Borders

A common topic of conversation in Skypeland is immigration. Some rooms focus on methods for getting into the US on a work visa, or into Australia or other places. One typical thing I have noticed is that many people have opinions based on minimal information, if they know anything at all about immigration. Americans do not understand their own immigration system, and say crazy things. Europeans do not understand the American immigration system, and weigh in with the strangest opinions. People in other countries do not have any comprehension of the situation.

In a room called, "Anti- Yankie- No Brainers! Only Yanks with an IQ of 130 and over please," the conversation was steered towards immigration since the Irish host said that she hated Americans since they were racist when they talked about immigration. The Irish lady stated, "Every American came from another country", obviously not remembering the autochthonous people who were in the United States first, thousands of years before the Europeans (were there countries back then? By this standard, the ancestors of everyone on earth came from another country except maybe the people in a certain area in Africa). People disagreed vehemently. A Colombian said, "If you want to see a 100% American you are going to have to go a casino."

The Irish lady lectured, "Do not seal your borders because it hurts the little children." She advocated giving access to the United States to anyone at all who wanted to come to the US so they could better their living standards and aid their children (The US is more generous than any other country on earth when it comes to immigration. Why does Ireland not do this? Ireland has an extremely unfair and discriminatory immigration policy and is 98% European. People in glass houses should not throw stones...) However, later she suggested that the Americans are stupid because they have illegal immigrants and did not enforce their immigration laws. Nothing like being rational and consistent, is there? Of course, she has repeatedly said she does not care about the facts...

The man from Colombia who had been a student in the US claimed that all foreigners pay 4 times as much in university as Americans do for school. This sure was not true when I was in university or graduate school.

An American asked the Europeans attacking the Americans for their immigration policy, "Why can't you absorb in 30 million immigrants into your country?" The Europeans became enraged at this. One said, "You cannot be prejudiced towards other people. Everyone should have equal opportunities. Problem is there is so much antiyankee feeling sometimes I am not Anti American feeling quite often because a minority of Americans are really gobby and arrogant and rude." Nothing like avoiding the question with some sort of slur, is there? They want to dictate to Americans how to run their country, but do not want to hear anything about their own. This gives Europeans an extremely bad image, frankly. They have very little credibility given their past history and current situations.

One American talked about people coming in from "Nigger-agua". I do not think anyone else noticed this. This kind of thing does not help in a dialogue, frankly.

An American claimed the Irish potato originated in Mexico. The Irish lady said he was ignorant. Funny, I thought all potatoes come from the South American Andes near Peru:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato
Maybe they are both ignorant? It was impossible to talk in this room so I did not bother to correct this mistake.

Some American tried to interrupt and then complained for 5 minutes about how no one would let him talk. And then complained that Americans are taught in high school that the US is the best. This was so important to waste 15 minutes of everyone's time on ? Wow. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is common.

This degenerated into a big long discussion by the Americans in the room about what they just ate, such as ribs, or ham and eggs. It is typical for some to inject non sequiturs, including information about the size of their televisions, NASCAR races, soccer games, American college football, what type of cars they drive,. and what kind of food they eat and what they are doing on the weekend. Even in the middle of this sequence of non sequiturs, someone else came in saying, "hello, hello, hello" and interrupting even this interruption.

I gave up trying to contribute to the discussion. I was the only one in the room who had actually gone through US immigration and knew other country's immigration systems as well and knew how they compared. But no one really wanted any real information or informed discussion; they just wanted to spew nonsense at each other...