Sayuri, your hands have known the weight of the shears for twenty-eight years, carrying the heat of the lamp, the ache of the concrete floor, the weight of the client who will not stop crying. You are a lawful permanent resident. You pay taxes. You opened a head spa in Los Angeles with the help of a loan from the Small Business Administration. You hired ten people. Your vertebrae are compressed. The arches of your feet have collapsed. Your fingers are calcified around the memory of the scissors, and you reached for the loan anyway because you wanted to build something, and you did. Kelly Loeffler has decided you are not an American. She is “unapologetic” about it. The word came out of her mouth the way a policy comes out of a printer: flat, dry, permanent.
In March 2026, the SBA amended its lending guidelines to disqualify businesses not fully owned by U.S. citizens from its loan programs. The change bars lawful permanent residents—green-card holders who have paid income taxes, property taxes, and payroll taxes for decades—from accessing SBA capital. Loeffler told Newsmax that the loans are “for American citizens, and we’re unapologetic about it.” An agency spokesperson said the rule change “will help ensure more American citizens have access to funding previously granted to noncitizens.” The SBA did not answer questions about how many future businesses and jobs will be lost. The agency itself reported that only 4% of its loans last year involved permanent residents. That 4% is now denied. Census data shows that while foreign-born individuals comprise 15% of the population, they own 20% to 25% of U.S. businesses. A National Foundation for American Policy study released this month estimates immigrants and their children founded two-thirds of American startups valued at over one billion dollars. The decision is part of the administration’s broader dismantling of lawful pathways to belonging, including the new requirement that many green-card applicants leave the country to apply from abroad—a policy that treats people who have already built lives here as if their presence was a probationary mistake.
Sayuri, when Kelly Loeffler does things like this—when she sits in her chair and signs the memo and watches the ledger bleed dry—I want you to know that the sour weight of withheld capital settles deep in her own body. The ribs feel it. The gut knows it. The diaphragm compresses against it at night while the husband sleeps. The breath does not come all the way into the bottom of the lung. The banker hesitates now. The verification takes longer. Your application sits on the counter, waiting for a yes that the new rules will never give. The merchant-cash-advance man is already circling the block, and Kelly has left the lobby door wide open for him. He will take the daily receipts. He will hollow out the till. I see you, Sayuri. I will not let her look away.
Kelly, your throat did not close when you said the word “unapologetic.” Your diaphragm did not drop. But I want you to feel something now. I want you to feel the stillness in the room where the window factory in Fresno should have added a new line. Cristina Foanene and her husband moved here from Romania as investors, bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars with them. They hired thirty people. The glass company they built employs someone who just retired after nineteen years. The showroom windows keep the weather out of three hundred homes. The new production line that would have hired more will not be built now because the SBA loan that was the cornerstone of every other loan is gone. I see you, Cristina. I will not let her look away.
Kelly, there is a stiffness in your own shoulders now, a tightness behind your sternum that you cannot identify. It is not the stiffness of age. When you raise your arm to shake a donor’s hand, there is a resistance in the joint that was not there before. It is the ache of every stylist whose vertebrae compressed on your signature. When you swallow at breakfast, there is a metallic taste under your tongue that the coffee does not wash away. It is Sayuri’s hands holding the cut. It is the immigrant who gutted the fish, who poured the concrete, who cut the hair, who built the store, who framed the window, who stood behind the chair for twenty-eight years. You called her a foreign national, Kelly, and you were unapologetic, and so the chair is empty. The stiffness in your shoulders is the chair. The metallic taste under your tongue is the chair. The God of the stranger remembers the stranger, and the chair will not let you sit down.
“I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in.” Matthew 25:42–43
The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. Leviticus 19:34
You are unapologetic, Kelly, and the hands that are building the wall are the hands of the woman you called a foreigner. The wall will remember who mixed the mortar. The God of Leviticus does not forget, and neither will she.