409 Silly Immigration Details

Facts to complicate your consideration

Several years back when I was thinking about ISIS and who may or may not be crossing the border, I was still mixing it up with the proto-woke folks in my friends list. My argument went something like this: If you care so much about the fate of ‘Native Americans’ why do you accept that they have a different kind of citizenship than you?

I don’t remember the answers, I just remember that they weren’t coherent, but I’m rather certain that I went down various rabbit holes, like how many died at Wounded Knee, the Trail of Tears and whataboutisms of the vicious battles between tribes as well as slavery and squaw trafficking.

What I was trying crudely to get to was some simplification of the matters of equal rights in a shakeup of the conditions under which any and everyone had a great chance to become equal under the law with the same legal standing as you and me, with some minor provisios. I’m doing this with the clear understanding that Indians I have been working with (the kind from Chennai) waited for a decade to get US citizenship. In the air at the time were proposals for military service to be a fast track.

So in service to this line of reasoning I searched the State Department website to find out how many classes of provisional citizenship the US offered. I was expecting maybe 10 or at the outside perhaps 25. Yeah. I didn’t bury the lede this time friends.

It get’s very very specific, especially for countries like Cuba, Armenia, Haiti and dozens of other cutouts.

I have put the entire list in Github. I haven’t looked in years but I have no reason to believe these classes and codes have changed. I leave that as an exercise for your and your arguments on immigration. Oh yeah, and this guy.

By the way, this is the same kind of argument I have about the developing world’s contribution anthropocentric warming. Your million green cars is just another gumball. Just saying, mathematically.