by Flemming Funch
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has arrested close to 1000 Middle Eastern immigrants in Los Angeles, after tricking them into voluntarily coming in to register. That's not good, and it is looking a bit like how the U.S. imprisoned Japanese Americans during WWII in 'internment camps'. Lisa Rein has a bunch of things to say about it. Well, I can see the other side too, not that it is reasonable or pretty or anything. The U.S. immigration system is a hugely screwed up bureaucracy. People are still being processed based on boxes of paper, and each step typically takes several years, no matter how simple it is. My wife and my daughter only got their greencards last year, and that took 9 years for a simple formality, as they had a right to immigrate because I already had a greencard. In the meantime they could, in principle, have been arrested and deported. But the immigration system has an unwritten racial bias here. People from Mexico, or people from the Middle East, would most likely be deported if arrested. But if my wife had been arrested, we could probably have talked our way out of it, with the help of a laywer, as we don't look like illegal immigrants. Anyway, the bureaucracy is so huge and stupid here, and there are so many holes in the societal control system here, that it looks very feasible for people to just stay here after your visa expires. And that's what happened with those 1000 Iranian people. They live here, but they didn't have valid visas, and some of them had applied for greencards, but they weren't really in any legal category. So, yes, when they walk into the INS, they will recognize of course that these people don't have any legal visas, and they will arrest them. But the whole thing got to look quite a bit like a setup, in order to cart Muslims off to concentration camps.
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