NYUorker

Immigration, Redux

2007-08-23T22:44:00.000-04:00

There are new rules in New Jersey when it comes to arresting illegal immigrants.

The state Attorney General issued a directive Tuesday requiring any police officer who arrests someone on felony or drunk driving charges, and thinks the arrestee might be an illegal immigrant, to check the arrestee's immigration status. If it looks like the arrestee is undocumented, the officer will then report it to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The likely outcome is that after the immigrant's sentence is over -- or if they are found innocent -- they will be deported. That's right, it doesn't matter whether or not they are found guilty.

And it's up to the officer to decide who is suspiciously undocumented-looking.

I'll have a story about it in tomorrow's Jersey Journal.

These rules are almost directly the result of all the buzz surrounding the revelation that Jose Carranza, one of the suspects implicated in the deaths of three Newark college students and the near-killing of a fourth on Aug. 4, was not only an illegal immigrant but was also out on bail pending trial after he was charged with the repeated rape of a young girl.

Recidivism among illegal immigrants will be zero, the reasoning goes, if they are deported after their first felonies.

You can read the actual directive from state Attorney General Anne Milgram here.

2007-08-20T00:54:00.000-04:00

Let's not talk about real problems: From A Powerful Idea

2007-08-14T23:13:00.000-04:00

On my public policy/editorial blog, A Powerful Idea, I just wrote a post on the aftermath of the brutal murders of three college students in a Newark parking lot on Aug. 4.

You should care because over here in New Jersey, people are starting to make their deaths a vehicle for what will likely become draconian and misguided immigration policy. You see, several of the suspected killers were immigrants, and some were not here legally. However, at least one lived in this country since he was nine. A link to a Star-Ledger story profiling the suspects is on my Web site.

That the 25-year-old suspect has lived in this country for 15 years would make him a product of our fucked-up system, not an international one. Yes he is an immigrant, and yes the other suspects are too, some of them illegal. But they grew up here and are a product of our system. Illegal immigrants are not the cause of the problem. Illegal immigration and the circumstances of the poor in America, on the other hand, are. That's the short version and the gist of my blog post.

What I don't say in my blog is that in another Star-Ledger column, columnist Paul Mulshine supports the mayor of Morristown, New Jersey, in his push to make police in the state automatically act as agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

I know what you're thinking and the answer is yes -- that would mean every beat cop is also suddenly la migra when they want to be.

On the surface, this honestly isn't that bad an idea. Undocumented immigrants here should not be committing violent crime and we should not have to deal with them hurting us.

But headline-grabbing violent crime is thankfully much rarer than the stuff that goes unnoticed -- drug arrests, disorderly persons offenses, the kind of thing that puts you in county lockup for a couple of nights and sticks you with a heavy fine unless you can pay bail and beat the charges with a lawyer. How many people who can't afford to be in this country legally, much less live in a low-crime neighborhood, can do that?

Making police double as immigration cops and increasing the number of deportations might get criminals out of the country. But when did these immigrants who commit crimes become criminals? Was it before they entered the country, or after? And if they came here illegally, was it the necessity for illicit action that made them familiar with criminality?

My job puts me face to face with a lot of people, and some of them live unhappy and impoverished lives. Some people in those conditions smoke weed or do heroin or get drunk in public or yell at each other in public and some of them get caught. Some -- I would guess most -- can't make bail, of course, and so they go to county lockup until their court date. They are eventually released from lockup and return to their lives, poorer for the time wasted not working if they have jobs, the trauma and humiliation of imprisonment, and whatever penalties imposed on them for their behavior.

As a result of their imprisonment, some of the people I meet in those circumstances fear for their jobs, their housing situations, their family stability.

Their incarcerations hurt not only them but anyone who depends on them, and if someone is made even poorer by imprisonment, won't their chances of committing another crime only increase?

So the low-income world is already a precarious one. Throw a questionable residency status on top of that and consider what the consequences of imprisonment are. Sure, people shouldn't be committing crimes in the first place, but is it wise to punish a guy for ruining his own life by giving him a kick in the ass to help him down the road to oblivion?

Crime committed by illegal immigrants is not a matter of "them" doing violence to "us." It is a failure of our social services and our society, just as is all crime. And it is quite likely that our American system of poverty and neglect manufactured the criminality in the first place.

End of story.

I run the A Powerful Idea blog and currently work in media in New Jersey. Fred invited me here some months ago. I am just making a return to blogging and recently restarted A Powerful Idea after a some-month hiatus (losing my entire archive in the process), so my apologies for the belated first post. And, hello.

YearlyKos 2007 Cartoon

2007-08-05T02:37:00.000-04:00

I was just at YearlyKos this weekend in Chicago. For those not in the know, (here comes some political snobloggery), YearlyKos is a self-proclaimed speaker on behalf of the American people.

Here's my experience:

Pictures to come, maybe.

To whom it may concern

2007-08-03T06:09:00.000-04:00

Stop doing that silly-ass dance. You look ridiculous.

How do you kill a man locked in a room?

2007-08-01T10:50:00.000-04:00

A thin man lies half sprawled across a large wooden desk. He gently holds a pen. On the desk there are the man’s glasses, a photo album, and a piece of paper next to a stack of more paper. On the single page there is written:
I was born in 1939 in a small town outside Seattle, Washington. My father w-
The page ends in a long scrawled line.
Behind him, there is a bookcase. On his left there are three long windows each adorned with red velvet drapes and iron bars. To his right, there is a fireplace and above that a massive self portrait. If the man were alive, he would have seen in front of him two of the largest South Bay policemen breaking down his large wooden door. Until that moment, the office had been kept pristine.

“This is the General’s private study. He would come here to be alone. He only had one key made for this room.” The butler took a long pause and looked at the ground.
“Go on.” Detective May scribbled furiously.
“The last time I saw him was just last night, 9 hours ago. He checked the house as he always does… (sigh) as he always did. I was never allowed into the room.”
“Yeah, ok that’s all I need for now. Please wait outside. Thank you.”

May had come across scenes like this before. Usually the police don’t stick around too long for corpses without bullet holes, but this man was a government official. Theses cases always required full reports.
“Damn” he whispered under his breath. His pen had run out. “And now here comes that muscle bound idiot.”
Gregory Brig, Captain of the South Bay Police Department, strolled up to May.
“Looks like that old General finally died. Stupid old man, he started his biography too late!” Brig chuckled to himself.
“You are unbearable” May mumbled
“Shut up May. What did the doctor say about the General?”
May quickly flipped through his notebook. “The doctor said the General died ‘around 8 hours ago of a heart attack or some heart condition.’ He will check in the autopsy, but he is certain it was all ‘natural causes.’ I think he’s wrong”
“Uh-huh” Captain Brig had wandered to the window “It’s been a shitty winter, eh, May?”

May ignored the Captain and patted himself for another pen. Something was still bothering him. He just needed to gather his thoughts. He was about to ask Brig for a pen, but remembered that he was an imbecile cop. “Only imbeciles cops walk around without pens.” he muttered.
“What was that?” Brig had wandered over to the window.
“Oh nothing, Captain” he turned to one of the deputies. “Did you find that key yet? It should be in his left pant pocket.”
The deputy shoved his hand into the Generals pocket. “It’s here sir! Ha, how did you know?”
“The General was left handed. Look where the pen is.” May smiled and quickly went to the desk. “I don’t think he’ll mind. Nice pen.” he mumbled.
May pried the silver pen from the General’s hand. It was probably a gift from another official. The pen was wonderfully engraved with the General’s initials. As he admired the weight and balance of the pen, he clicked it open. He froze.
“Hey lemme see those keys!” The deputy tossed them to May. He inspected them closely and found a small piece of tape attached to the leather flap. He then moved to the corpse and felt the neck. “Hey Brig, we’ve got a murder here!”
“That’s impossible. There’s no way!”
“Just go get that Butler.”
Brig left the room and returned with the Butler. May stepped forward with notebook and pen in hand. He smiled.
“You are real outdoorsmen aren’t you?”
“Uhm…I suppose I was”
“You go fishing a lot?”
“I used to before I worked for the General. I went with…”
May began scribbling in his notebook. “It’s always the Butler” he mumbled.

What's so great about New York? I mean, it's a dying city. You should try Gotham.

2007-07-26T23:35:00.000-04:00

Here are some photos I took while sneaking around the set of The Dark Knight, the next installment of Chris Nolan's Batman.

Click below:

Welcome to Gotham City. Don't get mugged.

Pythons: A very short story by Jon Comas

2007-07-22T06:34:00.000-04:00

Jane looked outside and sighed. There was a large python on the lawn. Jane sighed.

“Jim,” she called. There’s another python.”

“Can’t you get this one?”

“I got the last one.”

“Fine.”

Jane walked back into the living room. Jim went outside and killed the python. “We really should do something about the pythons,” he said.”

“Yeah,” said Jane. “I know. What do you want for dinner?”

“Chicken.”

“We had chicken on Monday.”

“Oh. Yeah. That was pretty good.”

“Thanks.”

“We could order pizza.”

“Okay.”

Out with the old, in with the

2007-07-18T21:16:00.000-04:00

Teacher: And why don't we want to be cliché?

Class: Because it's already been done before.

Cartoon: Plan for the border

2007-06-30T11:22:00.001-04:00

Yes, I do kind of have a thing for anagrams

2007-06-13T04:26:00.001-04:00

With apologies to my friend R. Noyes, who did this sort of thing first and better than I could have in his excellent piece, "The Dan Brown Code." I swear I wasn't trying to rip him off. Do check that link out if you get the chance.

A Significant Moment with Dan Brown and Tom Clancy

Jon Comas

“They’re trying to hide something, I know it.” Renowned author Dan Brown looked methodically and meaningfully at the book in front of him, a copy of Earth in the Balance by former Vice President and Tennessee Senator Al Gore. Then he looked to the right and then to the left and then at the book once more. Every one of these glances were very meaningful. He stepped toward the book. The book’s cover was smudged in a very poignant fashion.

“We can’t let them get away with this,” said Tom Clancy, best-selling author of gritty politically-themed books with American flags on their covers. “Those bastards.” Tom Clancy used swear words sometimes because really tough but pensive and complex people have to do that every now and then.

“But what can we do, Tom?” said Dan Brown. “This is Al Gore we’re talking about. The former Vice President and Tennessee Senator. The creator of the popular global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth. We don’t have that kind of power, Tom.

“And,” he continued, raising his hand to his chin and looking away meaningfully in order to prepare himself to say something especially important, “this world is all about power.”

“Dammit, Dan. We have an enemy to fight,” said Tom Clancy angrily as he raised his standard issue Air Force watch (replica), to check whether it was too late to go home and watch Grey’s Anatomy. It was. Al Gore had screwed him again. “Can’t you see? The world is at risk. Al Gore will eat your children as soon as look at you. We have to act.

“Before it’s too late,” finished Tom Clancy, verbally implying a new paragraph for added emphasis.

“We have to figure this out,” said Dan Brown. Dan Brown took a step down the quiet and tense aisle. He continued to walk. The situation was very tense. Seriously, really really tense. Then he turned around. “What could this mean?”

“Aha!” said Dan Brown exclamatorily. “Listen carefully. I think I’ve discovered the secret. This will change everything.”

“Hurry, Dan,” said Tom Clancy. “We don’t have much time.”

“Look at the cover of this book, Tom.” Tom Clancy looked at the cover of the book. “Don’t you see anything peculiar?”

“I see a threat to everything we hold dear,” said Tom Clancy.

“You need to look closer,” said Dan Brown. Tom Clancy looked closer. “Look at the name on this book.”

“Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.,” said Tom Clancy. “But what could it mean?”

“Think, Tom! The world is at stake! We have to uncover this!” said Dan Brown.

“My God,” said Tom Clancy. “It’s—it’s so simple!”

“That’s right,” said Dan Brown. “So simple that no one else has figured it out. The letters in ‘Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.’ can be rearranged to spell ‘Radar Bong Jell Retro.’ They’ve been hiding this for decades, Tom. Presidents, dignitaries, popes—they’ve all been in on the secret.”

“Do you think it’s too late for us?” said Tom Clancy. “If they find out what we know—”

“We can’t take that risk, Tom!” said Dan Brown.

“But we can’t just sit here!” Tom Clancy exclaimed. “The blood will be on our hands if we do!”

“Do you have any better ideas?” Dan Brown asked dramatically and emphatically. Suddenly, an enemy betrayed a sudden cough.

“It’s them!” said Tom Clancy. “We can’t let them find us,” he growled in a tough and grizzled fashion. Tom Clancy pressed a button on his watch and a military helicopter launched a missile through the far wall of the paperback section of the Barnes & Noble. Dozens were killed. “This way!” said Tom Clancy. And just as the door to store broke open with an army of covert agents, Tom Clancy and Dan Brown disappeared into the smoke, taking their newly discovered world-shaking information with them. The secret would be safe for another day, but how long could they contain the power of “Radar Bong Jell Retro?” Not even Tom Clancy or Dan Brown could tell. Maybe John Grisham, though.

Cartoon: Overrated

2007-06-10T02:04:00.000-04:00

(Click on image for a larger version)

Names that are almost as cool: Dale Bumpers ("beadle rumps"), Mike Huckabee ("hack imbue eke")

2007-06-09T04:30:00.000-04:00

Arkansas once had a governor named Xenophon Overton Pindall. He served from 1907-1909.

An anagram for "Xenophon Overton Pindall" is "a hoped xenon nil volt porn," which I'm sure someone has masturbated to at some point.

Ed. 6/9/07, 3:08 PM: Also Archibald Yell ("radially belch").

Zombies Unite!

2007-06-07T13:06:00.000-04:00

On October 27th 2007, zombies from around the world will unite together and perform the Thriller Dance. Its not that difficult to learn (mindless zombies can do it, you can too). So if you have dead time this summer, why not pick up a new project. As of now, I've been told there's no NYU group or a New York group for that matter, so tell your friends.

All you need to know can be found at www.thrilltheworld.com

Cartoon: Overheard at the Park

2007-06-07T13:04:00.000-04:00

(Click the cartoon for a larger version.)

Cartoon: So life is like this

2007-06-07T04:30:00.000-04:00

(Click the cartoon for a bigger version.)

Guilt of the You Name it Variety

2007-06-03T22:48:00.001-04:00

Here's something I wrote between not paying attention to everything unfolding around me in this city where even in the suburban streets in Forest Hills the trees are buzzing.

Trials

On the layer of spit and gum

he trembles and I don’t see beyond

the rattatat tatters

On the corner she hunches

on bended cane

between St. Patrick’s Cathedral

and media moguled buildings –

towering tinsel tinker toys

whose hispeed ears and eyes

don’t hearsee her cries

and me

I stare deep, deep

deep peering, penetrating

knife bleed down inside me

somewhere

in the moment between

“Can you help me?”

and crossing the street,

turning away

looking above, beyond,

I fail the Good Samaritan test

Cornell, The land I will never return to...

2007-05-31T13:16:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid I used to play with Play-doh. I'm sure you kids did too. I remember my first set came with all the colors my mom could afford: blue, orange, green and purple. And for a while, it was fun, molding it into the same crappy dinosaur/bird/car/"its a dog, but its legs fell off." The legs always fall off. After that first ten minutes though, you get bored and you find new things to do with your play-doh. Play-doh, so bright and colorful, like candy. So soft and squishy, like candy. I remember taking a piece of blue, because it was going to taste like blue, rolling it into a ball and slipping it into my mouth. The taste was awful, bland and salty. Mistake.

Being in Cornell is like eating play-doh. Really, it's a nice place to look at but it's as interesting and engaging as this leaf here.

As a result of this bland boredom, Cornelians find new ways to entertain themselves, with "hang-over" results. I had the displeasure of spending a weekend with a few members from the Cornell wrestling team: Charlie, DiSolvo, Keith, Luke, and Josh. These kids are a different breed. Sure they play the same drinking games we do (flip cup, Beirut) but that's not enough.

We played Chicken Leg the first night out. In this game, one guy chooses another guy at random and grabs on to his leg. The "chicken" will then have to continue the night with player in tow. The game ends when the "chicken" gets really angry and starts beating on the player, in which case, the rest of the team rushes in and beats down on the chicken. Laughter and applause follows. Charlie won when he rode his chicken for a good hour and a half before the beatdown. I chose not to play.

Drinking as well has become too simple and new forms have arisen. Eyeball shots are the most extreme form of alcohol ingestion I have ever seen. The belief is that one gets drunker faster if one holds a shot of vodka or any other high quality liquor to their eye. To some extent its true. The eye is the only external organ connected directly to the brain. Anyways the process involves a lot of screaming and cursing. I chose not to drink.

Overall, I'm thankful for my trip to Cornell, because I never have to go back there again. My sister graduated so really there is no reason to return.

Learn about the bomb and then learn to love it

2007-05-28T14:35:00.000-04:00

There are two statements that I wrote on my refrigerator: "Fuck the Bitches, live life!" and "Learn about the bomb and then learn to love it." The topic of this post is the latter statement. It has loose reference to Stanley Kubrick's 1964 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The film tackles the absurd fears that pervaded the Cold War era. It's a comedic tale about the possibilities of mutually assured destruction for the

and

USSR

. I first saw it in the tenth grade in history class. This class' teacher had a penchant for introducing us to other artifacts like Nazi daggers and arm bands; he assured us that he doesn't don these items and march around home with a pair of shiny black boots.

As you know, capitalism prevailed. Apple pie beats kompot any day. Much as the threat of the atomic bomb could not be "worried away," neither can capitalism's hegemony. For the past three years, I have studied the motor of urban development. In classes like "Cities in a Global Context," "World Cultures: the African Diaspora," "The Port of New York," "Law and Urban Problems," and especially "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Metropolitan Studies," my classmates and I almost uniformly criticize neoliberal orthodoxy, bemoan the sad state of affairs of the world, and attribute it's uneven development and contested class structures to contemporary globalization. To have such peers is comforting, indeed. We endlessly discussed the developmentalist paradigm of neoliberalism, it's wholesale faith in the market, and concluded that the world's gross inequalities can be attributed to it. (Some of us had greater fervor than others).

I once ran into a classmate and we decided to grab a cup of coffee. I suggested the Starbucks in Washington Square Park. He didn't seem so conforming and expressed reservations. I'd hate to quote him from memory, but he did say something along the lines of not finding large multinational corporations agreeable.

I am working for one this summer. I am a retail management intern for Sears Holdings Corporation. It sounds either impressive or derision-worthy, depending on your perspective. I intern at a Sears store on the north side of Chicago. With five floors of shopping glory, it's among the company's largest of the Midwest. It makes me recall a term I appropriated for describing the American suburb: "shit factory." The everyday mode of living, or Heidegger's Dasein, of the average American is shaped around a culture of consumerism for the financial benefit of shareholders of stores like Sears. They shamelessly shovel shit into middle America. The suburban landscape is built with Craftsman tools; at least one in two American households has a Kenmore brand appliance; and Martha Stewart's sensibilities expanded their reach since Kmart and Sears' merger. (HA! I just realized a link between Dasein and the fact that Stewart's company is named "Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc." and her brand of products sold at Kmart is called "Martha Stewart Everyday.")

I would like to say that I am in the belly of the beast, but I am not. It would provide for a more delicious story. (Think The Devil Wears Prada.) I did, however, get an offer to be a competitive analyst intern at Sears Holdings' corporate headquarters in Hoffman Estates, IL, but I turned it down. A more apropos characterization is that I am a foot soldier for the beast, working for the man, the corporate man.

My job at Sears consists of attending the store's meetings, gaining insights from its management team, and following and helping associates with their daily tasks. (This weekend, I was given the particularly important task of grilling hot dogs for the associates cook out.) The goal here is to provide the intern with preparation for becoming a store manager. My assignment is to take as many notes as possible about the store's operating inefficiencies and to make an end-of-internship report about how to act on those "opportunities," in Sears parlance. Not a day goes by when I don't think about how I could turn this into a book deal or a reality-TV show.

I will never become a store manager for Sears; it's a personal goal of mine. But I do hope to attain some acumen in management from the private sector, from a Fortune 500 company. Still, I can't help but sense a certain uselessness to angling the clothes racks so that they face the customers a certain way or ensuring that we display clothing on mannequins in layers, both directives that came from the Chicagoland district manager. But then again, retail is a pennies driven industry and the extra effort may be the finishing touch necessary to get those flannel shirts off the sales floor. My most important take-away from microeconomics is to think on the margins.

And so I am learning about the bomb, it's machinations, it's ruination, it's ceaseless and ruthless drive for profit. Everyday I work with people whose lives are sustained by Sears and made joyless by Sears. I will likely see the firing of an assistant store manager, whose underperformance is notorious among the management team. I have gotten to know 70 year olds who work along side high schoolers, several of whom go to work to buy their first baby strollers. At my first store meeting I marveled at the ethnic diversity of the attendees. I then quickly realized the social stratification at work here and wondered if the average skin color of a meeting at the corporate headquarters would skew as brown. An assistant store manager admonished me to not go into retail. "You pay too much for your education for this. I'm only here because I didn't get an education above high school."

I worry that my decision to come here was a mistake, that I shouldn't have to share in this crowd's bottom-of-the-ladder existence. There is an opportunity cost for this final summer before graduation, after all. But for someone like me, who is disconcerted by the notion of working for a living, perhaps I need something like this. I must will myself to love it, or at the very least learn to deal with it. And then, maybe, fix it.

(Credit to Mary Kearl for the first photo of my dorm room refrigerator, furtively taken in my absence).

Welcome

2007-04-07T13:39:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the NYUorker blog, where you will find stories from the city told by members of the Metropolitan Studies Society of NYU.