Two sad stories in the news exemplify the unfortunate victims of America’s restrictive immigration laws. A high school student from Laos is set to be deported 22 days before graduation. His family has lived here for 13 years, and after unsuccessfully attempting to get permanent citizenship, are set to be deported. Both parents have productive jobs, and Tchisou has been accepted into the University of Minnesota, where he wanted to study natural resources or aerospace engineering. Unlike so many illegal immigrants from south of the border, the Tho family actually attempted to comply with the law and obtain citizenship, and deportation is their reward.

Like the Tho family, in a few weeks I will mark the 13^th year since my family came to America, and although we came here legally, it boggles my mind that I could be deported back to Ukraine because of a difference in paperwork. I cannot speak for Tchisou, but I speak virtually no Ukrainian, and loath Ukraine and everything it stands for with a passion that rivals only my distaste for commies (and for the same reasons). Besides that, the country I left was USSR, and it is dubious that Ukraine would even take this dirty Russophile Jew back, probably dooming me to years in detenention camps while the bureaucracy decided my fate. Like Ukraine, Laos is a mix of communism and anarchy held together by nationalistic propaganda, and a former immigrant would be doomed to second class citizenship or worse. (I dramatize a bit since the Tho family will probably end up in France by virtue of having lived there on the way to America, but being an American in France is only a marginal improvement over Laos these days.)

Meanwhile, the bodies of 18 immigrants were found in truck in Texas, stuffed inside a locked truck that may have held over 100 people. This is just the latest episode of the annual death marches that many thousands of illegal immigrants undertake to find low-paying and unwanted jobs in America that usually involve working outside in 100 degree Texas heat. Everyone who has ever complained that Mexicans are “stealing” his minimum wage job should feel some guilt and responsibility for the suffering his economic ignorance causes.

While they are expert at sending little boys and young men back into slavery, the immigration services too overwhelmed by the drug war and their attempts to stop well-meaning immigrants to deter any actual criminals from crossing our shores. The ultimate hypocrisy is that Middle Eastern terrorists are able to buy visas while harmless and hard-working immigrants are denied their chance to the American Dream.

Posted by David on Thursday, May 15th, 2003 at 1:50 pm.