by Shalmi Barman
"A visa is not a right. It's a privilege," [US Secretary of State Marco] Rubio said on Tuesday. Trump administration officials have said student visa and green card holders are subject to deportation over their support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel's conduct in the war on Gaza, calling their actions a threat to U.S. foreign policy and accusing them of being pro-Hamas. —Reuters, May 21, 2025
The State Department has told U.S. consulates and embassies to immediately begin reviewing the social media accounts of Harvard’s student visa applicants for antisemitism in what it called a pilot program that could be rolled out for colleges nationwide. —Politico, May 30, 2025
Counselors who work with foreign students eager to attend college in the U.S. are advising them to purge their social media accounts of posts that could attract the attention of U.S. State Department officials. —CBS News, May 39, 2025
To demonstrate that I don’t pose a threat,
I strip the stickers from my laptop case,
purge the Kindle reader, ctrl-shift-del
my browsing history as if the past
two, ten, eighty years had never been.
We’re experts here at inoffensiveness,
smalltalk savants, the brightest and the best
arriving on these shores to earn our keep,
inflate the GDP and pay our dues—
the price of entry to the winners’ club—
in labor, taxes, learned neutrality.
A privilege, not a right. In Khan Younis
the going rate for a sack of gritty rice
exceeds my weekly wage. Faucets frothing
overrun my glass. A legless child
plucks maggots from his wounds. I sink a knife
deep in the turkey, utter ritual thanks
for innocence far from the blasted plains
of Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon…
Purpose of visit? To become just like you,
I want to tell the agent matching my name
against a neutered profile. To shop at Target
on the Fourth of July, pledging allegiance
like a marriage vow. For this I stand in line,
bereft of fluids, jacket, shoes, and shame,
not-thinking of checkpoints a world away,
asking smilingly how much? how high?
Shalmi Barman is a South Asian national, a holder of a student visa, and a newly minted PhD. She spent several years at the University of Virginia writing a dissertation on class and labor in Victorian fiction, and doing other things that would likely be deportable offenses today. Her poetry has previously appeared in The New Verse News and also recently in Boudin, Blue Unicorn, EcoTheo Review, Gyroscope Review, and elsewhere.
