Don’t Get Sentimental

At my job, I work with a lot of immigrants and my office helps them apply for various statuses: green cards, visas, citizenship, etc.  One service that draws a lot of people is Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which the US offers to various countries whose people have been/are enduring hardship.  More specifically, we get a lot of Salvadorans and Hondurans in this office.

As part of this process, the prospective immigrant has to answer 30 some yes or no questions to determine their eligibility.  These questions range from useful to batshit-fucking-insane, and I’m fairly certain that they’ve never stopped anyone from entering the country.  For your perusing pleasure, here is an assortment of questions our Great Nation uses to keep out the unwanteds:

• Have you engaged in or do you continue to engage in terrorist activities?

Really? You think we’re gonna catch terrorists by asking them nicely?

• Have you been or do you continue to be a member of the Communist or other totalitarian party, except when membership was involuntary?

Nevermind the fact that the Red Scare ended 50 years ago, this is a great tactic.  If only they’d had something similar at Ellis Island, we could’ve kept those pesky anarchists out too.

• Have you participated in Nazi persecution or genocide?

This is a personal favorite, not least because any remaining Nazi ‘persecutors’ would have been about 7 when they were commanding Auschwitz.

• Have you within the past ten years, engaged in prostitution or procurement of prostitution or do you continue to engage in prostitution or procurement of prostitution?
• Follow-up: Have you been or do you intend to be involved in any other commercial vice?

Frankly I think it’s unfair that prostitution, in every possible form, should get its own shout-out above all other commercial vices.  Other commercial vices, according to a google search, include “keeping a bawdy house, procuring, or transporting women for immoral purposes.”

Which is kind of the same thing, except one uses the phrase ‘bawdy house,’ which in my opinion should get its own question, and probably some follow-up questions to inquire about the nature of said bawdy house.

And finally:

• Do you practice polygamy?

Which is totally unfair, because we let the Mormons stay.

If I’ve learned one thing through all this, it’s that maybe building a giant fucking wall across 1,951 miles of territory is not in fact the stupidest thing our government has tried to keep out the undesirables.

God Bless America!

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