GOSH YO!!!

FEE for all: For those who fly locally in america, some airlines particularly American Airline has made a decision to slap a fee on the first checked bag, i am guessing this is due to the increase in oil prices from $3-4$ plus..this is crazyyy. so if am flying from newyork to dc, theres going to be a charge?? GOSH America!!!

Anyways, there is a litle piece written by my sister, Kunmi on the killings of immigrants in sOUTH Africa,an interesting one i must say. A MUST READ!!!!


Since May 11, several of the unemployed and understandably angry indigenes of this great country have decided that the often poor, mostly hard-working, and perhaps equally frustrated people who settle in South Africa from neighbouring Zimbabwe, Malawi, and even Nigeria out west, are responsible for the dearth of jobs and height of poverty in the townships.

In February of this year, I visited South Africa for a week. Yes, I was in Cape Town, which is an idyllic reverie compared with the harsh reality of the hard-knock township-life in Alexandria, Johannesburg, and some other areas where violence against immigrants is currently being unleashed. Perhaps that is why, when asked what I really observed about the South African people, my comments were along the lines of "the people I met seemed so content and forgiving, seemed to have moved on after apartheid and to be happily getting along." Forgiving. Moved on. Happily. Getting along. So between February and May, what happened? Or perhaps this is an issue of space, not time. In which case I would ask instead, between Cape Town and Johannesburg, what happened?

Immigration is not an easy issue, and I am faced with that reality everyday. In the States, people who look Latino are condemned as "illegal" immigrants, even if they do happen to have their papers intact. "They are stealing our jobs," Americans cry, though in my six years in the States, I am yet to find an American who would trade his or her job for the endless meniality of cleaning in restaurant kitchens or constructing fancy homes and hotels, which is the reality of what forms the bulk of jobs you can get illegally or without the language requirement, in this country.

Immigration in Nigeria? Well, I have been scared. There is talk of building a metrorail system in Lagos, and industries have been springing up here and there. But the other day, I found myself asking my father what he thought about the influx of immigrants, or, as immigrants to developing nations from developed nations tend to be called, expatriates. Why did I ask him this? Because industrialization is tricky. You think you are getting good roads and bigger oil rigs and steady electricity supply and look, finally, an oil refinery that works! Even cell phones for everyone! You are so excited by this set of changes that you may neglect the other ones: that is, people are coming into the country at a high rate, to make all these changes happen. And those people, guess what, can do the math of the quality of life they get as expatriates in this country and what it was when they were regular Joes back home. And bar the mosquitoes, they even kinda like it here. Heck, they'll enroll the kids in the Italian School down the street, and help the wife find a new job at the bank whose manager they know. Soon enough, the wife and kids won't be able to tell the difference between here and home, yes, bar those damned mosquitoes.

That is how immigration happens: a direct result of the search for the better life. For better education, a society with better culture, a better job, a better real estate market for houses by the beach, or for diamond mines, a better retirement atmosphere, a better-sounding language, a better future for the kids. The search for better. That is why, as we speak, thousands of visa interviews are being conducted on people who are already packed up and ready to leave home behind forever, hundreds of children are being born who would never speak their parents' mother-tongue, and tens of people are being killed for no fault other than existing as non-indigenes in rural South Africa.

Is immigration bad? This question directly affects me. However, after pondering the question for a few days, aided by a back-issue of The Economist with a focus on immigration, I decided that the answer was, and is, no. Immigration is good for the economy because immigrants into richer countries, though tax- or tuition- paying, hardly utilize the facilities and health and social services at the rate that citizens do. And this is true - I remember being shocked to find that people had steady doctors in the States, and went to see them even when they were healthy. If 100% of the inhabitants of a place were citizens cognizant of the culture of steady use of these services and resources, needed or not, imagine the strain there would be on those services. Immigrants also make the richer country a more competitive market, because they have the net effect of driving down the costs of goods and services, some of which are traded on the global front. As a local example, living in the uber-expensive capital city of Norway one summer, I found that the least expensive place to buy food was in the immigrant neighbourhood of Grønland. On the global front, you want to be a competitive nation because if your resources are being traded at too-high costs, countries that need them will get them elsewhere. And we are not talking unit quantities here.

Immigration is good for the immigrants, and for the citizens of the country the immigrants are now inhabiting. It gives the immigrants the better life they wanted. "Immigrants" as used in the twenty-first century, seems to have a negative connotation - not as bad as "illegal immigrants," I admit - but it can't help things that the word rhymes with other negative words like "truants" and "delinquents." I myself am beginning to favour the term "expatriates." Or "non-permanent residents", but that is quite a mouthful, and it does not cover categories such as "green-card holders" or "newly-permanent residents." But I digress. If you want a better life on this earth that we live in, and you go about it by means as honest and peaceful as you can afford, then I don't see why it should be denied you. I think the issue of illegal immigration is tricky, so I will not get into it here.

Immigration also makes more "cultured" people of the nationals of a country experiencing the influx. I know that the most engaging conversations I have had have been, not necessarily with people who hold advanced degrees, or who have so much wealth that there exists a Swiss bank named in their honour, or who have so much humility that they make the cleaner of the King's bathrooms seem like a demigod, but with people who have cultivated their knowledge of and respect for the world's peoples, either by travelling widely, or by accepting people from other countries into their lives and homes. Practically, it also feels better to say when you have guests at your house, "so shall you have naan with that hummus, or do you prefer challah?" or, "I personally prefer the moscato grapes to the zinfadel from California, but that is just my opinion." Ok, maybe a bit "snob", but hey.

I dream of a world where we would no longer be able to tell the difference between the Ethiopian and the Norwegian. Where everyone will be mixed so that a sort-by-colour for anything besides stockings would be futile. A world where you think you have pigeon-holed that man into the "Sicilian" category, and mentally judged him as such, until he opens his mouth and you find that his accent is Egyptian, and that he speaks Japanese fluently and named his three children after the Yoruba gods of thunder, fire, and water*. Because in such a world, who is to say, "You are from Malawi, you are not one of us, therefore I shall stone you to death"? Or "I do not like your people, they persecute us in the name of religion, therefore I do not want you living in my country"? Who is to say that?

As I go to sleep tonight, I shall be saying a prayer for the people of South Africa. I will pray that their government and the world would help them fight the unemployment and poverty that seem to be the roots of this intolerance. Not a slap-a-Band-Aid-on-it, send them some quick aid or appeasement solution that seems to be favoured by governments these days. But a lasting solution that would encourage South Africans, and all of us all over the world, to embrace immigration, while intelligently shaping our minds and economies to adapt to it. Because immigration, it seems, is here it stay.

*The Yoruba gods of thunder, fire, and water are Shango, Ogun, and Oya respectively.