Ferragosto:

          ~  A Mediterranean Breath in the Heart of The Bronx

E-Verify as a Solution to Illegal Immigration?

 In an effort to strengthen internal enforcement of the visitor's laws, the U.S. Congress set in march a voluntary internet-based program created in 1997, which allows an employer electronically verify the employment eligibility of a potential worker for hire. Inaccurate databases depriving lawful workers of employment and discrimination against workers by employers in an already weakened economy has opened the debate whether the Pilot/E-Verify is a factual solution to illegal immigration in the U.S. deepening the gap of intolerance between illegal immigrant and legitimate citizen workers.

Entities and individuals as US lawful employers and employees, The Senate of the U.S. Congress, Citizenship and Immgrtn Srvcs, Chamber Of Commerce, federal contractors, and regulators as The department Of Homeland Security and The Social Security Administration among others work on defining how 7 to 20 millions of labor force U.S. illegal immigrants law offenders , supported by national labor groups and unions, commerce associations, technology experts, scholars from conservative think tanks, due process and constitutional rights advocates, faith-based and social justice organizations plus, (please notice) foreign born U.S. citizens, eligible U.S. citizens banned by the system errors and its poorly trained users which oppose the failed implemented system, would be placed next in the stressed U.S. economy.

Immigrants have been the potential of the U.S. since its foundation, “America is America because of its immigrants. It’s not just a mantra, I genuinely believe it. I have to. I’m an immigrant myself” says the former director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service Emilio Gonzalez. The importance of knowing and identifying the different types of immigrants that the U.S is dealing to day is a must do if the Congress wants to get near to a feasible solution to the continued illegal filtering. Studying general lines of the actual immigrant profile we found that, contrary to a general consensus, granting citizenship it does not seem to be the obvious answer any more. The majority of U.S. illegal immigrants proceeding from Central and South America desire to go back to their homeland. “No one wishes to be far from their families” says a woman citizen from Michoacan, Mexico who, like many others whose family members traveled to U.S. looking for better opportunities to build their house and support them economically are shown in the documentaries “The Other Side Of Immigration” by Roy Germano and “The Other Side” by Journeymanpictures leaving kilometers of once cultivated and now abandoned barren lands as a question mark towards the future. “To put it in perspective, we have more illegal immigrants in the U.S. than the population of Ecuador, or the population of Belgium. You can’t throw these people out, but there again you can’t let their illegal action be a benefit. I used to have long chats with immigrant rights groups. They would talk about path to citizenship, but I would talk to the actual immigrants themselves, and they would tell you, ‘Hey we don’t want to be citizens, we just want to be able to come here and work and not have to be looking over our shoulder for the police.’ What you found was that disconnect.” continues Emilio Gonzalez.

One of the ways that the immigrant and the US government can be both favored cooperating positively to the actual US economy came to mind through an anonymous comment written in an article on this film in The Economist Magazine. Down the page, the commenter asserts: “…the average illegal pays a coyote something like $10k for the CHANCE of making it over the border and the risk of dying of thirst in the desert. Instead, the US could charge an entry fee of $15k (air-conditioned bus, plenty of water, 100% success rate) and a $5k/year health insurance fee to let the immigrant come over as a temp. worker. He would have an ID card, get a drivers license, and pay all taxes to boot. Any children born here to these temp. workers should NOT be US citizens. Immigration is a fact of life. We might as well set up a system to make it work for everyone.” Granting temporary status and a green flag to border crossing to immigrants who seek to work in the U.S., and the suspension of the $6m per mile that costs the security and maintenance of the U.S southwest border -according to Roy Romano’s documentary-, would generate the necessaries founds to solvent the expensive project proposed by the identity crisis writer Jim Harper. One of the tentative solutions against identity fraud proposed by Jim Harper at studying employment eligibility points to new developments that enable to use cryptography to allow these queries to be answered efficiently through the use of ideal biometric tracking systems like smart fingerprints readers or iris scanners which could be implemented as a new ID form to all U.S. citizens.

To incentive the federal employer to hire lawful workers and discourage the contract to improper documented immigrant, the U.S. government can offer financial facilities or rewards to encourage business as per say, lines of credit at a rather low interest or a tax reduction per eligible employee contracted.

***

In order to provide a better quality life to the immigrant who offers himself to the land in his/her search for better opportunities in the U.S., avoid social consequences learnt from past ignorance, the Congress is challenged to offer security and benefits while the foreign is under its soil in exchange to fair labor and taxes.

The Other Side of Immigration:

                                            ~  Necessary Evil Leaves Ghost Towns

        “A necessary evil” is how is been called the fact of emigration for the citizens of Michoacan, in the 1:44min. trailer of the documentary “The Other Side Of Immigration” by Roy Germano. Kilometers of once cultivated but now abandoned barren lands remain as a question towards the future of the dissected families of residents who are left behind. “No one wishes to be far from their families” says a woman like many others whose family members traveled to U.S. looking for better opportunities to build their house and sustain her economically. Many say that this state, as others in Mexico, functions thanks to the funds that is mailed from the U.S. to mainly females who wait for years for their husbands to go back home.

        In a Let’s Talk Live interview, the director states that this film was made with the intention of divulging detailed reasons of the emigration to the U.S. of civilians of this Mexican state in an effort of finding a solution.

     








    The ones who can cross the militarized border risking their lives through days in the barren region helped by coyotes, labor in Beverly Hills mostly in gardening, construction, gastronomy and housekeeping.

     Cristina Guerrero, community worker of the city of Guajaca remarks in the documentary “The Other Side”, the importance of the accelerated social problem emigration cause, the clash of culture when this relatives come back, and that in the long term, as if many young people leave, this cities will disappear.

      Communities in Los Angeles organize projects to generate funds and collects to funds to their home towns to survive by building, classrooms, churches, municipal plazas, well-being centers and houses who are destined to remain empty like in the Guajaca city.

  One of the comments written as an answer for the trailer in The Economist suggests; “the average illegal pays a coyote something like $10k for a CHANCE of making it over the border and the risk of dying of thirst in the desert. Instead, the USA could charge an entry fee of $15k (air-conditioned bus, plenty of water, 100% success rate) and a $5k/year well-being cover fee to let the immigrant come over as a temp. worker. He would have an ID, get a permit, and pay all taxes to boot. Any children born here to these temp. workers should NOT be US citizens. Diaspora is a fact of life. We might as well set up a system that function for everyone.”

 An article from 'The Guardian' about a campaign to stop Arizona's visitor's law says "I came to America from Mexico when I was five, crossing the border with my sister to join my parents who were undocumented workers. My father worked as a groom at the race track, in laundries and in construction. My mother was in the garment industry.

   "We were lucky – we managed to use a one-off amnesty to gain legalization in 1980 before Ronald Reagan shut off the opportunity in 1986. 

"When people ask me what all these undocumented immigrants are doing in this country, I reply: 'We are laboring for you, making this country desirable. We are looking after your children, making your houses beautiful, tending your gardens, so that you can thrive and raise your families. We are laboring for you.'"

 







 May be we should think in focusing more on a temporary residency kind of status for the ones that offer cheep hand labor in the States that also wishes to go back to their homeland to visit their families.

This, enjoying plenty of freedom and rights.

***

No Fence Would Keep a Determined Immigrant

                                                                                                                                                                                           
  The actual fencing technology that demarks the limit between the U.S. and Northern Mexico covering only the third of the most manageable border goes along 600 mile-plus stretch between San Diego and Brownsville, Tex. and it cost $2.4 billion to build and will cost an extra $6.5 billion in upkeep across two decades. The project is running seven years behind, and billions of dollars ahead since the Bush administration. Investigators concluded that there’s no good way of estimate the effectiveness of the fence since the innovative have already learned to breach it with cutters, torches and ladders.

The Border Patrol's Budget has raised in the latest years

    Nothing less, the native Mexican citizen deeply believes that the states of Alta California, New Mexico and Texas, which ownership ceded after the 1847 war, has been taken away from them long time ago, so the passing by the border and systematic filtering through the years would mean to them that they know their own land because it intimately belongs to them.

     With more than 225 million crossings annually through Southwest border stations, Mr. Cornelius co-director of a center on migration at the University of California, said in a recent study on federal human-trafficking “close scrutiny of this massive flow is impossible.”

   The particular ultimate character in the scene is the Minuteman Border Patrol for hire to watch any fence maneuvers. The Minuteman; “a solitary man on a hill” with hat on, dog and pistol, custodies the border saying patriotically that he cares about his land's interests from “people who has no love for the country”. He carries an Obama Bin Laden picture under a “wanted” sign at the more old western cowboy style talking as if Mexicans were a serious threat for national security.

    Are not ideologies and interest confused in all this border crossing issue? Or is still ignorance, in spite of the latest technological paraphernalia what keep us, humans, miles apart?

***

    In the other hand, Calais, France, authorities dismantled a camp for undocumented migrants outside the English Channel port in an effort to crack down on the smuggling networks that assist them, rounding up almost 300 Afghans, Pakistanis who had gathered there for years in the hope of making clandestine journeys across the 22 miles of water to Britain (attractive because of its large communities of Africans and South Asians and its underground economy). 

The French immigration minister, Eric Besson, defended the operation “This is not a humanitarian camp,” he said. “It’s a base for human traffickers.” “The operation in Calais won’t stop departures from Kabul,” he added. “The smugglers will find other routes that are more complex and more dangerous.” Many said that they had fled conflicts in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Pakistan and Iran, and that they had nowhere else to go. Moustafa Tcharminian, a 38-year-old from Tehran, “The smugglers are in love with money,” he said. “They will keep sending people and lying to them, telling them to go.” The EU estimates that 500,000 people cross its borders without papers each year.

***

   In immigration matters it’s crucial to know the immigrant’s background to find out his most intimate interests. A follow up through the first years in the new country giving him the freedom, the civil rights and the benefits to motion around is important for his development into the community.

     In a research on Mexican laborers, Nina Berstein states that the tens of thousands of Mexicans who labored in the cotton fields in the Southwest under the Bracero program, were never a threat to national security; there "never was a more docile animal in the world than the Mexican”. Nearly every immigrant group has been caught at that crossroads for a time, wanted for work but unwelcome as citizens, especially when the economy slumps. But Mexicans have been summoned and sent back in cycles for four generations, repeatedly losing the ground they had gained. As one rancher quoted in Mr. Zolberg's book remarked to a Mexican hand: "When we want you, we'll call you; when we don't — git.". 

Today, the nature of the deal can no longer be disguised, said Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, co-director of Immigration Studies at NYU "It's a bad-faith pact," he said. "We can't have it both ways — an economy that's addicted to immigrant labor, but that's not ready to pay the cost."

“Turning immigrants into Americans is a mission tied intimately to this country’s self-interest and identity, if not its very soul” says a NY Times source on a commitment of citizenship article.

***

    The border crossing issue has not been resolved yet because it has a long history of manipulation according to the calling of the times and this has not stopped the determined immigrant to risk his life to cross it, in its search of a better life.

The Visitor:

                                                                    ~   Where Flutter our Hearts

     In the first half of the 20th century, people massively fled from European war miseries pursuing peace to a bloodless land where build their golden dreams; professionals, business men, illiterate, poor, sick and orphan embarked along on a “one-way trip”.  Their legacy is a proof of the more advanced perspective of living and willingness to become assimilated than the contemporaneous migrant: since they looked for integration and settling, they could pictured over a grassland plain the potential town where future generations would live. From Quebec to Tierra Del Fuego settled their home in the middle of nowhere and full of hope burned their ships ashore. It  never occurred to them to go back to the land they left behind.

       Migration waves of skeptical of their own government people looking for a better quality life and monetary opportunities that could be harvested in their own life period increasingly happen all around the world. The US and EU are among the most popular destinations propelled perhaps by the side effects of the media.

       Migrations of the modern world system have produced the ethnic and racial diversity that paved the way for multicultural claims; “To a certain degree, liberal states today are necessarily multicultural” states Christian Joppke in his studies on multiculturalism and immigration, adding that Third-World-based immigration waves of the postwar period work as a main force of liberation in the way of multiculturalism.

       Integration or “assimilation”, whose literal meaning is “making alike”, is no longer plausible in contemporary migrations due to a strong disinclination on the part of migrants to abandon national loyalties. Advanced transportation and communication technologies are responsible for migration to become no longer “one-way trips”, which Tzvetan Todorov considered the basis of the classic migrant’s willingness to become “assimilated”. “Even if a physical departure is postponed or abandoned, symbolic returns are plentiful and permanent up to a point where even the sense of having departed at all is lost”, he said.

       Without long-takes and virtuoso camera movements, The Visitor, portraits just one of the hundred of stories of an illegal immigrant who is violently being deported in the most straight, clean cut and simple way.

        Tarek, an immigrant from Syria, has spent years in the US waiting for his political asylum to be accepted. What is unknown to him is that this petition was denied long ago and his mother Mouna, from the old generation if immigrants who bitterly left Syria with no intentions to return, has hidden the deportation letter since he was young. He and his partner Zainab, an immigrant from Senegal, are being illicitly rented the NYCity residence of an aching widower and bored professor of economics whom, at the time of visiting the city, gets surprised to find them sheltering in his property. Out of pity, the proprietor Walter Vale, decides to temporarily host them.

       Palestinian actress Hiam Abbas, who play the role of Mouna, replied in an interview that The Visitor was mainly a story about cultural exchanges. In effect, while the egoistical, fictitious and lifeless external world of Walter Vale stresses out recalling a lost world attempting vainly to master the piano, brightens up when Tarek introduces him the djembe and when getting puzzled in describing the colorful and intricate crafts that Zainab makes for a living. Walter soon attends Tarek’s performances and awkwardly joins the drum circle at Union Square until he’s unfoundedly detained, arrested, shortly held in a detention center and ultimately deported to Syria by US immigration agents. As Tarek ceased calling, his mother Mouna comes from Chicago to voluntarily fly back to Syria after him.
        And what is left from all these psychotic moves other than the djembe at the professor’s apartment? Walter Vale’s pretending life is much like the city itself; cold structured still compassionately sheltering any tenacious passing byes, a life of pretensions, longing on a brilliant past and out of touch with his own emotions, yet actively searching for the proper medium where to canalize its soul material. One of the significant scenes where he unleashes his raw emotions is in the detention center where he is suddenly told that Tarek has been ‘removed’ or deported and no information was available on the matter. “You can’t do this to people, he had a life!” he yells to the agent, and one recalls Mouna when earlier referred to the system resentfully saying “It’s just like Syria”. His impotency against a cruel system jumps out of the screen and possesses the spectator way through the end of the film. No djembe rhythm softens it.

     Tarek, like all immigrant in love with what to come, brings music, new possibilities and flavors with a smile full of hope in which sustains the fragile stability and the move of the world that would be shattered in the detention center.

     Tarek, with no concrete memories of his homeland, never planned going back to Syria and, perhaps because of his illegal condition, never thought about join the mass work force of the US in any way, instead, while being in love with what he brings, his heart was settled in the place where he born. He looks for a place where his imported values be accepted, rather than for his social and cultural differences be assimilated in a way that after melted, faded away and ultimately extinguished.

      The vast majority of the to-day immigrant is not interested in citizenship or any bureaucratic matter; according to Emilio Gonzalez former Director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. Seeking for a temporary but concrete employment that enables them to sustain their family left behind, they travel with a pocket full of dreams and a promise to come back. But U.S. Immigration Services is interested in naturalizing the prospective voter which heart doesn't fly away.

      Many in the world are like Tarek; after their home country has been dismantled and exposed to the eyes of the world by the war against the Taliban, immigrant orphan Afghans have a difficult time at trying to anonymously be part of the society in order to build a life in the EU. They're too young to think about sponsoring or even supporting the surviving relatives left behind. Instead, they sleep alone on street benches of the City Of Lights dreaming with becoming engineers.

        Others traveled with the promise of a happy family reunion, but between eastern dreams and western life, they’ve got lost in translation, and cast down in on one of the crowdest cities of the world, age in isolation, according to Patricia L. Brown’s article “Nobody To Talk To” for the NY Times. A happy family reunion is a too antiquated dream for the current Californian life-style in which some immigrants became too old to adapt.

         Their hearts surely don't fly anywhere close by.

***

Multiculturalism, Migration & Customizing National Identities.

   
   

      The French national identity theme that was much of the formula for Sarkozy's popularity which made him won the 2007 elections is brought on debate as to distract citizens from real issues as unemployment and rising budget deficit. Read it here 'Sarkozy returns to his political roots'. According to this article of The New York Times, Eric Besson, the minister of immigration and national identity, just opened three months debate for local government to define “what it means to be French”. National identity and immigration are high issues in actual France where the largest immigrant community is conformed by Muslims.

       What does significance bring the way you are in the community where you live? I think much of the major problem of the US immigration reform is close linked with identity; the meaning of your identity and its effects on the community where you live.

        We’re naturally inclined to be what life invites us to be and we fit in it as if in a mold; as Ortega Y Gasset states in “The Revolt of The Masses” to describe the ‘mass-man’. [To start with, we are what our world invites us to be, and the basic features of our soul are impressed upon it by the form of its surroundings as in a mould. Naturally, for our life is no other than our relations with the world around. The general aspect which it presents to us will form the general aspect of our own life] (p. 41) And this is valid also when we migrate; when you move your surrounding your different identity is questioned. It seems to be natural that part of your identity suffers shifts when changing communities, ‘A sort of survival’ I heard an American friend to say when her foreign roots got lost in the family generation because of society hostilities at the time. Undoubtedly changing cultures would alter much of what you are, if you don’t, you may have strong reasons to keep tied to your roots and live dissociated and isolated from your surrounding.

        For some communities of diasporic cultures changing identities is never in the agenda forming ‘clusters’ of cultures into the community, the national identity of the adopted community is put into question. When that sub-community grows, cultural differences and social need surface.

Can you be called to be someone whom you don’t represent with your identity? In other words, can you be called to be a citizen of a country which national hymn, laws, culture, history and basic things like this you do not know or reject to assimilate in spite of the years of living there?

    In this study about Cultural Pluralism and Partial Citizenship, Jeff Spinner-Halev, in charge of the Department of Political Science in University of North Carolina goes deep into the problem of multiculturalism and tries to respond to the questions if multiculturalism threatens citizenship. He distinguishes types of multiculturalism: -thick multiculturalism or cultural pluralism, which is given where “the advantage of a society where group membership is prior to citizenship is that groups have a reasonable chance of maintaining a robust version of their identity”. This cluster community seek state funds for group separation as for the state give them support, financial or otherwise, to further their own goals, deeply threaten citizenship since people are not interested in citizenship not in making the state a better place to live. “Even the term ‘fellow citizen’ may strike them as strange. What they have are fellow Jews, or fellow blacks, or fellow Muslims, or fellow Sikhs. Citizen, however, are not their fellows.” -Inclusive multiculturalism; the more typical form, are formed by minority groups pressing for inclusion into the dominant culture, they want to be able to retain some of traditional dress or type of recognition while serving their country. These claims are to ‘expand’ citizenship.

      The United States is a nation made of immigrants: being an immigrant is part of its national identity. The novelty is that the new immigrant is not interested in acquiring citizenship according to the former director of the INS (U.S. Citizenship and Naturalization Service) Emilio Gonzales in an interview for Poder Magazine. Furthermore, the new immigrant finds its own community settled there already, with which he/she identifies, for there is not such a need for adaptation which motivated the immigrant that founded the country.

    On the other hand, on Roxanne Lynn Doty's research about immigration, in "Immigration and National Identity: Constructing the Nation”, says that the identity of a nation is given by the state and is totally constructed. “The identity of a nation will be related to ‘tradition’ and to existing cultural practices, but the decisions as to what is relevant and how it should be used in establishing the national identity will rest with the state" she quotes from John Breuilly in ‘Nationalism and the State’.

       Then, state decisions are a must when giving shape to a national identity of a country.

An example of this could perfectly be when considering the custom of foot-binding (Oops! don't click here if you're too sensitive) that Chinese women practiced and which identified them with a sign of beauty for centuries until it was recently banned for the government. In her book “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” Lisa See describes its meaning as "Only through pain will you have beauty. Only through suffering will you have peace". This traditional practice of inflicting pain on children very much rooted into the Chinese cultural life ceased to be a symbol of beauty when suddenly the government prohibited its procedure.

      Another example of administrations influencing national identities I believe is clearly confirmed in the actual configuration of Algerian families where the huge communication gap existing between one single generation talks tons about citizens being consistently manipulated by the government of turn, this driven by the educative system.

It begins with occupation and schools designed to train people for a French-run system and the subsequent forced state-sponsored-Arabization after the independence where Egyptian teachers were hired because of a lack of local Arabic educators “not realizing, officials say now, that many of those teachers had extreme religious view and that they helped plant the seeds of radicalism that would later flourish in a school system where Arabization became interchangeable with Islamization” says the article "In Algeria, a Tug of War for Young Minds" of the New York Times.

Because of government management on school system, now Algerian families find few things in common at home; the older generation, trained under French rule, filling out crossword puzzles can’t help their children with their homework because their Arab is poor. Instead, influenced by the current school regime, girls wear velour pants and tops and a large scarf pinned beneath their chin. “Algeria’s young men leave school because there is no longer any connection between education and employment, school officials said. The schools raise them to be religious, but do not teach them skills needed to get a job (...) We say that Algeria’s schools have trained monsters (…) In Algeria your sense of identity often depends on when you went to school" states the source.

    The film "The Battle of Algiers" by Gillo Pontecorvo, which vibrantly documents the struggles for the Algerian independence of 132 years of the French colonial rule through terrorist practices, it underling talks also about struggles of a surviving yet latent native identity.

Pontecorvo portrayed one of the most vile yet desolated ways of regaining freedom through violence, racial intolerance and the abuse of trust.

      Here, purposely, Algerian women change their “identity” by changing their physical aspect westernizing their clothing style, dyeing their hair etc. so they could have free access to the seemingly French occupied region of the city, through the checking points, for then, dynamitize French-habitué centers such as airports and cafes. In This scene, innocence is depicted by the rhythm of Cha-cha-cha, the charm of adolescents and toddlers and the presence of Coca-Cola, shakes and ice creams.

Click here for a full description of how this is accomplished in an 8min film sequence.
You don’t need to know Arab nor French language to understand that the three Algerian women after giving up their veils and changing their identities are being designated for the-to-be dynamited places. That by their new aspect are allowed accessibility to the Parisian city where we notice drastic contrasts between architecture and street customs of both civilizations. As for example, one of the hair dyed Arab women is asked by a French soldier if she’s heading for the beach! An unthinkable activity for the Arab world. And again, the presence of fear on the gesture of the intruder; in this case the Algerians are not immigrants in their own land, but they feel like that in the French occupied part.

      "Now the government is urgently trying to re-engineer Algerian identity, changing the curriculum to wrest momentum from the Islamists, provide its youth with more employable skills, and combat the terrorism it fears schools have inadvertently encouraged.” concludes the NY Times article.

***

       Customizing national identities by states breaks family unity and the common sense of past.

Concerning human integration and national identity, I'd say that freedom is precious but opaque when deduced from the freedom of others.

Dardenne's, Jacob Riis & Lewis Hine:

 ~ Dens of Death,  
                                   Birds of Prey                          

                                                              &   Loving Darkness 

                                                                                                   Better than Life

     As I was looking for a book, I found a documented recollection of realities of immigrants’ life in the late nineteenth-century in New York City portrayed by the former police reporter and photographer Jacob Riis.

    How bold I’d said if I haven’t learnt that he was raised among these people, now objects of his work. As I was going through the pages, exploring through the deploring working and living conditions of “How The Other Half Lives”, I kept assuring myself if there was any place in the world where they could have came from where they may possibly experienced such precarious living conditions as these, yet chosen by their own will.

 

     Perhaps, some of the closest descriptive words that can alive these muted scenes could be these of Gregory Christiano on a research about urbanography for The New York Daily Tribune of about the same time and place:

 “Among the places the most crowded in proportion to their actual size, the worst ventilated, and whose mortality is the greatest at all times, are those subterranean abodes which constitute the subject of our remarks, and which we have denominated – for want of a more appropriate term – Dens, Dens of Death; the term “cellar” not 
                                                   conveying a proper idea of the place when used as a residence. [“CELLAR – A room under a house, used as a repository for provision” Webster]. These dens, or man-made caves of the earth, like the natural caves in former times in Africa, often send forth bands of murderers, who live by thieving alone; and the modern Troglodytes, like their prototypes, after a successful expedition, return to their dark recesses to divide their spoil and plan a new scheme of depredation.

Darkness, therefore, would appear to have been from the earliest times one of exciting causes of crime, and our modern policemen see it is so now. We heard a worthy Alderman once say that plenty of gaslight in the streets would go far to exterminate wickedness of all kinds. Whether darkness be a cause of crime or not, it is certain that murderers, thieves, etc. “love darkness better than light,” and that there is more propriety of deportment found in a good, honest abode above-ground, fully open to the light of day, than in dark under-ground residences and caverns, which in a state of nature are inhabited only by beasts of prey.

But we have not undertaken to consider the relative state of morals of Subterraneans and of the “Upper Ten,” such as live on the surface of the earth; we shall, therefore, pass to the subject of the consideration of the physical effects of living in these damp and stifling abodes of darkness.”

     Isn't it described here what a dungeon is, so to speak?.

     And about decease in dens he adds; “These places are always damp, and are thus a continued source of various inflammatory diseases; indeed the occupants of them are always sick in a never-ending rotation, and demands for medical services are more frequent by the inhabitants of dens, than by such as live on the surface, in proportion to their number. Sickness among the poor is always great and in the damp and badly ventilated abodes we are considering, is more protracted, beside being more fatal, than above ground, so that if life is prolonged it is too frequently an existence of helpless misery.”

   Well, his complete research is rich and exciting but I was moved to ask me more and more the now most obvious question; what kept this immigrant people alive? And I strongly wished someone to enlightened me.

 Another series of photographs, of a more recognizable type of living, about the European immigrant arriving at Elli’s Island and the hardships of living in slum buildings in America of about the same time were portrayed by Lewis Hine of a slight up level on social class; the tenement. All scenes are reminiscent of impressionist paintings as "Boy picking Cotton” and “Shucking Oysters” from the county life are heartbreaking; he still finds beauty in the poor “with hope”.

     Extreme poverty or such a strong need that compels us to move to unfamiliar places that forces us to fight against of all kind of hostilities in order to pursue our dreams can be understood. 

What I think it’s difficult to understand is the acceptance of the miserable soul state that such eager pursuing can often leads us.

In a sense, I think this is exactly what the Dardenne brothers intended to point out when they wrote the Cannes awarded best screenplay 2008 for their latest film Lorna's Silence in Italy better translated to "Lorna's Marriage".   There, gangsters paid to Belgian drug addict Claudy to marry the immigrant Albanian Lorna so she can become an EU citizen for then later divorce him to marry a Russian mobster to become also an EU citizen, for then she can divorce him to marry his Albanian truck driver boyfriend and live for ever after in the for-to-buy snack shop in the EU. End.

It sounds simple and a very good all-winners plan so far. Characters have its own good dream for a better life, they diplomatically agreed and coolly planed to use and sell each other for their own benefit, there’s collecting money out of these playing-with-the-law transactions.

   Fair enough. But well, things get messed up in spite of hardening hearts, I guess, because life wasn’t designed to be lived in a so selfish fashion.

        So, while waiting for the divorce letter, the minute that Lorna gets to her living place she closes every window and lacks herself in her bedroom. Claudy, who looks more like a peaceful predator or like any of the men portrayed in the afored mentioned book sick in a never-ending rotation helpless misery, burning his money-share in drugs, starves for attention and care. Attempting to kick the drug habit he becomes a problem when reaches an edging desperate need. It’s not that he grew affection for her or anything but it’s more that she has what he lacks; a plan, hope, that freshness when she passes by, so healthy and desirable, so alive... and at the same time so selfish, so careless, unsociable and inhuman that at some point you may feel you hate her. She tries to stick to the plan and “helping” is out of the contract (he received €5000 for marry her and will receive the double to divorce her). That will be all.

     In order to speed up the divorce she injures herself to make the case as a violence one.

They live in hell, yes they live in a den. Oh, but theirs it’s a clean 2009 den where minimal furniture and white washed naked walls has nothing to say but that its tenants are not building a home there. Theirs is and interior den where they can’t get out. They force to live a miserable life, victims of themselves. All characters will live a life when they reach their dreams, meanwhile they're just wrecked people that wait to get there.

     Then, out of pity, Lorna offers her help and happens what never should had happened, as expectable.  Lorna's associates kill Claudy with an overdose, not even music for his mourning is heard in the film (although he was very attached to his disc-man). Now gangsters walk in the apartment (“returning to their dark recesses to divide their spoil and plan a new scheme of depredation”?) as if they were owning Lorna’s life and destiny, and going over the diseased’s belongings like vultures on carrion split his personal effects.

        So now, what was the next step? Oh yes... the Russian.
Lorna now in a round table with the gangsters and the Russian hears the instruction for the “meeting settling” arrangements with payed witnesses and everything. But now is Lorna the one who became a problem; out of guilt she believes is pregnant (in spite of negative tests), and at attempting to find out whether the Russian would accept her in this condition or not, he cancels the deal. Furious gangsters and boyfriend redirect Lorna’s money deal back to each other and return her automatically to her homeland Albania. Fugitive, she lives lost, insane and isolated in the woods.

The end.

      Now, I have a question: Where did the plan-for-the-better get spoiled? Wasn't it when the “being human” factor interfered in the equation? What an end, like many immigrants with so good desires that in the way got lost in a maze of selfish wishes for fulfillment. Their inhuman choices show that indeed they loved darkness better than life.

***

        Of course that it's but our dreams what keep us alive under the most unbearable conditions.

But immigrant or not, selfishness is undoubtedly labyrinthic for the human mind.