America, the Nincompoop

So a few years back, a friend of mine married this Irish guy: claddagh ring with emerald, Celtic music, bottles clanking cheers. Result: a child and the constant presence, outside working hours, in her lovely home and environs of a man cracking good jokes, beer in hand, clad generally in a Liverpool football jersey. This being America, the process of turning her Irishman from a conditional permanent resident into a full-on permanent resident moved at glacial pace. Then it screeched to a halt: omigod! Horrors! At some point back in the mists of time--Jurassic era?--in Ireland, her husband helped some friends steal a car. Not carjacking, just car theft. He was 19 at the time. Since then, his life path has been unblemished.

But this being America, we're sending him home. Out ya go, Paddy! Despite the fact you've done nothing wrong in the many years since that one youthful mistake, we view such mistakes as proof that you don't have the moral character we require of immigrants. We're a very moral country, y'know. We're the supermoral superpower. G.W. Bush can risk people's lives by driving drunk and we'll install him in the White House, but you, Paddy, are out of luck: when it comes to our immigration laws, we don't see much difference between someone who did one stupid thing in the 1980s and someone who's been raping strangers on a weekly basis since the day they got off the plane.

So anyway, she's going with him. Moving to Ireland. The only other option is for them to spend roughly $6000 for their lawyer to attempt to persuade the feds that his departure would represent an "extreme hardship." You would think that having two American citizens permanently deprived of their husband/father is a pretty extreme hardship, but no. That's just your everyday garden-variety deportation-related hardship, and family values be damned (as they generally are once an election is over). Spending $6000 for a very small chance of winning and a very large chance of having to up sticks and move to Ireland $6000 further in the hole is a risk they can't afford to take.

Of course, it's not like our immigration folks have more important things to do in this day and age. Great use of resources, guys! Next month, there will be a bonus for the USCIS official who initiates the most deportation proceedings against apolitical, gainfully employed European nationals with a single petty crime in their past: these people may be the greatest threat America has ever faced.

That's the latest from the Land of the Free and the Home of... ah, forget it.