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America has always been a place defined by the contributions of immigrants. From the construction of the transcontinental railroad to the founding of the country itself, no area of American history that hasn’t been touched by strangers.

One such stranger, like many before him, has the restless hands of a tinkerer. From in front of a stark white wall in Sao Paulo Brazil, he spun a plastic fidget toy between his fingers.

Gabriel Firmo, a Brazilian-born game developer, is only 26, but his dark, perpetually furrowed brows would be more at home on the face of a much older man. Firmo looked down at his desk each time he began speaking, avoiding eye contact and directing his answers away from the camera we were speaking through.

“Let me do the math real quick in my brain,” he said. “I lived 12 years of my life in the United States, and now it is very difficult for me to return in any circumstance.”

Firmo never intended to move back to Brazil. The move, to him, marked the end of his time as a game developer, something he had been working at for his entire adult life.

“I had to return to Brazil in 2024, and it was really fucking difficult,” he said softly. “It was, for me, kind of the death of a vision of my life, and a huge career hit, too.”

That career, for Firmo, began early. He said that he spent much of his youth creating board games and dreaming up fictional worlds, but that he didn’t know how to turn that creativity into a career until he attended Northwestern University.

“My parents were classic immigrant parents; they knew of some American colleges, like Harvard, Yale and Princeton,” he joked. “I had always wanted to work in a creative field, but my family always impressed upon me, you know, if you’re going to go for something extreme like that, have a backup.”

Those backups began as what Firmo called “more traditional paths,” like classes in anthropology, chemistry and creative writing. It wasn’t until he took a computer science course called Game Design Studio, though, that he found his calling.

“I didn’t really think that game developer was a career people had,” he said. “Then I took this class, and I suddenly have this moment where I realize I can do something STEM and something more stable, and I can use the analytical part of my brain and apply it toward something creative.”

In that class, Firmo met Matt Viglione, the founder of Chicago-based game studio SomaSim, who would eventually hire him as a junior software engineer. That meeting happened during demo day, a daunting event where industry professionals like Viglione critiqued the students’ games.

Viglione, a sardonic man with a youthful twinkle in his eye, suggested that he freaked Firmo out upon first meeting him by responding to his game with a resounding “hm.” However, he also said that he immediately knew that Firmo was talented.

“I liked it a lot,” Viglione said. “I did tell him that I thought it was good, that he was good.”

Despite his talent, Firmo said that after graduating, he had no prospects. His eyes crinkled at the corner in a rare smile as he recalled that he received rejections from “100 different games companies.”

He had just about given up hope when he received an email from SomaSim offering him a job.

Viglione is ever ready with a joke, but became uncharacteristically sincere when discussing Firmo’s hiring: “We got lucky. We got lucky with the timing, for sure.”

Eventually, Firmo would work his way up to the position of lead software engineer. Nick McKay, a programmer who took Firmo’s place as junior engineer when he was promoted, characterized him as a good boss and an excellent communicator.

“Gabriel is super easy to get along with,” McKay said. “I miss him.”

The thing that McKay, Viglione, and Firmo kept talking around is Firmo’s move to Brazil.

Having lived in the United States off and on since he was 11 months old, Firmo never realized that his time in the country could come to such an abrupt end. He was very adamant in stressing that his status in the United States was always a legal one, but that he never had a permanent status.

He waved his hand dismissively as he explained his history, starting with a dependent visa to his father’s work visa, then various student visas and visa extensions, before eventually securing a short-term work visa upon his graduation from college.

“Despite living 12 years in the United States and being mistaken for an American a lot of times, I had never established a relationship to the U.S. government,” he said. “I was always on the outside looking in.”

His admitted outsider status didn’t take away from what he called “a sense of inevitability,” though. Firmo and his parents were often content, he said, to let things work themselves out. But when COVID hit, his parents lost their pending green cards. Then, he failed out of the lottery for a long-term work visa. Then he wasn’t able to secure a green card for himself.

Eventually, he resigned himself to returning to Brazil, self-deporting at the end of 2024. With that resignation, he was also forced to come to terms with the possible end of his career.

“I had to return to Brazil, and me and Matt had always talked about my employment kind of being a thing that depended on me being in the U.S.,” Firmo said through a weak smile. “Thankfully, he was willing to adjust the studio process for me to work remote.”

Part of that remote work was the agreement that Firmo would return close to the release of the studio’s current project, Rise of Industry 2, in order to attend meetings and interface with his team directly. In March, Firmo secured a B-1 business visa, which covers foreign nationals traveling to the U.S. to consult with business associates.

He stressed that four different immigration lawyers advised him that this visa was the appropriate one for his specific situation.

Firmo began to speak faster and more robotically as he recalled the next part of his story:

“I fly into Chicago, and the guy at customs pretty much immediately directs me into a side room where I sit and wait for like two hours. Then I am taken to a back room with no windows, where I am questioned by two CBP officers who were armed. They repeatedly tell me to agree to statements, as if I had said them, that were not true.”

No matter how many times he attempted to assure the officers that he wasn’t trying to break the law and that he would gladly return to Brazil, they did not budge, instead taking his shoes and belongings and moving him to a holding cell, though not before they made him sign a document he said he was not allowed to read.

“There were no things in that cell, not even a clock or anything,” he recalled, his face appearing blanker and blanker. “I asked for a book. I was not allowed to bring a book.”

Firmo went on to say that the agents mocked him for his anxiety disorder and that they “went out of their way to be pretty horrible.” After 11 hours, armed agents escorted him onto a plane, handing his passport to the pilot. This ordeal made it so that Firmo is barred from applying for any more visas to enter the U.S.

Viglione seemed overwrought when he described his perspective: “I mean, he went through it. It was awful. But I was just sitting here feeling absolutely powerless to do anything.”

During his whole story, Firmo did not look at the camera once. When he finally looked up, he seemed close to tears. “So that was where I was,” he said. “I was like, OK, maybe I should move on. Maybe I should look for something else because I’m never going to be able to go back to the U.S.”

At that point, when Firmo was sure his career was over, Viglione contacted him about being co-director on his next project.

“I was like, what do you mean?” Firmo said. “I was honestly pretty shocked.”

Viglione, for his part, laughed and said that Firmo wasn’t getting rid of him that easily.

The two, once supervisor and subordinate, now spend their days writing narratives together and discussing how to pitch them to colleagues and publishers alike. As they discussed this change, the two seemed, for the first time, to be settled. “We’re out in open water and swimming down and figuring out what there still is to discover,” Firmo said, his smile finally a genuine one. “It’s been a really exciting process.”