How to Survive America?

Entry You are at the airport, perhaps at the seaport or at a border post. The officer is looking at your papers scrutinizing your passport and your appearance. You are nervous, you are fidgeting and perhaps excited. If you are nervous so you should be. You fulfilled all the immigration requirements, you submitted myriad of documents, you gave plenty of evidence that you are worthy of entering into heaven i.e. the United States of America. You went through an inquisitive process, lengthy interviews and waited for months, perhaps for years for this moment. Instead of the red carpet however, you are being tortured by an immigration officer who is taking his sweet time, crossing every ‘T’, dotting every ‘I’. In other words he is making sure that you are indeed who you are and not a fake, not a delinquent. He is paging into your foreign passport with an eagle eye, he is taking your picture, your fingerprints, and he is looking into the iris of your eye. You see my American-want-to-be friend you are scrutinized by a seasoned American. He himself may have been an immigrant once upon a time or his father or grandfather may have come to this country in better times. From an immigrant’s or a visitor’s point of view all time prior to 9/11/01 was a better time. Immigrants and visitors were welcomed; they were wanted by Uncle Sam. Some newly arrived at the turn of the 20th century; they had no papers or hardly any. Nobody knew who they were, if they had ever committed a crime, or what and whom they may have left behind. If they had an unpronounceable name they were renamed by an Ellis Island immigration officer. It did not matter if they had any money in their pockets if they were poor, tired, wretched, penniless the country accepted them. They were willing and cheap; the steel mills, dockyards, sweatshops and factories needed their hands. That was there and then, America has grown up since then.