2008.07.11: July 11, 2008: Headlines: COS - Togo: Writing - Togo: Journalism: Iraq: Speaking Out: Immigration: The New Yorker: George Packer writes: It’s the American style and it’s hurting our economy, isolating us from the world, and making a terrible first impression on millions of visitors
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2008.07.11: July 11, 2008: Headlines: COS - Togo: Writing - Togo: Journalism: Iraq: Speaking Out: Immigration: The New Yorker: George Packer writes: It’s the American style and it’s hurting our economy, isolating us from the world, and making a terrible first impression on millions of visitors
George Packer writes: It’s the American style and it’s hurting our economy, isolating us from the world, and making a terrible first impression on millions of visitors
I had just spent most of the evening at J.F.K. Airport’s Terminal 4 waiting for an Iraqi friend, his wife, and their two young daughters to emerge from immigration and customs. Just before 9:00 P.M., the family straggled out, making a heroic effort to look happy. They had been held, along with fifteen or twenty others, in a waiting room in order to be registered as non-immigrants on special visas. Why this took over four hours seems mainly to have been due to the indifference and incompetence of Homeland Security officers, who kept losing files, failing to apply the correct stamp, going on hourlong breaks, and, when my friend asked if the process couldn’t be hurried up a bit, threatening to make the delay even longer. The substance of the registration—name-check, fingerprinting, a few questions—took less than thirty minutes. My friend concluded that the wait was at least in part deliberate: these newcomers were given a prolonged taste of official authority before being turned loose in the country. “This is the Iraqi style,” he said. “Not the American style.” Journalist George Packer served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo.
George Packer writes: It’s the American style and it’s hurting our economy, isolating us from the world, and making a terrible first impression on millions of visitors
Give Me Your Tired—I'll Exhaust Them
I got home late Tuesday night to find in the mail pile the bound galleys of a book coming out in September: “The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11,” by Edward Alden. Its publisher promises “a striking and persuasive assessment of the dangers faced by a United States that cuts itself off from the rest of the world, making it increasingly difficult for others to come here and depriving itself of the most persuasive thing it can offer—the example of what it has achieved at home.”
At that moment, I was the easiest person in America to persuade. I had just spent most of the evening at J.F.K. Airport’s Terminal 4 waiting for an Iraqi friend, his wife, and their two young daughters to emerge from immigration and customs. Their plane from Amman had arrived at 4:30 in the afternoon. An El Al flight had gotten in around the same time, and the families of Orthodox Jews, the women in hijabs, the secular Muslim teens, the two varieties of monotheism sporting identical long beards, had all flowed out together from behind the metallic wall, peacefully pushing luggage carts in a perfect tableau of the most persuasive thing America can offer. Behind them came waves of other passengers from other places, Port of Spain, London, Kuwait, Cancun, Naples, and I would have started getting sentimental about the whole business were it not for the fact that my friend and his family failed to appear. A lull, then more flights, more of the world’s gorgeous mosaic disembarking in the capital of immigration, and still no sign of them. Hours went by. There was nowhere to sit. I was afraid to get a cup of coffee and risk missing them—they knew no one in New York.
Just before 9:00 P.M., the family straggled out, making a heroic effort to look happy. They had been held, along with fifteen or twenty others, in a waiting room in order to be registered as non-immigrants on special visas. Why this took over four hours seems mainly to have been due to the indifference and incompetence of Homeland Security officers, who kept losing files, failing to apply the correct stamp, going on hourlong breaks, and, when my friend asked if the process couldn’t be hurried up a bit, threatening to make the delay even longer. The substance of the registration—name-check, fingerprinting, a few questions—took less than thirty minutes. My friend concluded that the wait was at least in part deliberate: these newcomers were given a prolonged taste of official authority before being turned loose in the country. “This is the Iraqi style,” he said. “Not the American style.”
It’s the American style now, according to Edward Alden’s book, and it’s hurting our economy, isolating us from the world, and making a terrible first impression on millions of visitors. D.H.S. responded to the immigration failures that helped make September 11th possible by turning the immigration system into a counterterrorism program. The tradeoff between openness and security is never easy to figure out, but what struck me about my friend’s ordeal was its sheer gratuitousness. We should try to avoid reminding visitors of the reasons they were happy to get away from home in the first place. And someone should tell D.H.S. that we need all the friends and admirers we can get. On the way into the city, when the New York skyline came into view—beacon of immigrants all over the world—my friend’s wife didn’t smile.
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Headlines: July, 2008; RPCV George Packer (Togo); Peace Corps Togo; Directory of Togo RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Togo RPCVs; Writing - Togo; Journalism; Iraq; Speaking Out; Immigration
When this story was posted in July 2008, this was on the front page of PCOL:
Peace Corps Online The Independent News Forum serving Returned Peace Corps Volunteers
| Dodd vows to filibuster Surveillance Act Senator Chris Dodd vowed to filibuster the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that would grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that helped this administration violate the civil liberties of Americans. "It is time to say: No more. No more trampling on our Constitution. No more excusing those who violate the rule of law. These are fundamental, basic, eternal principles. They have been around, some of them, for as long as the Magna Carta. They are enduring. What they are not is temporary. And what we do not do in a time where our country is at risk is abandon them." |
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Story Source: The New Yorker
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Togo; Writing - Togo; Journalism; Iraq; Speaking Out; Immigration
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