This is Nik the Barber. He has been cutting what’s left of my hair for about seven years now.
In May of this year, federal agents descended on his small, brick home in the quiet Chicago suburb of Elmwood Park and waited for Nik to do what Nik has been doing every day for 20 years in America. They waited for him to go to work.
As soon as Nik stepped out the door, he was apprehended, loaded into a van and shipped to a cooler in rural Indiana, where a federal rubber stamp cloaked in black robes declared him a “criminal illegal alien,” pounded a gavel and launched him back across the Atlantic Ocean to his native Albania.
I have become an old man with very few Earthly pleasures, but one indulgence was my monthly visit to Nik the Barber for a haircut. We didn’t talk much at first, but he would always have the TV tuned to sports or the stock market report, which would inevitably help small talk get bigger.
I learned that Nik had grown up in a rural mountain town in Albania and had come of age right as Communism was collapsing in the Balkans. Aside from corrupt government patronage posts and the local mafia, there wasn’t much opportunity for young men, so Nik began crossing into Greece to look for whatever work might be available down there.
He told stories about mountain crossings at night in winter, almost freezing to death, getting stiffed by employers and getting kicked out of Greece multiple times because he had no legal right to work there.
Eventually Nik saved enough money to obtain a visa and come to the US, where he joined family members and other Albanians who had already immigrated and settled in Elmwood Park. There they filled in homes and storefronts that had once been the stomping ground of Italian immigrants, like the ones whose trips across the Atlantic are part of the reason why I am here today.
I can clearly recall childhood conversations with my own immigrant grandparents from Italy and Ireland and I remember being more or less spellbound listening to them talk about the ups and downs of life in the “old country.” At a young, impressionable age, I came to understand how their real life immigrant experiences helped forge in them an unshakable, non-negotiable love for America.
I heard something similar in Nik’s stories about leaving Albania and coming to America, so I enjoyed listening to them.
At some point, Nik felt comfortable enough to break out a bottle of his homemade grappa and so my monthly haircuts became a sort of bizarre day spa ritual that included shots of grappa, some sort of snacks like peanuts or pretzels and discussions about life, work and the world.
It got to where he would always schedule my haircut for the end of the day so he could turn off the spinning barber pole, close up shop and relax with a couple of belts of Albanian moonshine while shooting the breeze.
I learned that Nik got married to an American girl, had a daughter, bought a little brick house and fixed it up. And when he wasn’t cutting whatever is left of old men’s hair, he was laboring on construction sites or driving for Uber and Lyft and DoorDash.
Much like the immigrant ancestors who deposited my bloodline on these shores in the Twentieth Century, the man was a working man, cobbling together his own version of the American Dream, one day at a time.
Having willfully fled a society trampled by Communism and the chaos of its collapse, he would often say about people born here, especially young people, “they have no idea how great this place is.”
I don’t know if it was the haircut or the booze or all the philosophizing, but there was never a time I left that weird little temple not feeling better than when I walked in.
I suppose I always assumed Nik had gone through the legal steps to secure U.S. citizenship, or at least legal residence.
He has family members here who did.
But in fact, he did not.
As it turns out, the visa that granted Nik entry into the country in 2005 was fraudulent. He was essentially labor-trafficked into the U.S. by Albanian hustlers who took his money and vanished. All of this finally came out at his rubber stamp hearing in Indiana.
He had been ordered to leave the country before, but never complied, and thus the men who sit in judgment of all wrong chose to declare him a “criminal illegal alien” and eject him from the Land of the Free.
Despite the official government label, there is no evidence of any behavioral demerit, not even so much as a traffic ticket to weigh on the scales against Nik’s 20-year contribution of labor and tax revenue to the great American enterprise.
But in the end, the legality of this particular expulsion is not in question.
There is however, the fact that much of history and the drama that erupts from it, is about the yawning, eternal gap between what is legal and what is just.
My own Catholic education informs me and anyone else who didn’t sleep through Catechism that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was put to death by a completely legal “judicial” process.
So take one last good look at this face.
This is not, in any meaningful way, a “criminal.”
This is Nik the Barber.
Albanian by birth, American in spirit.