My phone beeped, alerting me to a ride. I clicked to accept, and a few minutes later I pulled up beside an older lady in a parking lot in Fairfax, Virginia, about half an hour outside Washington, DC. She exchanged a few words in Spanish with the man who was waiting with her in the early-morning darkness and then slid into the back seat of my Subaru Outback. The fare was going to earn me less than $7.
“Buenos días,” I said. She said the same to me and was chatty, unlike the people I had picked up earlier. She was born in Peru, she said, and her husband had died two years ago. He used to take her everywhere and now he was gone, so she used Uber to get to work. I dropped her at the front door of a hotel.
It was my first morning as an Uber driver, and everyone I picked up was Latino or South Asian and heading to work. My first three customers were schoolteachers. Then I dropped a young woman at a hospital and her mother at a grocery store that had yet to open. I brought a young man to a large auto mechanic’s garage, another to a Panera Bread chain restaurant, and a woman to the open back door of a strip-mall diner.
I made $130 in a little less than five hours. Since I’m 55 and have the bladder of a 3-year-old, I had to find a place to pee three times. “Welcome to Donald Trump’s America,” I muttered to myself as I whipped into a city park to take a leak behind a tree.
I didn’t know the immigration status of any of my clients. But I wondered: How is the misguided and aggressive targeting of the very people who serve us breakfast, teach our children, fix our cars, clean our hotel rooms, and comfort our sick “making America great”?
I have had a lot of questions since I returned to the United States to live and work on July 4, after having been away for 28 years. After serving as Reuters’s Ottawa bureau chief for five years, my job was eliminated in a cost-cutting drive. I wanted to stay in Canada, where I owned a home and my kids attended the local schools, but I was unable to find a new job that would allow me to. Crossing the border didn’t feel like a homecoming. America is as foreign to me today as Italy had been in 1998, when I started working there as a foreign correspondent.
One of the things people tend not to get is there was, in fact, a time when journalism was fun and exciting. When people tell me to "just get a fucking job" that I'll no doubt despise, they seriously cannot register the idea that there are jobs that don't suck. I'm considered stuck up for continuing to want what I've already experienced.