Tryangulation

I'm for immigration reform: security

2010-04-03T11:51:21-05:00

Here’s the next installment of my series on immigration reform. Please remember that this is a broad review of some of my thinking right now, not a dissertation.

Immigration Security

Undocumented immigration has been a problem since World War II when the bracero program started bringing guest workers from Mexico into the U.S. Ironically, legal immigration, which provided for standard labor benefits, made production costs too high for American businesses, so illegal immigration made good business sense. Whenever there are labor supply gaps because of geography, low wages or climate, migratory labor is the most pragmatic solution, and illegal migration the most lucrative. For some.

Much of migration theory revolves around the “push-pull” concept, where hardship in one place “pushes” people into the migration stream, while better conditions elsewhere “pull” those migrants toward them. This is the source of almost all legal and illegal migration to the States. No matter where you are on the political spectrum here, you have to agree that the U.S. has a lot more to offer (and is reputed to offer even more) than the homeland of most immigrants. In many cases, the disparity between us and them creates a combination of the forces of push and pull that becomes an irresistible storm surge crashing against an eroding and irreparable sea wall.

I grant that large, unmanageable populations of newcomers present security problems, especially in a hostile environment of marginalization and the failure of many migrants to realize the exaggerated expectations they had before arrival. However, traditional push-pull migration is not where we have the real security problem. The perpetrators of 9/11 did not come to America for better jobs and a better future for their children.

It is grossly ironic that, in the name of national security, we have spent undisclosed billions of dollars on an unpopular, factually unfounded war in Iraq, when that same money could have fixed the immigration security problem several times over. That money would have been spent more effectively on better vigilance of persons and goods at our borders and other points of entry, more coordinated and creative information management, and better recruiting and training of the professionals who have to rely too much on subjective profiling and the humiliating treatment of “suspects.”

When we passengers have to spend hours in multiple security lines, we all tend to look a little scary, and inspectors tend to get a lot more crabby. I wonder if the number of persons of interest correlates in any way with the length of passenger waits or with the number of hours an inspector has spent on her feet. We need an approach that researches and integrates safe, efficient, and humane surveillance of all who cross our borders.

After years of traveling between Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and the US, I have seen plenty first hand, and have heard reports from honorable Middle Eastern and Latin friends, indicating that too often our unevenly applied security measures are spent looking for terrorist profiles in the wrong faces and in the wrong places. These measures alienate our nation’s friends and only feed our xenophobia, just the destabilizing effects that terrorists desire.

We are experts at protecting ourselves from the past threats, but this only challenges our enemies to develop more creative and diabolical tactics, forcing us to play catch up. Now that we all take off our shoes at airports, do we really expect another shoe bomber? Besides, which profile will protect us from another Timothy McVeigh?

I'm for immigration reform

2010-04-02T13:08:49-05:00

I was invited to write another post for La Vida Idealist which will be published soon (I’ll let you know here when it’s up). In that post I tell an anecdote about labor migration from the little town of Tacaná in western Guatemala all the way to my little hometown in western Michigan.

When you get to the punch line in the anecdote I am working with migrant farm workers in Michigan. This is after having worked with international students in Houston and then with Mayan peasants in Guatemala, many of whom became migrant workers. Later I worked among Iraqi and Iranian refugees in Texas, while at the same time helping an immigrant Spanish-language church get off the ground. Now I interpret between Spanish and English for social service field investigation.

That’s several chapters in my life where I have worked directly with immigrants to the U.S., documented and undocumented, in addition to other chapters where I was the migrant/immigrant/expat. I spend a lot of time thinking about immigration issues, and am formulating my own position in favor of reform that promotes security, compassion and community well being. I’ll explore my take on these issues in a few subsequent posts, and will keep in mind that this is a blog, not a dissertation.

They should know that time is a barrier too

2010-02-16T16:21:22-06:00

We've been in the US for a while, but I continue to read education news from Turkey, and I continue to be amazed at planning delays and the concealment of imperfections, such as I noted some time ago here and here and here.

Finally, at the very end of 2009, the Minister of Education declared that public schools in Turkey will be refitted to accommodate the approximately 85,000 students with physical disabilities that make school attendance--and life in general--a daily and nearly insurmountable barrier to equal opportunity. Ramps, lower thresholds and wider doors are to be installed so that wheelchair-bound students can finally go to school. Additional modifications include lower chalkboards, accessible toilets and nonskid surfaces on outdoor walkways. What will they think of next?

The 85,000 that next year might be able to get through the school doors will, I hope, amaze their teachers and classmates with their normal level of intelligence. Even more, I hope in some small reduction in the embarrassment felt by physically able (yet attitude-challenged) members of society who now have to deal with people they would otherwise prefer to keep out of sight.

I congratulate the Minister for her challenge to this immensely inert institutional discrimination, but I also wonder how much the EU accession process had to do with driving this change. I still feel regret for the hundreds of thousands who might have gone to school if only these changes had taken place just ten years earlier.

Link to news article in Turkish: Okullarda engelli öğrenci devrimi / Türkiye / Radikal İnternet

¡Buenos días a la vida!

2010-02-05T09:35:53-06:00

That is, "Good morning to life!"

I just learned this morning that my guest post on La Vida Idealist was published. I wrote about my struggle with biases that impeded my learning the really important things while living in a village in Guatemala. It's a topic I keep coming back to in my personal reflections, even if they don't make it to the pages of my blog (but you can check out My Favorite Posts on the left sidebar to get a taste).

So, I'm jazzed this morning about getting a little southern exposure, and that Celeste wants me to write some more. And if you got here through the link on La Vida Idealist, thanks for stopping by!

Here's the link: Seeing the World in New Ways | La Vida Idealist

just keep looking

2010-01-22T08:55:28-06:00

"Around every corner there's a photograph that needs to be taken."

Matthew McDermott, photographer of this amazing rescue in Haiti, in an interview with CNN.

In between

2009-12-27T16:25:48-06:00

While I might not be blogging as much as in the past, I am spending more time with my notebooks and other writing that just doesn't seem suited to blog posts. So during this in between time --while I am in between fits of blogging, in between a just-finished and a brand-new notebook (the paper kind), and in between the Merry Christmas and the Happy (or, God willing, Happier) New Year -- here's something I just found to help spend three minutes clearing one's head.

We can call it a stocking stuffer of peace and quiet.

Untitled from Rami Lob on Vimeo.

It's just down the road from Paricutín

2009-11-11T14:18:31-06:00

Do you remember in grade school the story about the Mexican volcano that rose overnight in a farmer's cornfield? That volcano is called Paricutín, and during its initial eruptions it destroyed the town of San Juan Parangaricutirimícuaro. The townspeople relocated and named their new community Nuevo San Juan Parangaricutirimícuaro, while the amazing story of the volcano brought some broad, but brief, attention to their tragedy and also to the astounding name of the town.

With the passing of time, the place name took on a mythical quality, and now many in Mexico doubt that Mexico's longest place name is authentic, although across the country people are amused by a famous tongue twister that evolved out of that name. I won't repeat the entire tongue twister here, but you can see different versions of it on the town's Spanish Wikipedia page. I've successfully used the tongue twister myself as a tool for teaching the language learning technique of the backward build-up: learning phrases by starting at the end and with lots of repetition gradually adding the preceding syllables, thus demonstrating that the technique works even with nonsense words.

Well, wouldn't you know that someone from that town eventually made it to Houston, and during a chance meeting and subsequent casual conversation about the both of us growing up on farms, he mentioned in passing the name of his hometown. Having myself come from near a place called Kalamazoo, I was also used to meeting people who didn't believe there really was such a place, and I had to confess to him that I too had doubted the name of his hometown. Still, we quickly got past that, I surprised him with my ability to recite the word without prompting, and I enjoyed our conversation far more than if I had just met a lady named Sue who really did sell seashells by the seashore.

I chalk this up as another example of my theory that there are wonderful unseen things --and people-- all around us. Take the time to find some of them and it just might make your day.

86 year old man earns university diploma

2009-11-03T09:20:03-06:00

The Turkish newspaper Today's Zaman reported today about Mr Halis Beyhanoğlu, who graduated from elementary school in 1938 and just received his second university diploma in September at the age of 86. After being a civil servant for most of his life, he finally received a degree in public adminstration, so he now apparently has the choice of returning to work as the country's oldest bureaucrat, or staying in school as the oldest grad student. He says he wants to be a lecturer someday, so we wish him well (link).

This reminds me of a story a few years ago about an 84-year-old man who enrolled in first grade in Kenya as soon as the country began to provide free universal education, unashamed to sit among six-year-olds so that he might gain what had been deprived for so long. (click here for the rest of that story).

Both stories impact me for the brazenness of these gentlemen to pursue learning beyond society's limits of propriety. A couple years ago I shared on this blog the quote of a woman in her 90s who had not been so brazen: "If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken up the violin at 60. I'd have been playing for almost 40 years by now."

We --that is, I-- forgo so many endeavors because we are unaware of what is within us, how much endurance we carry, and the power of the victory over society's often silly ideas. So today I remind myself to pick up once again the aspirations that were within me and rekindle them, even if it is with the tiniest of sparks. So what if I'm past 50? Just think where I'll be in 40 years!

Today is Information Overload Awareness Day

2009-08-12T07:17:00-05:00

August 12, 2009 has been declared the first Information Overload Awareness Day. In honor of the day, I will not provide you with any information.

Oops, that was a bit of information, wasn't it? Sorry.

Here's the link: Information Overload Awareness Day

The blog evolves

2009-08-03T22:37:09-05:00

I started this blog while I was working full time in a school in Ankara, but now that I've been away from Turkey for a year and went for nearly as long without updating this blog, it's time to make some external changes that reflect internal changes. My previous context kept me thinking mostly on the relationship between knowledge, learning, technology and culture within the confines of school. Since then, I've turned my thinking more to how people -and myself in particular- learn or don't learn, school or no school.

So "education" has been removed from the title of this blog. I still think of Education (with a capital "E") as one of the most important institutions of society, but my own thoughts now go in other directions enough to make Tryangulation more inclusive. I've tried to express this in more detail in the rewritten About me page which, by the way, is still a draft. Hey, if I'm changing, why shouldn't my About me page be in flux as well?

While at work fixing up my About me page, I spent most of Sunday learning how to add a couple other features to the blog. You might notice the new navigation bar under the banner. That's the row of links that say Try what?, About me, and so on. When I first added the navigation bar I got a row of very unimpressive plain text links, while I was hoping for something a little more visually appealing.

I kept hunting around the Typepad help files, and learned another cool html trick for using images as links to html pages. That means that, for example, the Find me link above is actually a graphic that works as a link. It took some time and frustration, but I won out and now have <img src="http:\\url"> in my little blogger toolkit. I then had to try creating graphics with the right look, which involved another hour or so of trial and error (learning some new functions in my graphics editor), reformatting the blog design to test the new graphics, then going back to the drawing board.

I'm still not sure it's what I want, but at least the font matches the banner, and the horizontal spacing doesn't look too bad. This is all part of the process called "fail forward." A bit of knowledge that had eluded me and even intimidated me a little, after many small failures and victories, is now mine.

And that's what this blog is about.

A license to teach

2009-07-29T08:50:06-05:00

Ta dah! By virtue of my credentials from Michigan (from 1978, no less) I just got my Texas Educator Certificate from the State Board for Educator Certification, so that I can now legally impart my knowledge of Spanish to unsuspecting Texas teenagers. In consideration of the SBEC's legitimization of my competence, I will refrain today from any thoughts on Ivan Illich or John Taylor Gatto.

Just today.

Houstonopathy

2009-07-26T14:58:17-05:00

This is my latest entry in a new Flickr photo set of funny shots taken with my phone while driving around Houston.

I noticed this next door to the very successful Vietnamese noodle shop where we had lunch today. The door to the Pollo Bravo says "KG Grill & Subs" and the parking sign says "Philly Connection Parking Only." The windows are papered over, but it's impossible to tell who went under first. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Additional photo caption suggestions are welcome. Click here for the rest of the growing Houstonopathy collection.