(no subject)
29/3/06 07:50![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyI've talked about this before, but the whole immigration debacle just pushes my buttons.
I've been a foreigner for ten years of my life, and a linguistic minority for five (counting the years I lived in downtown Montreal but not when I lived in the much more Anglo West Island). A much more priviledged foreigner, no question about it, than the Mexican immigrants who are being debated, but--that's the point, in part. It still wasn't anything easy.
It was seven years before I was able to legally work in the U.S. (I think I was actually technically an illegal immigrant for a period of a few months, through a bureaucratic technicality). I flew back from Japan to go through the process. We had been told, if you're not there by seven in the morning, you're not getting through, so we got up at four in the morning to drive to Charlotte, stood in a long line for a while until they opened the door, and then waited some more, five or six hours. They had one person working at any given time, maybe two at the most. When it was my turn... they ripped out my re-entry permit to Japan. Which I did not discover until I arrived at Narita. (All was well in the end, but if it weren't for that, I might not have missed my flight and had to stay in a hotel that night...)
You wait for years mired in bureaucracy, you spend hours waiting in line and dealing with severely underpaid and perhaps not entirely competent civil servants, and then you can tell me it should be a felony if you try the less legal way.
I've been a foreigner for ten years of my life, and a linguistic minority for five (counting the years I lived in downtown Montreal but not when I lived in the much more Anglo West Island). A much more priviledged foreigner, no question about it, than the Mexican immigrants who are being debated, but--that's the point, in part. It still wasn't anything easy.
It was seven years before I was able to legally work in the U.S. (I think I was actually technically an illegal immigrant for a period of a few months, through a bureaucratic technicality). I flew back from Japan to go through the process. We had been told, if you're not there by seven in the morning, you're not getting through, so we got up at four in the morning to drive to Charlotte, stood in a long line for a while until they opened the door, and then waited some more, five or six hours. They had one person working at any given time, maybe two at the most. When it was my turn... they ripped out my re-entry permit to Japan. Which I did not discover until I arrived at Narita. (All was well in the end, but if it weren't for that, I might not have missed my flight and had to stay in a hotel that night...)
You wait for years mired in bureaucracy, you spend hours waiting in line and dealing with severely underpaid and perhaps not entirely competent civil servants, and then you can tell me it should be a felony if you try the less legal way.
