleagues, I stated that I simply didn’t need one. Everything I needed I could find in the US, and the conferences I attended were all typically in the US. It’s a big, well-endowed country. It’s all happening here. But this comes with a cost.

            The cost is not just the perception of the American people held around the world that we are kind of cute but a bit obnoxious and naïve overgrown children. This is the 21^st century we are in, and more and more the problems we face are global problems. It simply will no longer do to look inward, to be ignorant of causes and effects elsewhere in the world, to be careless of causes and effects elsewhere in the world, to be ever more protectionist, drawing the covered wagons round us. Such behaviour will incur a very large cost even in the short-term, never mind the long-run (it already has). We need to work and live with the people of the planet. Become people of the planet, in fact. It’s gratifying that our current President actually is such a person, and appalling that he has been vilified for being so.

            Even the concept of patriotism needs to be refined. Patriotism is a concept that has generally been used as a divisive mechanism. It’s useful in uniting one group of people but has the inevitable consequence of dividing humanity into ‘them’ and ‘us’. This is why patriotism is drummed across the land in times of war, of course. But to the extent that patriotism depends on the patriot feeling superior to ‘them’, it’s a false concept. If one’s sense of self-esteem depends on feeling superior to others, rather than gratified by one’s own accomplishments in and of themselves, then one can be said to be deluded, diseased in a way.

           The US is by no means alone in displaying some of these traits, but it’s exaggerated here, almost a caricature at times, in spite of any ‘what abouts’ one might call forth. I look forward to a United States that does not suffer such delusions, and sees uniting the global community in mutual respect and mutual curiosity as an important goal. A time when striving toward that goal is not seen to be un-American.

            A time when an expat or foreign national can find their country on the bloody drop-down menu.