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.

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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 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.

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