INS, ACLU
Most of you probably know by now that the INS recently detained a large number of people who showed up to fulfill the new Federal requirement that non-US-citizens from certain countries register with the INS.
There's a BBC article about this, and a Philadelphia Inquirer article, and it went out on the AP, but (I gather) it took a while to get much mainstream news attention in the US.
Fortunately, we don't seem to be heading for concentration camps for Arabs anytime soon. New York Times followup says:
An I.N.S. official in California told family members and immigration lawyers that virtually all of those still held would be released in the next 24 hours, with instructions to report back in 30 to 60 days to complete the registration process, lawyers said.
It's unclear to me from that article what happens to people when they return to complete the registration process, but it looks to me like the detainments were largely due to the INS being overwhelmed by more people showing up to register than they expected.
Which on the one hand suggests that there's no government conspiracy here to round up the furriners; but on the other hand also suggests that most of the people detained were detained for bureaucratic reasons rather than because they were Criminal Terrorists Out To Destroy Our Freedom and/or Evil Visa Violators Who Must Be Deported Instantly. (A couple of people I know had suggested that the detainment was too bad, but was necessary since those people detained had broken the law and must be removed from our country.)
Here's another interesting perspective on the situation: an Oblomovka entry "On following the rules," about the travails of a college-educated British journalist attempting to acquire permanent-resident status in the US:
I can honestly say it's been the most impenetrably complex bureaucratic procedure I have been involved with in my life. If my livelihood and my residency in this country depended on it, I'd be terrified. [. . . But] I'm lucky [. . .] My immigration attorney says my case is "relatively straightforward".
A compelling and well-written piece. It ends with this:
Anyway, I'm buying myself a Christmas present. I'm joining the ACLU.
(And then a little further discussion.) I've been kind of avoiding the ACLU for a while, ever since they sent me a mailing a few years back that included the phrase "without eternal vigilance, it could happen here" (which I think was the motto of the Vigilance committees, which kind of left a bad taste in my mouth—and regardless, was blatant scaremongering to increase membership), but I think it's about time I joined up. They do an awful lot of good work. I followed the link and sent them a credit-card donation; it took under 2 minutes.