when the american dream gets lost in the mail

on dreams, bureaucracy, and conditional belonging.

a note ~

i debated on publishing this story, as hyphen is a space to explore the intersection of creativity & tech, and it didn’t seem aligned.

but i think this part of reality belongs here too: the unglamorous bureaucracy one faces to be a part of that world.

---

there's a particular sort of helplessness that comes with being a foreigner in America.

a helplessness that no amount of education, achievement, or assimilation can shield you from.

i learned that lesson crying on the curb outside the post office.

i. the search begins

it started simple enough: my work card was supposed to arrive.

this small piece of plastic would allow me to start my job here. with it, i could finally begin the career i'd spent years preparing for.

the card never came.

what followed was a kafkaesque journey through America's most broken systems.

"have you checked with the supervisor?"

i walked from post office to post office.

finally, i was told i could speak to the supervisor, then waited an hour only to discover he'd been there all along, helping other customers. no one told me he was there, no one told him i was waiting.

"he'll call you tomorrow morning," they promised.

he didn't, so i returned at 10am the next day.

"the supervisor is out for lunch," they said.

i looked around for somewhere to sit and wait. there were no chairs, so i stood. the heat was oppressive in the building. i ended up walking twenty minutes to the nearest cafe for water, and back. the clerk explained that the supervisor was actually out in the field, and that i could come back tomorrow.

they looked genuinely sorry when i pleaded with them that it was immigration mail. i could see they wished they could do more.

ii. two receipt numbers

the worst part wasn't the waiting, it was the isolation.

the way the system turns you into a receipt number, that only another receipt number could understand.

"it's fine, right? you're a Stanford student..."

at the Tresidder package center, one stop of many i needed to cross off my list, i ran into another new graduate from Stanford.

she was from Nigeria, and facing the same nightmare. her work card had also never arrived.

we waited together outside in the heat, while the building was being repaired due to electrical issues. therefore, the package center wouldn’t open for another three hours. we both stayed and waited. i had a headache because my water had ran out again. hers did too.

while we waited, i got on the phone with immigration services to see if they could help me understand what to do next.

after battling an automated voice agent, a customer service agent promised me a 90-minute wait time just to speak to a human being.

when i finally got through, they told me the only solution was to restart the entire application process from scratch.

two thousand dollars to expedite a replacement card.

five hundred, if i waited up to eight months.

with a job offer hanging in the balance, those weren't really choices at all.

iii. the myriad of possibilities

what tortured me (the situation truly felt like some sort of special, psychological torture) was the myriad of possibilities, illustrated in detail in many desperate reddit threads i combed through looking for answers.

the package could be anywhere.

stolen from my mailbox.

delivered to the wrong address.

sitting in a postal facility somewhere, misfiled.

i could pay two thousand dollars i didn't have—that was the point of a work card, to be able to start making an income—or keep searching through a system that felt like an endless maze.

my family was worried, but i didn’t want to explain it to them fully. they were an ocean away, limited to supportive WhatsApp calls in the hours of day we overlapped—what could they do?

so for two days, i made my way to and from the mail offices in three locations and every nearby package center, talking to anyone i could. a fifteen-minute trip from my friend’s place i was staying at to the main post office would take me an hour and a half by public transport.

i was on borrowed time; my unemployment days were ticking down. foreign workers on my visa class had ninety days of unemployment before being forced to leave the country.

the housing center staff told me they were “drawing on blanks”. neighbours, seeing the note that i had slipped, going door to door, told me they received nothing.

campus was closed for the summer, so there was nowhere to escape the heat.

iv. when achievement means nothing

funnily enough, my PhD researcher advisor appeared at some point while we were waiting outside the package center, looking harried.

i hadn’t seen him in a while; i told him i was going through a “visa problem”.

"not you too?"

international students are never alone in this particular circle of hell.

a professor going back and forth between Germany and the States every weekend for seven years, to finally be eligible for the green card that would allow him to be with his family. a Canadian student who was barred for five years from entering. workers sent home after not being able to draw lucky in the lottery that would allow them to obtain a work visa. my roommate, facing such extraordinary visa wait times that she might not be able to come back to school this year.

it’s something that not a lot of people talk about openly. you’re at risk here by even speaking out. anything can happen.

and i was, perhaps on paper, the ideal candidate. i had graduated from Stanford with a master's degree. i had a great job offer, a strong network, institutional support. but i was just another application number in a broken system, reduced to the same bureaucratic nightmare that destroys people every day.

despite years of building a life here, i was still just a visitor. my welcome could be revoked at any time.

i really tried to do everything right

if this was happening to me, who on paper had every advantage, what happens to everyone else?

v. the flimsy promise of america

here's the irony: even after you get approval on paper, after you've proven your worth to the federal agencies, your future still depends on the postal service successfully delivering a piece of plastic.

the American dream comes down to whether the mail carrier can find your apartment.

that plastic card carries your ability to build your life here, and it travels through a mail system that everyone acknowledges is broken, staffed by people for whom your desperation is routine.

being a foreigner in America means living with a vulnerability that we all here understand. you’re walking on a thin line between belonging and exile.

so you sit on a curb and cry. and then you get up.

---