It is no accident that Xmas dramaturgy coincides with winter solstice, when the civil twilight is most pronounced and the Northern hemisphere has its longest night of the year.\u00a0 Transformation occurs most after the dark night of the soul!<\/p>\n
English saw the word \u201cimmigrant\u201d from its use in the United States.\u00a0\u201cImmigrate\u201d was already coined by 1776 but the noun \u00e9migr\u00e9 who leaves his country to go to another was the word of choice.\u00a0The New World introduced \u201cimmigrant\u201d, one who journeys into uncharted territory and to an unknown future.\u00a0JFK called us a Nation of Immigrants.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
I am an immigrant, slight modified.\u00a0I signed up with Americans and others in a global service force after the earthrise of \u201968, and I have been in the glocal force ever since.\u00a0 Glocalis is that domain of global consciousness and local action.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Still, there is the matter of passports.\u00a0As a returning student in \u201970 qualified to migrate by marriage, I was 3rd degree\u2019d, then harassed for not turning the green card into a blue book as soon as I qualified.\u00a0Stirred but not shaken, I raised a hand of allegiance in \u201984. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Our blue book is not the subject of this reflection.\u00a0Papers of numerous \u201cimmigrants\u201d in Saipan are; I met a few of them in my long sojourn in Micronesia,\u00a0 in Majuro and Guam in the early \u201980s, traveling through\u00a0FSM and Oceania, SEA and South Asia.\u00a0My\u00a0first trip to Saipan was in \u201989; I\u00a0returned to the lagoon shortly after Thanksgiving Day of \u201998.\u00a0 We broke bread and raised the chalice at Immanuel UMC, then taught at PSS; we are not novice to the affairs of the CNMI.\u00a0We intoned the triune name at Chamber affairs, sheltered folks with labor and immigration issues.\u00a0We exchanged pleasantries with Sophie and Pete, and nodded to island politicos, less with Juan but more with Diego.\u00a0We knew real island heartbeat was elsewhere but Capital hill.<\/p>\n
The future of the CNMI is not Article XII.\u00a0It is on what we do with our \u201cimmigrants\u201d!<\/p>\n
The paramount illusion spinners are foisting over communal consciousness is the alleged\u00a0contractual nature\u00a0of the descent of\u00a0workers from many parts of the world into the CNMI.\u00a0The numerous labor cases attests to the fact that we exploited the labor of those of made it into Saipan; we also made them pay exorbitant fees at source for the privileged of coming to a U.S. territory, even misleading some into thinking that we were an L.A. suburb!\u00a0 Three-year contracts signed at home were invalid on shore.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The garment industry was profitable at the HR end, more than in the alleged transshipment of boutique\u00a0clothes!\u00a0The litany of misfortunes attendant to this sorry state of affairs is familiar; we are\u00a0also conversant of\u00a0its soft underbelly exemplified in the islands\u2019 Houses of Horus!<\/p>\n
We witnessed last week the ironic consequences of lured asylum seekers for a Java boat ride to Australia\u2019s Christmas Island.\u00a0Less than a fifth of the passengers survived the tempest.\u00a0The extent immigrants seek to better their lot away from their land of birth attests to the scandalous maintenance of colonial policies in the people\u2019s access to this planet\u2019s resource.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
America\u2019s U.S. immigration agency was launched in fear of the \u201cyellow fever\u201d, and England\u2019s previous penal colony decimated the natives.\u00a0Oz restricts access to Down Under from the neighborhood; Canada and New Zealand, just a bit less so.\u00a0Kipling\u2019s white man\u2019s burden was played too well!\u00a0<\/p>\n
There is a great civil war going on over the minds and hearts of folks around the world.\u00a0 Malthus triggered this when he touted that there is not enough food to go around, population growth exceeding food production.\u00a0The image stuck.\u00a0The political line to better conserve profligate consumption because the unwashed and ill taught hordes are out to destroy U.S. moves votes.\u00a0Rhetoric assault on Obama\u2019s White House follows this line.\u00a0 Unadulterated greed, individual or corporate, footnotes the decline of the American Empire.\u00a0<\/p>\n
USCIS officers are conflicted among those who embody the Statue of Liberty\u2019s claim, and those who defend the new Maginot Line that stretches from the Aleutians to Down Under, through Panmunjom, Okinawa, Guam, Cotabato, Darwin, and Diego Garcia.\u00a0 Gualo Rai office is a 50\/50 proposition!\u00a0<\/p>\n
That’s what Rabby and Bonnie\u2019s\u00a0entourage have to work with.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Enshrined in this nation\u2019s psyche is the right of dissent of the governed.\u00a0If the violent kind is not one\u2019s cup of kava, there are many forms of revolt, including methods of civil disobedience that may be employed if legal recourse proves sorely unyielding, intransigently abetted by threatened\u00a0anxious hard-hearts in executive positions. <\/p>\n
While islanders cower in fear, immigrants-to-be freely demonstrate that if there\u2019s a will, there\u2019s a way.\u00a0They need not be feared; locals might even join \u2018em.\u00a0 We have idle lands that await tilling, fresh and seawater ponds to hold fishies, buildings to be maintained, elders to be cared for, not to mention an extra hand to pour\u00a0the brew and knead tired muscles.\u00a0 Guv, might we start seeing each other as human beings rather than as mere units of labor?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Judge Ramona Manglona welcomed six hand-raisers not too long ago.\u00a0I am looking forward to a deluge of hell-raisers!\u00a0Why not?\u00a0\u201cImmigrants\u201d are already deemed guilty until proven deportable, so what have we to lose?\u00a0After all, fighting by all means necessary is very American.\u00a0Welcome fellow immigrants, local and foreign born!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is no accident that Xmas dramaturgy coincides with winter solstice, when the civil twilight is most pronounced and the Northern hemisphere has its longest night of the year.\u00a0 Transformation occurs most after the dark night of the soul!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}