Grumpa Joe's Place

It might be my imagination that thousands of birds are seeking food at feeders this fall. Flocks of hundreds swarm through the skies in swooping aerial gymnastics and land near a feeding place. I poured a pound of sunflower seed into the backyard feeder this morning. As I write this, flying critters like English Sparrows, Chickadees, House Wrens, Gold Finches, and some that I don’t recognize are staging themselves in the adjacent juniper shrub, waiting for an opportunity to fly in and join the party. I read somewhere that when birds feed like crazy it is because a storm is coming and they are stocking up to survive the atrocious weather; it is called a “feeding frenzy.” I enjoy feeding them and recognize that with the nasty twenty degree(F) weather we are experiencing they need all the help I can give them. Like all things the cost of seed has skyrocketed and my pockets are not as deep as they were a year ago.

This experience with the birds is not unlike the swarms of immigrants crossing our borders to escape unhealthy conditions in their home countries. Like the birds, we feed and house them, and unless they can find work and earn a living, we must continue doing so. We can’t just put them in a motel for a week and feed them once, hoping the problem disappears. They are hungry every day. The problem, as I see it, is that these immigrants will cost me a lot more than a fifty-pound bag of sunflower seeds every two or three weeks. Feeding a few birds and or immigrants is not the same as feeding swarms of them. How do we deal with the problem?

One answer is to send them back home, but they left home because they were unhappy. We should not be concerned about their level of happiness as long as they are not starving and have shelter. Our so-called broken immigration system was carefully drafted to give the country time to assimilate new people into our culture. What is broken is the law. It is being broken daily by those who supposedly should be enforcing it.

I agree that the world has a shrinking population problem, but I also remember that not long ago people were going crazy about overpopulation. The cry was for abortion, birth control, and various schemes dedicated to keeping the planet from being ruined by too many people. Hell, China went so far as to adopt a one-child law, and they vigorously enforced it. If a Chinese couple wanted a second baby and defied the rule, they might suddenly learn that they no longer had a job or an apartment. The law worked so well that the government soon learned that there would not be enough people to care for the elderly. Now, China is panicking and encouraging more babies to be born. Except, the young people who are in the child bearing years have learned that having babies is expensive and also hard work. Without saying it, they are sending a message to the CCP to go pound sand. It is their problem, they created it, and it is theirs to deal with.

The shrinking population has also affected the USA. Like the CCP, our ruling leaders have decided to solve the problem by importing new people from countries where young people still like to have babies. Instead of doing this correctly by changing the laws to increase our population through immigration, they decided to open the borders and let the world in. I believe that the entire world population would immigrate to the USA if we were dumb enough to allow it.

Recently, I sponsored an immigrant to come to the USA. Except they were already here. It so happened that they came no matter what or how. I hired an attorney to help me make things legal. The process took three and a half years, about ten thousand dollars, and the immigration department required untold numbers of forms to be completed (I-130, I-131, I-485, I-601, I-765, G-28, I might be wrong, but I assume there are continuous form numbers to fill in all the gaps in between those I used. That would imply that there are well over a thousand forms in the immigration system all dealing with very specific cases.) . The forms are all in English but unintelligible because they are in the language of Immigration Services, and only those people trained in that system understand them. We also had three face-to-face interviews during which the immigrant was interrogated relentlessly. Thankfully, we hired an language interpreter to work with us so the questions could be answered lawfully. Many of the questions they asked were already answered in writing as they were directly from the forms submitted. It was obvious to me that they were trying to trip up the immigrant with answers different from those on the form.

Yes, the system is very hard to deal with, but our lawmakers made it that way. Any time a new case arrived that the standard forms couldn’t address, they revised the form to accept the case or invented a new form. Each form has a number. In our case the form numbers ranged from one hundred and thirty to seven hundred and sixty-five. Immigration officers must use the forms exactly as written. They must assure that the immigrant has answered the question validly, if not, the application is denied. .

This process was very much different than the one that was in place when my parents arrived on Ellis Island in the nineteen twenties. I must give our country credit for allowing over 1.4 million immigrants into the country lawfully every year. There is not another country in the world that is as generous with its immigration quotas. It is just in the last few decades that we have lost it and have decided to break our own rules. The existing system is generous to a fault. It is designed to let good healthy people in, and to give the country time to allow the newcomers to culturally assimilate, learn the language, find jobs, and housing. What we did over the last four years was to allow as many people into the country to make a new city the size of New York literally, over night.

Finally, I recommend that if you have kids, grandkids, nephews, nieces, advise them to become lawyers specializing in immigration law. They will have lifetime employment. Secondly, I urge you to feed the birds.

Filed under: Birds, Garden, Immigration | Tagged: Green Cards, Immigration law, Legal residency | 1 Comment »