DACA Data

DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is an Obama-era,US immigration program that was designed to manage the issue of individuals who entered the US illegally as minors with their parents. They are still in the country but are not US citizens and they do not have a clear path to citizenship, nor do they have a legal right to remain in the US. Today, many are young adults going to school or working or volunteering.  

And this makes for a very hard immigration case.  The ugly question that homelanders are wrestling with is Should they be deported?  Well, that feels downright inhumane and many (dare I say most?) Americans do not support ejecting them.  These young people didn't do anything wrong and the US is the only country they know.  They speak the language, know the culture, and they were educated in the US school system.  In a sense they are already Americans.  One could even argue that they have a better claim to being American than my children who do speak English but who didn't grow up in the US, who went to French public schools and who have had to learn US culture while on vacation.

 DACA was a step toward regularizing the status of these "Dreamers."  It gave them some protection from deportation and allowed them to work and go to school.  A look at the requirements for entry into the DACA program is instructive.  Note that some of these young adults appear to be veterans.

"To qualify for DACA, unauthorized immigrants have to meet six criteria: (1) applicants had no lawful status as of June 15, 2012 (i.e., an unauthorized immigrant as of June 15, 2012); (2) applicants came to the United States before the age of 16; (3) applicants must have been under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012; (4) applicants must also have continuously resided in the United States since June 15, 2007; (5) applicants must be currently in school, have graduated or obtained a certificate of completion from high school, have obtained a General Education Development (GED) certificate, or be an honorably discharged veteran of the Coast Guard or Armed Forces of the United States; (6) applicants cannot have been convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor, or three or more other misdemeanors. In addition to these DACA qualification criteria, an individual must be 15 years or older to submit the DACA application."  Pope, N. G. (2016). The effects of DACAmentation: the impact of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on unauthorized immigrants. Journal of Public Economics, 143, p. 100.

 DACA was not, however, a long-term solution. As you may have seen from the headlines (if you read the English speaking media) the US president has shut down this program and tossed the whole mess to the US Congress.  The debate has begun and it is ugly.

I am shutting out the noise so I can think about this one and do some research.  Let's start with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services website.  This report has the number of DACA requests and denials over the past few years plus information by US state.  Very interesting reading.  The top four countries of origin for DACA beneficiaries are Mexico,  El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras but the entire list contains 24 countries (Poland is one) and a category called "unknown."  In the states of residence in the US California and Texas are the top two by far and there is a category called "missing" in that list.

Any thoughts?

The Border Patrol by John Oliver

Oliver is back from vacation and his latest is an expose on the US Border Patrol.  Interesting piece.  I learned a few things.

Yes, I can believe that it's a pretty boring job.  Dangerous, too.  Not sure what to think about the charges of poor hiring practices and corruption.  And what about the Northern border?  Same or different issues?

I would love to hear your take on it.

The Cat Cafe

Oh, what we do to please our children.  The Frenchlings shanghaied their mother into taking them to a Cat Cafe.  Damn it,  I have cats and they are ungrateful little kibble gluttons.  I sure don't need to pay 1200 yen for an hour with someone else's fractious felines. Even if I am bribed with Mango Milk.

We went.  I drank the milk (but not the kool-aid) -  it was just as silly as I imagined it to be (grumble, grumble, grumble).

But a few minutes into the experience I started to relax.  I will even admit that maybe I enjoyed myself. The cats were remarkably well-behaved.  (Well, except for the one that was in heat and was acting like a shameless hussy though the boys were having a fine, if frustrating, time.)

And they were cute.  And that, mes amis, is why we keep the little critters.

Sorting the Citizens from the Non-Citizens: Checkpoints within US Territory

This video appeared on my Facebook feed this morning.  It was filmed by a family that was travelling within the borders of the US when they were stopped by border agents  (not at the border mind you) and asked about citizenship:  "So..... Are you a US citizen?"

To her credit the driver, a teacher in San Diego, refused to answer the question and had a few of her own.  Good ones.

And yet, I found that I wasn't particularly shocked that she and her family were stopped.  Where I live  (France) the authorities do have the right to stop me at any time and ask for my papers.  It's never happened and I do have to wonder why that is. Oh, hell, let's be honest here, I don't need to wonder at all since I have gone through checkpoints in the Paris area in the past and duly noted that almost all the people who were being forced to produce their papers were from Africa.  Me, they just looked at my clothes and my legs, smiled at me, and waved me through.

I'll let you watch the video for yourself and if you are so inclined I would love to hear your thoughts.

In particular, if you are a migrant/expatriate or a naturalized citizen I'm curious to know if you have ever been stopped by the immigration authorities or law enforcement in your host country.

The Festival of the Gods

Last night I met the younger Frenchling at work and we walked for a time with the gods.

Yesterday was the Osaka Tenjin Matsuri festival.  It starts at a local shrine with a procession through the city streets.  There were dancers in Heian era costumes, Shinto priests on horses, and mishoko, portable shrines that carry the gods.  At the river they piled into barges and the procession continued up and down the river. There was one boat that resembled a penteconter and it fascinated me because it was powered by master oarsman who could turn on a dime.    A spectacular sight.

According to the Japan Guide: "Tenjin Matsuri is the festival of the Tenmangu Shrine and honors its principle deity Sugawara Michizane, the deity of scholarship."

How fitting, I thought.  And if I had not already given my heart and soul to the Lady, this is one deity I would be honored to serve.

Here are a few pictures:

Some Musings about History

"The sources of collective memory range far beyond personal recall, but these sources too resist correction by others.  Since we alone understand the legacy that is ours, we are free, or even bound to construe it as we feel it ought to be.  Those who share a communal legacy must accept some mutual notion of its nature.  But each sharer treats that corporate bequest as his own; like personal memory, it remains barred to outsiders." (page 314)

The Past is a Foreign Country - Revisited by David Lowenthal


Americans sometimes fall into this seductive trap when they go abroad and marvel at ruins.  They exclaim with admiration: "How wonderful! We have nothing as old as this at home."   Statements that are both true and false.  True in the sense that the Parthenon is unique to a particular time and place but false because it utterly erases the history of the first inhabitants of North America who migrated from Asia anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.  To accept the argument that "civilization" on the North American continent only began with the arrival of Europeans is a lovely fable which may please Europeans and European-Americans alike but is utterly without foundation.

History as the subtraction of facts which do not fit the narrative.  Well, no nation is exempt from such attempts to shape and sanitize the past.  Not only does the past as we feel it ought to be confer legitimacy on the present day inhabitants of a territory, it makes us feel as if we own something that is beyond the reach of the tourist or migrant. History, says Clifford Geertz, is one of those "primordial loyalties"  along with "[a] sense of the "givens" of social existence -- speaking a particular language, following a particular religion, being born into a particular family..."  I do not doubt that such things are felt by millions around the world. It requires considerable effort on the part of the state, communities and individuals to sustain a common language, culture or history when one has only to talk to one's elders to learn that the taken-for-granted "primordial" is an invention of the present.

My sense is that we seek the "primordial" at times when we realize that we were born in the middle of a moving river and we would very much like for someone to close the floodgates so we can float for awhile in this moment.  Since that is entirely outside our capacities, we instead attempt to anchor ourselves in the past against the current.  We may not know where we are being taken but surely we can find something in the usable past that will slow us down.

The more I move around, the more I question the history of my home country and what is being presented to me as history by the various host countries I've wandered through.    I have learned to be skeptical of their "primordial" narratives both for what they have left out (a lot) and for what has been invented (also a lot).  To accept the US as a English-speaking country or France as a Francophone one since time immemorial requires that I ignore the distinctly un-French accents of old Breton farmers, the tales my mother-in-law tells of hearing languages other than French spoken in her village, and the stories of my German and French-Canadian ancestors in the US who happily spoke French and German across generations.

But it's not simply about debunking the facts, it is also about holding an awareness that the past is indeed a foreign country and that a 21st century French or Japanese or American is born into exactly the same place with regards to their own history and that of other peoples.  No, there is no gene for history or language or culture and the past not a personal memory.  On the contrary,  we all start from zero in terms of language, culture, and history when we are born and then what we acquire as we grow up is what people in the present think we ought to know.

Going beyond that (questioning the "givens") means grappling with more complicated and less ethnocentric narratives that call into question the "ownership" of things dear to the heart of the locals.

Is Notre Dame a symbol of French architectural genius beloved to the French of our time or is it  an edifice among many in a worldwide network of Roman Catholics and a concrete example of the universality and longevity of the faith?  A symbol of France?  Or a symbol of a multinational living faith that has existed for thousand of years and still serves the faithful in the same way as, say, St. Patrick's in New York or the Grand Cathedral of the Virgin Mary of Osaka?  To see it as one and not the other would be to leave quite a lot out.  Better, I think, to know both and to seek out other interpretations to see how it has been incorporated into many narratives over the centuries.  For is it so hard to imagine that the people who constructed it were as unlike a 21st century Frenchman or woman as we of different nations are to each other today?

As we travel and marvel at the wonders of different places my modest suggestion would be to be extremely cautious about the historical narratives being trotted out for your edification.  Consider that the locals may not know any more than you do.  They had to learn the facts and narratives just as you do, and unless they are highly inquisitive it is doubtful that they will do more than parrot what they were taught in school or on their own guided tour.

Be aware that there are other narratives foreign and domestic (and the latter is not necessarily superior to the former) and that viewed from another context their cultural ownership of something may be highly questionable.  They were not there when the event occurred or when the edifice was constructed and their relationship to it is as distant as yours. If these things are the reflection of any genius, it is limited to the people who lived and breathed and built then.  What their supposed ancestors think of them now is all about how they feel about the present and may simply be another manifestation of trying to stop the river of time.

And then go back and apply all of the above to the past of whatever country you call (or once called) "home."  I guarantee you'll find there is a lot more there there than you ever dreamt.

An Insignificant Short Timer

Himeji Castle

"You feel small, whether as a courtier or an artist or a historian, because you recognize your insignificance in an infinite universe.  You know you can never yourself rule a kingdom, or capture on canvas everything you see on a distant horizon, or recapture in your books and lectures everything that happened in the past.  The best you can do, whether with a prince or or a landscape or the past, is to represent reality:  to smooth over the details, to look for larger patterns, to consider how you can use what you see for your own purposes."

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
by John Lewis Gaddis

Over the past three years I have had a most excellent opportunity: my host versus home country paradigm became a triangle - US, France and Japan - and then a quadrangle with the addition of Belgium as a fourth point of reference  For someone who as a callow youth could hardly imagine a life outside the Pacific Northwest of the US, I can only look back as I pass the half-century mark and marvel at how I ended up here or there and how completely unprepared I was for each trip.  I was a green water vessel shoved out into blue water hoping to dock at a friendly port on the other side of a vast ocean.  So far, no shipwrecks.  Which, I assure you, was not at all due to my skills as a navigator.

A very small vessel, indeed.  Insignificant, in fact, in the larger scheme of things.  Every day millions of people set off on their own journeys to distant shores.  It has been both a pleasure and a relief to turn my attention to them and not spend my days pondering my own small part in the late 20th/early 21st century migration flows in this globalized world of ours.  Looking for the larger patterns allows one to return to the Self with a sense of connection, relieved of the burden of thinking that one is special or unique.

I have been an emigrant and an immigrant. I have also been an expatriate.  Twice, in fact.  Both times in Japan.  My first time here was spent in Tokyo where I worked for a French multinational.  This, my second time around, has been dramatically different.  I am what is referred to as a "trailing spouse" and a couple of years ago that term and the circumstances around our move to Osaka did not sit well with me. And I did not hesitate to say so (and other people did not hesitate to tell me that I was being something of  a pill and a killjoy which was hardly helpful.)  

There is some truth to that but looking back I have compassion for the woman I was.  At the time I was still recovering from treatment for cancer and I was considering how to get back into the French workforce.  I was nervous about being so far from my oncologist and I wondered what a few more years not working would do to my future job prospects.  All very legitimate concerns.  And I really have to wonder why they were not taken more seriously.  I suspect that they would have been if I had been a man.  Surely one of my spouse's co-workers would not have touted getting his nails done on a regular basis as one of the benefits of the expat life.

Once I got over "living in the wreckage of the future" I finally got the gumption to make something of my time here and there.  The most visible accomplishment of my time here was my research which led to me getting my MA in International Migration.  But there have been other less tangible benefits which I only became aware of when I realized that our time here was getting short.  

Top of the list would have to be enjoying Japan.  The first time I was here (in Tokyo) I was working long hours and traveling to Korea and China.  There was no time for much else because I had a project to run and deadlines to meet.  This time  around I have had all the time in the world to travel around Japan. I have been back to Tokyo but I also visited Okinawa, Miyajima, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Nara and numerous other places in the Kansai region.  I have hiked in the mountains, slept in a temple guesthouse, visited markets, wandered through many fine museums and fought my way through the crowds to see the magnificent floats at festivals.  And, of course, there are the gardens which make my heart sing.  At every one I took mental notes for my own little bit of earth back in Versailles.

Koko-en Garden

Tourism?  Absolutely.  And the very best kind to boot because there was no rush, no plane to catch in a week.  Unable to see everything in one trip?  No matter because there was always time to return.  I've been to Nara at least four times and each visit was a revelation though there was some continuity because I always stay at the Nara Hotel which is, hands down, the finest hotel I've ever stayed in.

Nara Hotel, Kyoto

But that's not all.  I realized at some point that I could relax and just enjoy the ride.  There was the complete absence of the kind of stress that I felt in France as an immigrant.  I have heard many Anglophone migrants here talk about their integration issues large and small and I completely understood where they were coming from (albeit in a different country).  But here I really am just a guest, a temporary visitor with no plans to stay and so I feel no pressure to integrate.  Only a subtle sense that I should do certain things a certain way (such as properly sorting the garbage) which is no hardship at all.  

No one ever asks if I work (or insinuates that I should be working), there are no tense interviews with the public administration, no struggles to fit in because I don't need to fit in here except in the most superficial way.  With only a few very rare exceptions people are civil and pleasant.  And if they are bothered by my inability to communicate in Japanese, the only sign that they care one whit is the real pleasure and surprise on their faces when the younger Frenchling steps up and starts translating.  

Integration where I actually live is something else.  It is indispensable because I have to meet certain expectations in order to get a job, have friends, be on good terms with my neighbors, go to mass and confession, enjoy a dinner party, read contracts, deal with civil servants and so many other things big and small. This is the pebble in my shoe and I am subtly reminded of it every hour of every day in France. 

Granted it's a very very small pebble these days because, well, time has ground it down to next to nothing.  And I would never have noticed, I think, that it was still there if I hadn't remarked on its complete absence here in Japan.   So it has been something of a relief to be in a place where expectations are low, low, low given my status as a short-timer.   Never has my own insignificance felt so good.

Just a few more months and this vessel will sail once again (Air France will do the navigating): one small unimportant craft in a sea of over 200 million migrants in the world today.  Looking forward to being back full-time in my first country, the country of my heart (that darn pebble be damned).   Japan has served its purpose and home is just over the horizon.  Vive la France!

My Garden in Versailles