The travelogue is not quite done yet, alas. A few more days, perhaps. Things take so much longer when you have writing standards. I took off Thursday and Friday this week (for Passover) but that doesn't really help with the time it takes to think about how best to describe something.
My major accomplishment of the week was getting tickets (using frequent flyer miles) to Poland for my mother and myself. I've also got a travel agent working on the land part of the trip. Mom is getting pretty excited over this.
But the main thing I wanted to write about was immigration. In general, I have negative feelings about restrictions on immigration since I consider the restrictive laws of the 1920's to be complicit in the murders of so many of my relatives. At the same time, I disapprove of breaking bad laws, as that encourages people to break good laws.
There are several immediate steps I think we should take. First, we need to make the process for legal immigrants more efficient. I personally know people who've been delayed for a year or more because of lost paperwork and just general bureaucratic incompetence. There's no excuse for that.
Second, even attempted illegal immigration should not be a death sentence. I strongly support groups who do things like set out caches of water in the Arizona desert.
Third, we need to fix the process of obtaining refugee status. The political issue of whether or not somebody qualifies all too often has to do with what other governments we're cozying up to. But the real outrage is something I read about in a recent editorial in the International Herald Tribune. People who have provided "material assistance to terrorists" are not eligible for refugee status. I don't have a problem for that, but the statute makes no exceptions for coercion. So somebody who has given a glass of water to a terrorist at gunpoint can be denied status. The particularly egregious matter that the IHT wrote about involves a woman from Sierra Leone who was held in her house and repeatedly raped for six days. The proper term for people like this is not "terrorists." It's "victims."
There are lots of other things I could say, but I want to get back to working on the travelogue.
Copyright 2006 Miriam H. Nadel