This is quite personal for me and, as such, I'm going to get quite personal.
I will preface this for those who do not know - I am married to a Brazilian woman. One who has not yet received her green card, but will legally hold it in the near future.
Now, before Donald Trump was elected, she could buy a plane ticket and get special permission to fly back to Brazil to visit family and then come back here. This, the United States of America, is where she will be living her life for the foreseeable future, as she has absolutely no plans of moving to any other country - I, on the other hand, will be working diligently to convince her to move with me to some other undetermined European country. That is irrelevant.
My wife has not seen her daughter in over a year, a sacrifice my wife made to come here because she could make more money cleaning houses than she could working in her home country, money she could then take back with her to create a better life for her and her daughter. We met and fell in love, got married, and now we're working towards getting her daughter here. That, however, requires time.
A couple months ago my wife booked a plane, immigration lawyer stating that there should be very minimal problems - a few questions when she arrived back here in the States and she'd be on her way as they would have no reason to deport her.
Now, all that changed. With Donald Trump's recent ban on immigrants from the seven Muslim majority countries, and even though my wife is not affiliated at all with those countries, our immigration lawyer has advised her to cancel her flight entirely. This is not done for fear that she'd be confused to be a Muslim, or from the Middle East. No, this is because now there is a stigma drawn on every single immigrant in this country.
So now you may be saying, "but Dustin, your wife worked here illegally. She didn't pay taxes! Shame on her!" Maybe you're saying to yourself, "this country has too many people in it already! She doesn't belong here, she should go back to her own country!"
Yeah, I'm not going to change your mind on that. If those are the way you feel then next time someone offers you 20 bucks to drive them some place turn the money down, or 50 dollars to turn a wrench, 100 dollars for a sucky-sucky job - turn them all down. Guess what, you've worked illegally, too. We all have.
As for her being from another country, if you go back two, three, four generations then your family was from somewhere else, too. Maybe it was a bit longer than that, but go back far enough and not even Native Americans are native to this country. Get the fuck over it.
The point is that when you place a ban on people coming into this country, you're not preventing the bad people from coming into this country. Sure, an ISIS operator could be sneaking in with those Syrian refugees, but statistically it isn't happening. Those rapists you're so worried about from Mexico? Yeah, statistically, more rapes happen by legal citizens in such a large amount that it isn't even worth bringing up foreigners as a whole as rapists by comparison.
The same logic that the gun-toting conservatives use with the whole banning guns won't get guns off the street is the exact same logic that can be applied to banning immigrants. So long as it is easier for immigrants to make more money here than in other countries then they will be finding a means to cross that border. So long as we continue to bomb countries in the Middle East, we will have terrorists - unless, of course, we kill every other country.
All these bans do is encourage more problems, not less. Now those refugees who desperately need help are going to see that we're closing our doors to them, the most powerful country in the world, and they are going to grow bitter from that. A country in which has more guns than any other country. A country which has 11.1 MILLION people who have a concealed carry permit alone. A country who has a police force so well equipped that it would rival the military of the countries on the ban list. This is, by definition, irrational fear.
And because of this fear, this irrational fear, my wife now has to go even longer without seeing her daughter. We were officially told my the immigration lawyer that it would be a bad idea for my wife to go back to Brazil to visit her family (note: the lawyer did not tell her not to go, but rather just that it will be very ill advised to go). That is simply not a risk my wife or I am willing to take. This is just my wife, though. The immigrants all throughout this country are in the same position, whether they are refugees or otherwise.
Now I will ask you, if you're so willing to force someone to go a year without seeing their children, when will you go a year without seeing yours?
-Dustin Stover
I will preface this for those who do not know - I am married to a Brazilian woman. One who has not yet received her green card, but will legally hold it in the near future.
Now, before Donald Trump was elected, she could buy a plane ticket and get special permission to fly back to Brazil to visit family and then come back here. This, the United States of America, is where she will be living her life for the foreseeable future, as she has absolutely no plans of moving to any other country - I, on the other hand, will be working diligently to convince her to move with me to some other undetermined European country. That is irrelevant.
My wife has not seen her daughter in over a year, a sacrifice my wife made to come here because she could make more money cleaning houses than she could working in her home country, money she could then take back with her to create a better life for her and her daughter. We met and fell in love, got married, and now we're working towards getting her daughter here. That, however, requires time.
A couple months ago my wife booked a plane, immigration lawyer stating that there should be very minimal problems - a few questions when she arrived back here in the States and she'd be on her way as they would have no reason to deport her.
Now, all that changed. With Donald Trump's recent ban on immigrants from the seven Muslim majority countries, and even though my wife is not affiliated at all with those countries, our immigration lawyer has advised her to cancel her flight entirely. This is not done for fear that she'd be confused to be a Muslim, or from the Middle East. No, this is because now there is a stigma drawn on every single immigrant in this country.
So now you may be saying, "but Dustin, your wife worked here illegally. She didn't pay taxes! Shame on her!" Maybe you're saying to yourself, "this country has too many people in it already! She doesn't belong here, she should go back to her own country!"
Yeah, I'm not going to change your mind on that. If those are the way you feel then next time someone offers you 20 bucks to drive them some place turn the money down, or 50 dollars to turn a wrench, 100 dollars for a sucky-sucky job - turn them all down. Guess what, you've worked illegally, too. We all have.
As for her being from another country, if you go back two, three, four generations then your family was from somewhere else, too. Maybe it was a bit longer than that, but go back far enough and not even Native Americans are native to this country. Get the fuck over it.
The point is that when you place a ban on people coming into this country, you're not preventing the bad people from coming into this country. Sure, an ISIS operator could be sneaking in with those Syrian refugees, but statistically it isn't happening. Those rapists you're so worried about from Mexico? Yeah, statistically, more rapes happen by legal citizens in such a large amount that it isn't even worth bringing up foreigners as a whole as rapists by comparison.
The same logic that the gun-toting conservatives use with the whole banning guns won't get guns off the street is the exact same logic that can be applied to banning immigrants. So long as it is easier for immigrants to make more money here than in other countries then they will be finding a means to cross that border. So long as we continue to bomb countries in the Middle East, we will have terrorists - unless, of course, we kill every other country.
All these bans do is encourage more problems, not less. Now those refugees who desperately need help are going to see that we're closing our doors to them, the most powerful country in the world, and they are going to grow bitter from that. A country in which has more guns than any other country. A country which has 11.1 MILLION people who have a concealed carry permit alone. A country who has a police force so well equipped that it would rival the military of the countries on the ban list. This is, by definition, irrational fear.
And because of this fear, this irrational fear, my wife now has to go even longer without seeing her daughter. We were officially told my the immigration lawyer that it would be a bad idea for my wife to go back to Brazil to visit her family (note: the lawyer did not tell her not to go, but rather just that it will be very ill advised to go). That is simply not a risk my wife or I am willing to take. This is just my wife, though. The immigrants all throughout this country are in the same position, whether they are refugees or otherwise.
Now I will ask you, if you're so willing to force someone to go a year without seeing their children, when will you go a year without seeing yours?
-Dustin Stover
Well, let me say that any employer of Mac Donalds can make more money than I was doing, as nurse, after 4 years inside a college in Brazil.
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