One of the hottest topics in today's politics is immigration. More specifically, our people are divided in trying to either keep illegal aliens out of the country, or whether they should be granted citizenship, and I'll tell you something right now; I'm a registered Democrat but my British fiance and I agree with the Republicans on this facet, and here's why.
Everyone is focused on illegals.
Americans are forgetting that legal immigrants are totally a thing. And the fact of the matter is that these legal immigrants that want to join our country, and are trying to go about it the correct way, still have a difficult time, if not more so than an illegal immigrant that just does things anyway and doesn't tell anyone about it.
So let me ask a few questions.
If this person is here illegally, why are they still here? When landlords rent to tenants, they have very specific contracts and there are laws to protect both sides from bullshit, such as sub-renting, and letting your friends live with you without being on the contract. Those people get evicted. So why are we so lenient with illegal immigrants?
If California is giving away free healthcare to illegal immigrants, why can't our legal immigrants or even our own citizens get free healthcare? We're giving them driver's licenses in North Carolina. Fuck, we might be giving them citizenship in the near future. Why are we even giving benefits to illegals at all? That's like telling them it's okay to be illegal!!!
"Hello Ma'dam, I'm glad to see you've successfully evaded the U.S. government for several years now. Here's your citizenship card!"
So what does that say to our legal immigrants? "I'm sorry, you should've sneaked over here if you wanted to be a citizen"??
Just about every single American's knowledge of the immigration system comes from watching The Proposal, which is totally and utterly wrong. When I tell people that I'm getting married to a British guy and that we can't leave the country for our honeymoon because of his current visa status, they always say, "But you're getting married. Doesn't that make him a citizen?"
No. Just no. That's so totally wrong. Now let me tell you why.
My fiance is here on an educational visa. That means it's temporary and he was expected to return to the U.K. when it expires. Because of a very specific set of circumstances, his visa status became subject to a two year home residency clause, which also meant that when his visa expired and he went back, that he couldn't come back to the U.S. for two years, even if he was married with children. Getting married and starting a family has no bearing on his visa status, because his visa is like a contract with the federal government and it specifically states that two year home residency.
Now there is hope for us, and we did successfully get through this, but John applied for a waiver that would essentially remove that two year home residency clause from his visa. It took many months for the Department of State to do its investigation on him and then send their favorable recommendation to the Feds for them to make their decision. Well luckily for us, they decided to give him the waiver. So now the next step is available to us.
After we get married, I can then petition the government to sponsor a green card for John. Yes, I said that correctly. I petition the government to sponsor a green card for John. We don't just submit an application and get it. It is yet another lengthy process. The only thing that movie got right was that they do get interviewed, except that you can totally bring your lawyer with you to the interviews, and that they only interview the couple, not your entire family.
Also, the green card that he gets is only a temporary green card. If we were to divorce within the first two years of our marriage, I could revoke my sponsorship and his green card could get taken away. At the two-year mark, we will have to fill out another form to make his green card permanent. Just so everyone knows, this still does not make him a citizen. For John to become a U.S. citizen, he will need to have a permanent green card, and then go through the naturalization process. It basically ends with a history test on the U.S. Most naturalized citizens know more about our country than the American born citizens.
TL;DR
Getting married does not make my alien fiance into a U.S. citizen. It takes years of submitting forms to the government. And apparently we're okay with granting illegal immigrants citizenship for evading the government for five years.
Honestly, the only scenario in which I have any empathy for an illegal immigrant is one with which had no choice in the matter. And by that, I mean a child that was brought over. We should protect those children as they grow up, because they've grown up with Americans, believing that they too are Americans. That doesn't excuse the friends or family that brought them over, but not everyone is equal.
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
16 August 2015
29 June 2015
White Pride! Straight Pride! Wait, what?
I've noticed an increasingly, interesting trend happening on the internet these days, and it was a rather collective, but subtle (until recently this last week), movement I dare say: pride for the majority.
Before you angrily disagree, let me clarify what I mean when I say pride for the majority (and you're probably still going to disagree, I promise, I totally have a point after this next paragraph).
I mean the students in Ohio that celebrated a Straight Pride Week, or this website dedicated to celebrating Heterosexual Awareness Month (though I can't really tell what month they're claiming since they've marked July 6th as Straight Pride Day and July 22nd as International Day Against Heterophobia, but you can buy T-Shirts and mugs!). This forum that is for White Nationalists that say they support true diversity and a homeland for all people, but want to promote the interests, values, and heritages of the white majority simply because there's so many organizations that already do it for non-white minorities. There is this radio and billboard project that claim to be the voice of the white resistance.
None of this is new. That radio station I linked to is run by the Ku Klux Klan, and they've been around for a really long time. And that's also kind of my point. I'm a firm believer that when people don't learn their history, it's doomed to repeat itself. In this technological era, and millennials in particular, we have no real understanding of what it's like to see a repressed minority. We grew up in a world where everyone is equal on the internet (go Net Neutrality! Woo!). We asked everyone their ASL (age, sex, and location, for those older and newer folks that missed the trend before we had online profiles, and for people who don't say folks), so you could be chatting up someone of a completely different background whether that's racial, financial, sexual, religious, or something else. While you may have your personal bias of who you PM'd (private messaged), the melting pot of an open IRC chatroom did not.
So we have a generation of people coming into their twenties in America that have only experienced a world where everyone can have an opinion. Anyone can become instantly famous in 140 characters or less. We've also experienced a world where Black History Month is celebrated every February, there are annual LGBT+ parades, and feminists can be found everywhere spreading awareness for equality between the genders both personally and professionally.
Equality.
We see that word, and we know the definition. But now we're starting to get confused. We see everyone fighting to be equal, but we forget what they're trying to be equal to. We've started to see these awesome parades and celebrations as privileges for the minorities, not as something as equal. And that's a hard thing to say. In fact, I'm kind of disgusted to say it, but I believe this trend to be true.
We watch silently as the rainbow flags wave above our heads. We diligently learn about Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream and the abolishment of slavery that followed. We learned why World War II and our own Civil War started (we briefly covered the Women's Suffrage, if at all in my school). But it all seemed so long ago. Those are just in our history books, and there are few people to recount memories of those events are alive today. In the time of the internet, those events may as well be in the Dark Ages because we move faster with the ever changing current of information available at our fingertips.
Now that we've grown up in this world, many of my generation are failing to understand why we celebrate the minorities like we do, and thus it results in my generation being led to believe that we are no longer the majority. That we no longer have these privileges that the minorities claim us to have had. That there are so many minorities banded together for equality, that we have actually become the outcasts.
And so white pride is born. Straight pride is born. We are trying to claim pride for ourselves because we're starting to feel like we're the minority.
It simply isn't true.
Sure, you can be proud to be who you are, and you should be! But the problems begin when we start repeating history because we failed to learn it, or learn from it. I'm not saying you should be ashamed to be proud because you're heterosexual. I'm saying you should be ashamed for your ignorance when you get upset, angry, or annoyed when someone else expresses their pride for being something different.
If I were a parent of a child with a bad habit, I'd say that even though I don't agree with your choice of habit, I accept it. That's what we need to do as humans. We need to agree that we may disagree with each other's choices, whether that is who they identify as, who they choose as partners, what they choose to believe or not believe in, whatever, but we need to accept each other gracefully.
We need to tone it down with this pride for the majority stuff. We didn't have to celebrate it before because it was already known. It was already "default", if I might say it like that. What we celebrate for the minorities is because it isn't "default." We're celebrating the differences in people so that they don't feel so different after all. But now it's turning into celebrating all but one...
In the end, we may find ourselves on the cusp of another civil war, with businesses and buildings taking down their confederate flags because of what they may represent. Is it white history? Is it American history? Is it Southern heritage? Is it a reminder that we once coveted slavery and fought to keep it? Whatever it means, it may cause us to repeat history because we either didn't learn it or have decided to only believe the parts we want to believe.
Read a history book from England. I'm sure their take on the French and Indian War is much different than ours.
Tessa is a feminist that falls along the LGBT+ spectrum and supports equality for everyone. She believes racism and sexism are both virulent in our culture and hopes to spread the awareness. Tessa is also in support for turning our current "rape culture" into awkward conversations in order to return the value of the word to it. Yes, she will overreact to rape jokes because they're not funny. Neither are jokes founded upon mental illnesses or physical disabilities.
Before you angrily disagree, let me clarify what I mean when I say pride for the majority (and you're probably still going to disagree, I promise, I totally have a point after this next paragraph).
I mean the students in Ohio that celebrated a Straight Pride Week, or this website dedicated to celebrating Heterosexual Awareness Month (though I can't really tell what month they're claiming since they've marked July 6th as Straight Pride Day and July 22nd as International Day Against Heterophobia, but you can buy T-Shirts and mugs!). This forum that is for White Nationalists that say they support true diversity and a homeland for all people, but want to promote the interests, values, and heritages of the white majority simply because there's so many organizations that already do it for non-white minorities. There is this radio and billboard project that claim to be the voice of the white resistance.
None of this is new. That radio station I linked to is run by the Ku Klux Klan, and they've been around for a really long time. And that's also kind of my point. I'm a firm believer that when people don't learn their history, it's doomed to repeat itself. In this technological era, and millennials in particular, we have no real understanding of what it's like to see a repressed minority. We grew up in a world where everyone is equal on the internet (go Net Neutrality! Woo!). We asked everyone their ASL (age, sex, and location, for those older and newer folks that missed the trend before we had online profiles, and for people who don't say folks), so you could be chatting up someone of a completely different background whether that's racial, financial, sexual, religious, or something else. While you may have your personal bias of who you PM'd (private messaged), the melting pot of an open IRC chatroom did not.
 |
| This is how we used to internet. (The Fine Bros.) |
So we have a generation of people coming into their twenties in America that have only experienced a world where everyone can have an opinion. Anyone can become instantly famous in 140 characters or less. We've also experienced a world where Black History Month is celebrated every February, there are annual LGBT+ parades, and feminists can be found everywhere spreading awareness for equality between the genders both personally and professionally.
Equality.
We see that word, and we know the definition. But now we're starting to get confused. We see everyone fighting to be equal, but we forget what they're trying to be equal to. We've started to see these awesome parades and celebrations as privileges for the minorities, not as something as equal. And that's a hard thing to say. In fact, I'm kind of disgusted to say it, but I believe this trend to be true.
We watch silently as the rainbow flags wave above our heads. We diligently learn about Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream and the abolishment of slavery that followed. We learned why World War II and our own Civil War started (we briefly covered the Women's Suffrage, if at all in my school). But it all seemed so long ago. Those are just in our history books, and there are few people to recount memories of those events are alive today. In the time of the internet, those events may as well be in the Dark Ages because we move faster with the ever changing current of information available at our fingertips.
Now that we've grown up in this world, many of my generation are failing to understand why we celebrate the minorities like we do, and thus it results in my generation being led to believe that we are no longer the majority. That we no longer have these privileges that the minorities claim us to have had. That there are so many minorities banded together for equality, that we have actually become the outcasts.
And so white pride is born. Straight pride is born. We are trying to claim pride for ourselves because we're starting to feel like we're the minority.
 |
| People actually think this. I didn't just make it up. (USDemocrazy) |
It simply isn't true.
Sure, you can be proud to be who you are, and you should be! But the problems begin when we start repeating history because we failed to learn it, or learn from it. I'm not saying you should be ashamed to be proud because you're heterosexual. I'm saying you should be ashamed for your ignorance when you get upset, angry, or annoyed when someone else expresses their pride for being something different.
If I were a parent of a child with a bad habit, I'd say that even though I don't agree with your choice of habit, I accept it. That's what we need to do as humans. We need to agree that we may disagree with each other's choices, whether that is who they identify as, who they choose as partners, what they choose to believe or not believe in, whatever, but we need to accept each other gracefully.
We need to tone it down with this pride for the majority stuff. We didn't have to celebrate it before because it was already known. It was already "default", if I might say it like that. What we celebrate for the minorities is because it isn't "default." We're celebrating the differences in people so that they don't feel so different after all. But now it's turning into celebrating all but one...
 |
| On the other side, Morgran doesn't want anyone to celebrate anything. |
In the end, we may find ourselves on the cusp of another civil war, with businesses and buildings taking down their confederate flags because of what they may represent. Is it white history? Is it American history? Is it Southern heritage? Is it a reminder that we once coveted slavery and fought to keep it? Whatever it means, it may cause us to repeat history because we either didn't learn it or have decided to only believe the parts we want to believe.
Read a history book from England. I'm sure their take on the French and Indian War is much different than ours.
Tessa is a feminist that falls along the LGBT+ spectrum and supports equality for everyone. She believes racism and sexism are both virulent in our culture and hopes to spread the awareness. Tessa is also in support for turning our current "rape culture" into awkward conversations in order to return the value of the word to it. Yes, she will overreact to rape jokes because they're not funny. Neither are jokes founded upon mental illnesses or physical disabilities.
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