As some of you may know, I’m in a job that requires me to read about five newspapers a day to stay conversant with current events. While I was checking the BBC News site the other day, I came upon this:
I of course was curious (well, appalled, mainly) about this story, so I checked the NY Times and Washington Post online editions.
The Times had a small article buried in the Nation section about the protest, then the Post had this today:
But my understanding is that those being arrested are those who have committed some immigration offense like overstaying a visa or some such. Given that fact it’s going to be hard to work up a lot of public outrage over the incident. It’s a non-starter as a story.
Whether the larger issue of a new registration program for specific groups of foreign nationals is a worthy story is one only the public can decide. Frequently the stories that get traction surprise even the newsies (trust me on this one).
There was indeed a much bigger deal in non-U.S. new sources.
I was surprised that there was so little coverage in North America, but as Jonathan pointed out a lot of it has to do with bureacratic paper work (Visas that were not properly renewed etc.) It’s usually ugly paperwork.
I hope people keep an eye on it though. Just in case…
Take a look at some of the stuff in the current GD thread (sorry, I can’t link, my browser is misbehaving) titled something like "Why should I not be disgusted with my government?). If some kind soul could link for me, I’d be very grateful.
In many cases, these are very minor violations, such as failure to notify the INS of moving within 10 days, a requirements that’s been on the books since WWII, but hasn’t been enforced in several decades. The immigration law firm I work for had 2 clients arrested and put in deportation proceedings this week for failure to register, althoughthey were OUT OF THE FRIGGIN’ COUNTRY during the registration period and had no other violations!
Frankly, right now INS has literally millions of unadjudicated applications on file at any given moment, and many, many thousands of unrecorded address changes sittiing in mailrooms around the country, because they lack the manpower to process/enter them. I haven’t seen any stats (and the feds sure aren’t releasiing any right now) on how many people have been registered and/or detained, let alone the reasons why they were detained, but I’d wager a good chunk of those detained are out of status because the INS filings that would put them in status (a marriage-based green card application, for example) take way too long (2+ years in some cases) to be processed.
This is insane. I’m terrified to speculate why coverage has been so minimal.