A great set-up and a promising story in the current New Yorker

Story by Said Sayrefiezadeh (I'm sure I misspelled that), Paranoia, in current New Yorker isn't a mind-blower but show a lot of talent and promise. He does a very good job setting a scene in some unnamed city (possibly LA? there's a reference to Santa Monica) at some undetermined time, as the country is getting ready for a war and there are shipments of arms and parades of soldiers moving south and west. That's a great set-up: a very familiar-seeming place but where are we? What's happening? We quickly learn that this is a narrative of a 20ish young man who's taken under his wing an immigrant living in the U.S. illegally and doing his best to stay out of trouble and under the radar - but the immigrant guy gets injured, hospitalized, has to borrow $, one thing leads to another and then to the inevitable: the men come and take him away, obviously for deportation. But the narrator learns of this only vaguely, in fits, from the immigrant's unfriendly landlord who speaks fractured English. At the end, there isn't a lot of plot to the story, mostly a lot of set-up, introducing the two main characters (one of whom disappears from the story) and some subsidiaries, particular a trio of black dudes, two of whom played football in h.s. with main character. First chapter of a novel, anyone? Any takers? From what I see here, it will probably be a pretty good novel. Any reader would suspect that the author is an Arab or perhaps Iranian, but the story gives no indication of that - the main character pretty much described as a white, average American guy. Assuming this story will spin out into a longer work, I wonder how the cross-cultural elements will play out. I know nothing about who SS is nor about his background, but wonder if he will (or has) used autobiographical elements in his fiction. If not - more power to you, SS! Most beginning writers draw exclusively on their personal experiences, and it seems you're able to draw on other resources, that is, your imagination and your observations.