The civil twilight of immigrants

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.  Transformation occurs most after the dark night of the soul!

English saw the word “immigrant” from its use in the United States. “Immigrate” was already coined by 1776 but the noun émigré who leaves his country to go to another was the word of choice. The New World introduced “immigrant”, one who journeys into uncharted territory and to an unknown future. JFK called us a Nation of Immigrants.   

I am an immigrant, slight modified. I signed up with Americans and others in a global service force after the earthrise of ’68, and I have been in the glocal force ever since.  Glocalis is that domain of global consciousness and local action. 

Still, there is the matter of passports. As a returning student in ’70 qualified to migrate by marriage, I was 3rd degree’d, then harassed for not turning the green card into a blue book as soon as I qualified. Stirred but not shaken, I raised a hand of allegiance in ’84.  

Our blue book is not the subject of this reflection. Papers of numerous “immigrants” in Saipan are; I met a few of them in my long sojourn in Micronesia,  in Majuro and Guam in the early ’80s, traveling through FSM and Oceania, SEA and South Asia. My first trip to Saipan was in ’89; I returned to the lagoon shortly after Thanksgiving Day of ’98.  We broke bread and raised the chalice at Immanuel UMC, then taught at PSS; we are not novice to the affairs of the CNMI. We intoned the triune name at Chamber affairs, sheltered folks with labor and immigration issues. We exchanged pleasantries with Sophie and Pete, and nodded to island politicos, less with Juan but more with Diego. We knew real island heartbeat was elsewhere but Capital hill.

The future of the CNMI is not Article XII. It is on what we do with our “immigrants”!

The paramount illusion spinners are foisting over communal consciousness is the alleged contractual nature of the descent of workers from many parts of the world into the CNMI. The 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!  Three-year contracts signed at home were invalid on shore. 

The garment industry was profitable at the HR end, more than in the alleged transshipment of boutique clothes! The litany of misfortunes attendant to this sorry state of affairs is familiar; we are also conversant of its soft underbelly exemplified in the islands’ Houses of Horus!

We witnessed last week the ironic consequences of lured asylum seekers for a Java boat ride to Australia’s Christmas Island. Less than a fifth of the passengers survived the tempest. The extent immigrants seek to better their lot away from their land of birth attests to the scandalous maintenance of colonial policies in the people’s access to this planet’s resource. 

America’s U.S. immigration agency was launched in fear of the “yellow fever”, and England’s previous penal colony decimated the natives. Oz restricts access to Down Under from the neighborhood; Canada and New Zealand, just a bit less so. Kipling’s white man’s burden was played too well! 

There is a great civil war going on over the minds and hearts of folks around the world.  Malthus triggered this when he touted that there is not enough food to go around, population growth exceeding food production. The image stuck. The political line to better conserve profligate consumption because the unwashed and ill taught hordes are out to destroy U.S. moves votes. Rhetoric assault on Obama’s White House follows this line.  Unadulterated greed, individual or corporate, footnotes the decline of the American Empire. 

USCIS officers are conflicted among those who embody the Statue of Liberty’s 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.  Gualo Rai office is a 50/50 proposition! 

That’s what Rabby and Bonnie’s entourage have to work with.  

Enshrined in this nation’s psyche is the right of dissent of the governed. If the violent kind is not one’s 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 anxious hard-hearts in executive positions.

While islanders cower in fear, immigrants-to-be freely demonstrate that if there’s a will, there’s a way. They need not be feared; locals might even join ‘em.  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 the brew and knead tired muscles.  Guv, might we start seeing each other as human beings rather than as mere units of labor? 

Judge Ramona Manglona welcomed six hand-raisers not too long ago. I am looking forward to a deluge of hell-raisers! Why not? “Immigrants” are already deemed guilty until proven deportable, so what have we to lose? After all, fighting by all means necessary is very American. Welcome fellow immigrants, local and foreign born!