My phone beeped, alerting me to a ride. I clicked to accept and a few minutes later I drew up beside an older lady in a parking lot in Fairfax, Virginia, about half an hour outside of Washington DC. She exchanged a few words in Spanish with the man who waited 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 dias,” 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 had retired after decades driving a city bus. He used to take her everywhere and now he was gone, so she called Uber to get to work. I dropped her at the front door of a hotel.
On my first morning driving for Uber, everyone I picked up was Latino or South Asian and they were all going to work. My first three customers were schoolteachers. Then I dropped one 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 $100 in a little less than five hours. Since I’m 55 with the bladder of a three-year-old, I had to find a place to pee three times. Welcome to Donald Trump’s America, I whispered to myself when 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 of our sick making America great?
I have had a lot of questions since I returned to the United States to live and work for the first time in 28 years on July 4. After working as Reuters’ Ottawa bureau chief for five years, my job was eliminated in a cost-cutting drive. Though I owned a home and my kids went to the local schools, I could not get permission to continue to work in Canada. When I crossed the border, it didn’t feel like a homecoming. America today is as foreign to me as Italy was in 1998, when I started working there as a foreign correspondent.
It is a darker place now. An American mother was shot on the street by a federal agent as the White House seeks to deport hard-working people who dream of making a better life for their children. The Department of Justice does not plan to investigate the murder.
As a correspondent who covered politics on two continents, I have seen other politicians use immigrants as scapegoats. It’s always a deadly policy, especially for the immigrants. Trump needs scapegoats to distract from the seeping wound that is the relentless shrinking of America’s once-great middle class. That social grouping included me for most of my life. But not anymore.
In Canada, I made about $130,000 per year. Driving, I’m unlikely to exceed the $36,580 per year that is the federal poverty guideline, and it takes twice that much to live comfortably in Northern Virginia.
Before, I interviewed prime ministers and CEOs and documented humanitarian disasters for media organizations with a global reach. Now I provide a basic service, and I wait for my phone to beep.
MARE NOSTRUM, OUR SEA
For most of my life, my movement has given me both agency and freedom. Now other people’s movement is a means for my survival.
I see my own fragility reflected in the people climbing into my back seat before dawn: widows, migrants, parents, workers stitching together lives on the margins. We are all improvising, all one broken transmission or missed paycheck away from something worse. For the first time in my life, I am no longer observing this precarious world from the outside, notebook in hand. I am inside it, dependent on an algorithm, measuring my worth in five-dollar increments.
As a journalist, I depended on taxi drivers to do my job. When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went to the White House, I took an Uber to Pennsylvania Avenue. When, as a sitting prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi spoke during his tax fraud trial, I took a cab to the Milan courthouse. When I interviewed Romano Prodi ahead of the 2006 national election, in which he narrowly defeated Berlusconi, I took a cab to party headquarters.
For several years I covered the deadliest migration route in the world, across the Mediterranean to Italy from Libya or Tunisia. Some 26,000 migrants are estimated to have died attempting this sea passage since 2014, a number roughly equivalent to half of America’s dead in the Vietnam War. It is also where there have been the most disappearances. Only Neptune, Roman god of the sea, knows how many.
At the time I was documenting the contours of human displacement I didn’t really understand what would drive a person to attempt such a dangerous passage, especially with children in tow. Now I am closer to understanding that kind of desperation.
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In 2014 I sailed on the San Giorgio, a 133-metre Italian Navy vessel. The San Giorgio was part of an Italian mission, called Mare Nostrum or “Our Sea” in Latin, which began after a shipwreck near the Italian island of Lampedusa killed more than 360 men, women and children. The mission saved 150,000 people, but it was suspended after a year under pressure from countries like France, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands — where most of the migrants settled after being rescued. Right-leaning, anti-immigrant parties were gaining ground.
Non-governmental organizations took over sea rescues after that. In 2017, I boarded the Aquarius, which was run by two NGOs. It was a peak time for sea crossings. In one morning, within sight of the Libyan coast, the Aquarius picked up 560 people in six massive rubber boats reinforced with a plywood floor. They hailed from at least a dozen countries, including Nigeria, Sudan, Morocco, and Bangladesh.
(Footage of the Aquarius rescues)
After they were safely out of the dinghies, the migrants were told in various languages, “Libya is over.” They cheered because for most of them, Libya had been hell on earth. They often were detained for months in warehouses, given little food and water, and the men were forced to work without pay. Sometimes gangs of people smugglers would sell migrants to each other like slaves. The men were beaten and sometimes shot to death if they tried to escape. Women were raped and arrived on board the rescue ships pregnant. I know all this because I talked to them and they told me their stories, which I published.
They literally only had the clothes on their backs. No shoes even. Among the children rescued was a five-year-old girl, the same age of my oldest daughter at the time. She was terrified and crying when she was lifted from the rubber boat, but she quickly relaxed on board the Aquarius, and her eyes lit up when the crew gave her fruit, snacks and a stuffed animal to cuddle.
After the migrants had got some rest, and after they had time to understand that the most dangerous part of their trip was over, the lights twinkling on the Sicilian coast came into view. Pointing and shouting, they erupted into cheers and then song. Beating on drums furnished by the ship’s crew, the migrants sang and danced well into the night. As I watched the celebration, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.
We docked in Calabria and I caught a flight back to Rome. As the taxi sped through the city, I couldn’t wait to see my three-year-old twins — a boy and a girl — and my five-year-old daughter. When I walked through the front door, they rushed to me. “Papa’!” they shouted. I hugged them tight. I never felt so lucky in my life.
MY CANADA DREAM UNRAVELS
When I was moved to Canada by Reuters in 2019, I realized a professional dream. I had become a bureau chief in a G7 country, which is the bloc of wealthy countries that seeks a common stance on the main economic and political challenges facing the world. Both Italy and the United States are also members. After a couple years I convinced my Italian wife that we should apply for permanent residency, which would give us both the right to work in Canada indefinitely. All I had was a work permit allowing me to work for my news agency.
I hired an immigration lawyer to put everything together. After a year of bureaucratic delay, I was asked to apply in 2023. Canada’s immigration process is governed by a point system and is by invitation only.
A few months later I was fired amid budget cuts in the struggling news industry. My jobless status weakened my application, and I would never be asked to apply again. The great and kind Canada, the country where I thought I would settle at least until my children were adults, had chewed me up and spit me out.
I couldn’t legally work, not even for Uber. When I lost my job, my entire family lost state healthcare coverage, and there is virtually no private healthcare. We had no family doctor and, God forbid, any hospital visit would have to be paid for out of pocket. Despite having good local contacts, I couldn’t find an employer willing to sponsor me. The clock was ticking on our legal right to reside in Canada. We were no longer welcome.
In June of 2025 I sold my house, the first I had ever owned. Not knowing how long it would take me to find a job in Washington, I put my family on a plane in Montreal. They flew to Italy where they could live rent free in a family member’s home, where they were covered by state healthcare, and where the kids could go to high school. After I said goodbye to them, I wept uncontrollably in the airport parking lot, not knowing when I would see them again.
After a life spent both crossing borders and freely reporting on those who struggled to overcome them, I didn’t expect one to rise up beneath my feet.
BITTERSWEET HOMECOMING
I left the States to teach English and freelance stories in Romania in the summer of 1997, when Bill Clinton was president. “Seinfeld”, “Friends” and “ER” were the most-watched TV shows. “Men in Black” was a summer blockbuster. The Internet barely existed and was used mainly for email. Businessmen had car phones, but no one I knew had a cell phone. I shared an apartment in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with my best friend from college and we each paid about $300 rent.
In Virginia I found an Airbnb apartment. It was the basement of a townhouse I shared with an elderly Latina woman who spoke little English and cost me $2,000 a month. My three decades in Romania, Italy and Canada have so far failed to impress recruiters.
Two years ago, I told myself, “If all else fails, I’ll drive for Uber.” Well, here I am, and it’s not as comforting as I thought it would be. I used to think I was different from the migrants I wrote about — protected by a passport, a salary, a press badge. But the past two years have stripped away that illusion.
That said, I am still relatively lucky. I’m a middle-aged white guy with an American passport so I’m not likely to be snatched off the street by ICE. I have some savings and people to lean on.
Impatient to get my family back late last year, I looked for a larger rental to fit my whole family. After two rejections because the landlords were understandably worried that I wouldn’t be able to pay the rent, my octogenarian father co-signed a lease with me for a place in Fairfax — $3,000 a month.
My middle-class habits die hard. I still want my children to have what they desire for Christmas, even if it is an expensive computer. I still want each of my three teenagers to have their own room. I still want them to get the kind of education that in America is found mainly in high- or middle-income communities, and I’m willing to pay extra rent for it.
My wife remains in Italy, where she has healthcare and feels more secure after our disorienting departure from Canada. She also fears being deported, something that has happened to other American spouses. Fortunately, I have reunited with my children, who are attending American high school for the first time in their teens. I feel like I’m building something in my newest city. I’m optimistic for the first time in a long time, but I also realize that optimism isn’t the same thing as security.
NAVIGATING THE DRIFT
In the 1980s and 90s, my teachers and mentors in high school and college in Indiana and Illinois encouraged me to be open to new cultures and languages. My favorite books then, including but certainly not limited to Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” or Herman Hesse’s “Siddhartha”, hinted at the knowledge and understanding that can only be unlocked by the unknown.
At 15, I applied to be an exchange student and ended up spending my junior year in high school in Italy. Fully immersed in the home of a warm family, I learned the language and adapted to the culture. The self-confidence I gained from that experience was a springboard to my success as an adult. My Italian host family remains close to me. The mother has been a third grandmother to my children. Being open and not afraid of “the other” has enriched my life. But it seems to have done the opposite of make me rich.
Today in America my international experience seems to have little value. Worse, it feels anathema to the values marketed by the ruling class. They are empowering armed agents to prowl the streets of our cities in search of “the other” and encouraging voters to fear them.
I do not fear different cultures or languages. I’m fascinated by them. The truth is we all have a lot in common. Most people, no matter their nationality, fall into two categories: Parents who want to help their children succeed in life, and youth chasing their dreams.
What I do fear is the economic squeeze that is coming. The job market is already a war zone. Tariffs will inevitably force up prices and slow growth. Setting monetary policy from the White House will lead to disaster. The shrinking middle class is going to shrink faster. It won’t be a sudden collapse, but a drift toward it.
The people I am driving around are, like me, trying to navigate that drift. They are widows, teachers, hospital workers, mechanics. They are people who get up before dawn to feed their families. They trust me to get them to work on time. I trust an app to buy me another day. None of us has any real leverage. Like the migrants who survived the deadliest border crossing on the planet, we are all at the mercy of the sea.
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