Steve Scherer, former Ottawa bureau chief for Reuters until the job was eliminated in 2024, writes about his life back in the United States as an Uber driver.
Scherer writes, “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.”
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