Arrogance

An acquaintance of mine has a Brazilian au pair working for her.  I’m not sure what the arrangement is; but if I recall correctly, the young woman can stay here for two years while working as a maid with a fancy French name.  This particular “au pair” has a Brazilian boyfriend. 

This boyfriend happens to be an engineer with a job and family ties in Brazil.  He wanted to come visit her and applied for a tourist visa to do it.  He was denied. Twice. As usual the officials who denied his visa are assuming, based on nothing other than an over-inflated view of this country and a prejudicial one of all of South America, that he will want to stay here illegally. They claim he has no ties to Brazil.
Get real America!  He has a job and he has a family.  If you are an American, that does constitute as ties; but if not, it doesn't. This is a double standard born of arrogance.

Brazil is one of the economies that is actually growing in this recession we started with our failed economic policies and policing.  The boy has a job, and a skilled one, in Brazil.   Why on earth would he want to come here where there are no jobs?  And to be an illegal immigrant to boot?!   And god forbid this skilled young man tries to immigrate here legally; it would be no easier.  Our policies make it no easier for skilled individuals to move here than it makes it for the "great unwashed" we seem so scared of, and that still pour into this country like water through a sieve no matter how many bigoted and misguided policies we put into place.  They keep coming precisely because we like hiring them to do the hard and dirty labor we've long ago gotten too lazy to do well ourselves.

We need more engineers, and every year we produce fewer and fewer on account of the terrible state of our precollege education and of the fact that our people, like all peoples of dying empires, have become just plain old fat, lazy and a little stupid.  Despite the need to revitalize our country by importing skilled labor, we still make it hard for people with skills to come in. 

Our current approach to immigration, like so many things in our government, is totally dysfunctional.  Ours are the misdirected policies of an arrogant country that long ago ceased to have anything to be arrogant about.