Among the many Valentines I received on Feb. 14 was one that appeared to be from Penn State Human Resources informing me that I needed “to complete a new I-9.”
Googling, I learned that I-9 is a proposed interstate highway connecting Bakersfield to Stockton in California’s Central Valley.
Hmm. I’ve driven from Bakersfield to Stockton a time or two, but as counsel says to the judge in every courtroom drama ever: Objection: relevance.
I refined my search. Form I-9, according to the website of U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services, is “used to verify the identity and employment eligibility of all new hires.”
Still baffling: I’m a new hire at Penn State like Viagra is a new drug on the market: We’ve both been around since 1998. If Russell Frank hasn’t taught 100 journalism classes during all those years, who has?
An hour after I got my Valentine, a message arrived via Penn State’s faculty listserv from a colleague who had received the same HR love letter. This faculty member noted, with evident alarm, that he was not born in the United States (though he was now a citizen) and wondered whether other foreign-born faculty had received a similar summons.
His message prompted three replies:
- “Yours is chilling news.”
- “Is the email legit? I received an email pretending to be from the State College Police recently, and although it looked legit it was not from the correct address. I would call HR to check.”
- “If this email is legitimate, it is likely the result of an audit of I-9 Employment Eligibility Verification records. A notice like this would indicate that HR may not have properly updated your status from legal permanent resident to U.S. citizen. These reverification notices are quite common and typically just a recordkeeping error. That said, you might want to kindly remind HR to keep their records in order, particularly in today’s political climate.”
If this Form I-9 business did indeed have something to do with Trump’s mania for ridding the country of anyone who wasn’t born here (and in the case of the children of non-citizens, even those who were), why was I being targeted? I was born in Brooklyn, f’cryinoutloud and, like Barack Obama, have the long and short versions of my birth certificate to prove it.
The only thing I could think of is that to some Americans, New York City, with all its non-white, non-Christian and non-native residents, isn’t the Real America, which makes me a candidate for expulsion. (The Real America grows corn. Backyard gardens don’t count.)
Of course by this logic, Trump, a Queens boy, should also get the boot or, at least be disqualified from serving as president, since the U.S. Constitution specifies that only the native-born need apply. (Trump’s tireless efforts to oust Hawaii-born Obama on these very grounds suggest that this is the only section of the Constitution with which he is familiar.)
My next communique from Penn State HR tacitly acknowledged the anxiety it had provoked. It apologized “for any confusion” and provided instructions for filling out the I-9 form and attending an in-person “document verification session” at HR.
I don’t think of myself as a paranoiac – I don’t, for example, think Trump is a Russian asset in the strict sense — but I called HR to do some verification of my own. A live human at an 865- phone number swore this was routine record-keeping and not part of some crackdown. So I filled out the form and drove over to HR HQ to present my documents.
No, I’m not paranoid, but visiting Building 331 in Innovation Park felt like visiting Area 51 in Nevada. It’s back of beyond, even for Innovation Park, and eerily deserted. To the right of the entrance was a large, mostly empty office. At the far end of the room was a table where sat two young women with laptops who asked me if I was there on Form I-9 business.
Still wary, I presented my identifying docs while asking if others had voiced concerns, given, you know, the times.
One faculty member, the women told me, was so suspicious that he asked how he could be sure they really were Penn State employees.
How, indeed. Clearly, we’re all losing our minds.
We’ve put a guy in the Oval who’s more concerned about getting rid of pennies and plastic straws, changing the names of landforms and waterways, preventing trans kids from playing on girls’ teams and acquiring real estate than about the cost of eggs or housing.
We’ve got an unelected – and foreign-born! – co-president attacking congressionally funded programs with a chainsaw.
And we’ve got the rest of us, from left to right, ready to believe the worst about everyone and everything.
Tell you what: If Trump leaves the White House, I’ll gladly exile myself to New York City. It may not be America’s heartland, but it’s my heartland.
