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06 March 04.
A funny thing Ms. MTIAM of Bacolod, Philippines sends the following amusing anecdote: On my way back to this fair land of ours. As most of you know, I became an American citizen in 1995 and one of the privileges of that legal status was the right to an American passport that would allow me to come and go as I please. But [...] a young Asian American manning the immigration booth at the Honolulu International Airport said she saw something in my passport that was suspicious. She did not open the passport, just kept looking at my picture through a loupe. She then called her supervisor, who takes a look at my picture and says, it's fine. Undeterred, [...] my officer puts my passport in a blue folder and calls a person who brings me to the "holding" room where I am to be interviewed. Why is that? I am the only American citizen in this room. I hear one of the interviewers tell this lady coming into the country that she can't come in, she has to go to the transit area and return to her country. Where would I go back to? The Philippines? Where I am no longer a citizen? What if they don't let me back in??? [...] Then I said, OK, I am late already, I am concerned about the person who is to meet me. Can I use your phone to call him? No, no phone calls are allowed. After about 40 minutes, I am interviewed. This guy, the only one there who is NOT Asian American (by this time the room is filling up and I am STILL the only American in there), takes a second to look at my passport and pronounces it good. [...] Now that I have thought about it, questions abound. What gives an undereducated, obviously undertrained woman the right to pull a passport even after her supervisor says it's OK??? What are our rights now, in this time of homeland security, in this age of presumptive guilt? [...] How does one disprove a negative? [...] I was not allowed to call anyone? I could have disappeared and none of you would have known that. What then? Ms. MTIAM makes an enthralling point, which riles many an immigration scholar: immigration law is enforced not by a bevy of judges and lawyers with the immigration laws at hand, but by folks like our ``obviously undertrained'' passport checker there. She probably has some modicum of training to look for the indications that the passport is valid (shiny confetti on the binding of the inside back cover, some state seals turned the wrong way, some deliberate typos I can't recall), but she probably does not have the US Code's immigration section at her fingertips. Consider a more difficult case such as an asylum application. Applicant arrives at the airport with a valid ticket but no visa, claiming that she is fleeing and expects to be granted asylum. If she's wrong, and after a lengthy trial is returned to her home country, then the airline is obliged to return her, free of charge. The airline, a private company, will take this into account when deciding whether to honor her ticket or not. In fact, when I say, `the airline', I mean the guy at the counter, who has zero training in immigration law. That guy, not the United States Judicial system, will decide upon whether the asylum-seeker has a valid application, while other passengers stand in line behind her. That guy has little at his disposal but an overall impression of immigration law: if the President of the receiving country has spent much time stumping about how we're taking a strong line at our borders and will process applications with much more vigilance, then the guy at the counter will receive that message---without the accompanying hundreds of pages of carefully written protections. From 2001 to 2003, asylum applications have fallen from 66,000/year to 49,000/year, a 26% drop. [The latest stats show a decline for Jan 2004 too.] Either the world is 26% safer and nobody needs asylum anymore, people are afraid to apply for asylum here in the States, or they are being preemptively turned away by the sort of people Ms. MTIAM ran in to. I'm disinclined to believe that first option there, leaving us some mix of the other two. If the rhetoric spewing forth from a country is anti-immigrant, then that rhetoric will push people away, whether their claims would be valid under careful scrutiny or not, and regardless of how many due process protections are put in place to dilute the rhetoric. Speaking of which... Here's an article from Foreign Policy magazine entitled, ``The Hispanic Challenge''. All told, it's more of the same that we've always heard: the old stock of immigrants were so much cooler than the new stock of immigrants, so although we're a nation of immigrants, we should bar the door now. But it's especially fun because it's in a well-respected journal (and by what I am told is a well-respected author), yet it makes almost no effort to hide the fact that it's racist. For example, a consistent thread through the article is that the United States was founded by Protestants, and yet these Mexican immigrants are Catholics. Color me a dumb Jew, but I didn't even know there was a difference until my European history class in high school. Yet our author here feels that distinguishing among different types of Christian is of vital import to the well-being of the U.S.A. He also points out (see the tables at the end) that Hispanics intermarry less frequently than other races (using Asian chycks for comparison), proving that they fail to assimilate properly. I just love that this guy is using intermarriage statistics to support his argument about immigration law. No beating around the bush here! [Though, it's the opposite spin from olden days, when intermarriage meant that dark-skinned men are stealing our women. The story here is that all these Mexicans are immigrating to our country, and we still won't be able to get any Latina tail.] All told, the article does the stuff that racists always do: it points out the cultural superiority of us versus them, homogenizes both sides, even though both sides (especially the U.S. side) are incredibly heterogeneous, all the while ringing the alarum bell about the downfall of our people to the flood of outsiders. As for that part, by the way, the foreign born population of the U.S.A. in 1900 was 13%, and it is now 11%. Quite the flood there. He also fails to discuss where the demographic shifts in immigration come from---he indicates that it's a Mexican reconquista, but much of it is just a lessening of the racism in U.S. immigration law over the last century. Anyway, just giving you a taste of the fun to be had when you click that there link. I was thinking of sending in an editorial to FP, since letters to the editor are the primary output of (name of think tank). But, as we say on the Net, `don't feed the trolls', so I'll just leave it at this here commentary.
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